A RECENT headline made my heart leap – “Aberdeen tops the league.” Had I missed something? Had the natural order of the Fergie years been miraculously restored? Had medical science found a way to transplant youthful legs on Willie Miller?

Alas, any hope of the cobwebs being dusted from the 1980s open-top bus was quickly and cruelly dashed. Closer scrutiny revealed that the Granite City had been nominated to represent Scotland in the couch potato Champions’ League.

According to a report prepared for the Scottish Parliament Health and Sport Committee –must be true then – Aberdonians are the Scots least likely to participate in sporting activity. We are the potatoes who slouch on the couch, buttery in one hand, remote in the other marvelling at the litheness and athleticism of the casts of River City and Still Game. A clear case of sofa so good. Or not.

All such reports need to be taken with a pinch of low sodium salsa. The report even provided an inactivity league table, appropriately placing the fat around the bottom. An impressive 87 per cent of people in Falkirk claimed to regularly participate in physical activity. In contrast 65 per cent of Aberdonians wobbled home in last place.

The people of Glasgow seem to have undergone a conversion of Pauline proportions.

A 2009 survey labelled them as the least active in Scotland. The parliamentary report suggests that Mars Bars (deep fried or otherwise) have been forsaken for parallel bars, with an astonishing 85 per cent claiming regular exercise.

Aye right. The table was based on responses from a self-selecting sample of around 3,000 people. Even the report’s authors don’t claim it was a controlled piece of research. Six responses from Falkirk, five of them boasting three active games of darts each week would be a table topping performance.

One wonders why time and effort is wasted on such pointless research and reports. Perhaps Aberdonians came bottom of the heap because we know rubbish when we see it.

Most of us are possibly too busy running, walking and swimming to vegetate at our computers, wasting time on surveys that provide little more than eye-catching headlines.

Similar doubts arose from recent research conducted jointly by the University of Aberdeen and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The researchers concluded that a tendency towards obesity might be the result of a malfunctioning gene. Studies with rats suggested that those with the faulty gene were less active and walked more slowly than those with fully operational skinny genes. There may of course be a simpler reason. The roly-poly

rodents were less active because they had opted out of the rat race.

It’s fitting that Chinese academics were partners in the research. There could well be a connection between obese Aberdonians and the number of fast food outlets in the city.

It’s time to call a halt to this pseudo research. It does a fat lot of good and researchers have lived

off the fat of the land for far too long.