I didn't say fat people were scientifically stupid despite reports, says scientist whose reputation was almost destroyed

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Fat people are stupid, a study was reported to have claimed last week. Except the scientists behind it have said that they never claimed anything of the sort – and that the reports have done damage to the reputation of scientists.

The researchers behind a hugely-popular study that was reported to have shown that fat people are less intelligent than thin people have hit out at those reports, saying that they were mistaken and have damaged the reputation of the scientists.

Many of the headlines about the study suggested that it had simply found that fat people were more stupid. “Fat people are less intelligent than people with a normal weight, a provocative study claims”, said one report.

But the report didn’t deal with intelligence at all, those behind the study said, “and it is certainly not about shaming or stereotyping individuals based on their weight”.

The research – titled 'Effects of Body Mass Index and Body Fat Percent on Default Mode, Executive Control, and Salience Network Structure and Function’ did look at the interaction between people’s metabolism and their brain structure and blood flow. But it didn’t even assess the cognitive performance or intelligence of those studied, so it could not look at the relationship between obesity and intellect.

The scientists said that the mistake had occurred as a result of something like the “telephone game” – where what is being said gets distorted as it is passed between people. Because many of the reports relied on other reports of the same study, it gradually became less accurate, they said.

As a result the scientists have launched an attack on the reports, which they say is a consequence of the “potentially harmful consequences” they have.

“They are damaging to our personal and professional reputations as credible scientists and, by extension, to the reputations of our academic institutions, funding agencies, and science in general,” the authors write. They are detrimental to society, because they mistakenly reinforce negative stigmas and stereotypes. And, in this case, they are harmful to individuals who may already be suffering from depression or dealing with self-esteem issues related to their body image.”

The scientists recognised that the research was long and quite technical in some of its sections. But in short it looked at the structure of people’s brains and compared them with the composition of their body.

Asked if his research showed obese people were less intelligent, Professor Chase Figley, one of the authors of the study, told The Independent: “The short answer to that is no. Our findings do not comment on intelligence at all.”

He said his work showed decreasing amounts of white brain matter -- but also increasing levels of connectivity -- in the brain’s ‘salience network’ as people gained weight.

Professor Figley said some journalists had ignored the latter effect and drawn their conclusions solely on the lower levels of white brain cells, even though this did not necessarily have any effect on intelligence.

He said the sample size of 32 people, of which six were overweight, seven were obese and two were underweight, was “very small” and that the academic paper he wrote had made this clear.

The paper was partly designed to flag up an area for future research on a larger scale. Future work could explore whether there is a relationship of causation between body composition and brain structure, for instance, rather than just looking at the correlations between the two things.

Since the publication of the stories, Professor Figley said “my inbox has been overwhelmed” with emails from people concerned about the research or wrongly attacking him for producing “junk science”.