If you saw the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver skit about scientific studies and the media, you know that you can take most studies you read about with a grain of salt (or not, depending on whether or not the study says salt is good or bad for you, as the case may be). It wasn’t long ago, after all, that studies were telling us that running makes us smarter, which motivated us to get off our couches. (Or, in theory it did. In practice, we maybe did it once and then forgot, because Netflix.) Now, a new study published in the Sage Journal of Health Psychology says that people who don’t workout are smarter to begin with than those who do. Hm. To reach this conclusion aimed at making physically lazy people feel superior to all the people they see out running on Saturday mornings as they stumble to the corner store for Gatorade, Advil, and bread products, researchers studied a whopping 60 people and found that those who were high-cognitive scorers were less active. While it’s true that some of us would rather read a book than go for a run, and that reading allegedly makes you smarter, we’re not sure this small sample is quite compelling enough to let those couch-loungers among us feel smug in our sloth-like behavior. We will cite it, however, when our significant other suggests we ‘go outside and get some air’ this weekend as we’re trying to finish our Stranger Things binge. Thanks, science!
