Tipping the scales in favour of honesty, happiness and good health

Do you know how many bathroom scales there are in the UK? Or even how many are sold each year? I don’t. It is almost impossible to find out unless you are prepared to access pay-walled market research. Which I’m not! I can tell you that the UK has the largest market share of bathroom scales sales, but I can’t tell you what that is. I do know that global sales are estimated to grow to £2.2 billion by the year 2030. I don’t like not knowing, or not being able to find out, but let’s leave bathroom scales for a moment and consider the integrated concepts of honesty, happiness and health.

The worst thing an academic can do is to have a sexual relationship with one of their students. The second worst thing an academic can do is to falsify the data they use when publishing a research paper. Proving that someone has falsified their data can be tricky. It depends on what the data consists of. I have supervised a few PhD students who have ‘cleaned up’ the narrative data they have collected. In the main this will have been done in complete ignorance and can soon be sorted. However, well-established academics should know better.

So, I was surprised and perhaps a little dismayed to read of the allegations levelled at a Harvard Business School professor called Francesco Gino. She has been accused of falsifying results in several behavioural studies she has used when publishing the outcome of the studies. No case of deliberately trying to manipulate the outcomes to suit a particular espoused view has yet been proven. However, in a somewhat ironic twist, Gino is a professor who studies honesty.  What I do know is she is not a happy bunny.

And increasingly, happiness has grown in importance when it  comes to  living a well-balanced life, free from mental health issues, and improving one’s sense of wellbeing. This year’s World Happiness Report has been published listing Finland as the happiest nation and indeed, for the sixth year running! For the fourth consecutive year, the UK has slipped down the happiness rankings and we are now ranked 19th in the world. But we are in front of Afghanistan and Lebanon, two of the most unhappy countries in the world. The report uses an evaluation tool called the Cantril Scale. This is not a bathroom scale, although I will return to them shortly. The Cantril Scale looks at a number of factors that might influence the degree of happiness people feel, including generosity, freedom and trust. Finland scores well on many of these factors, including equality, healthy life expectancy, a lack of corruption and a great GDP.

As a nation, they face the same global challenges as the UK. The Finnish response to these challenges is somewhat different to ours in the UK. It is underpinned by a national commitment to equality, education and transparency. Three things that have been in short supply recently in the last few years in the UK! When I first started going to Finland, I thought their general acceptance of what life gave them was rather strange. However, over the years I visited, I came to realise that what it actually demonstrated was a sense of contentment, again, something not seen everywhere in the UK. So many people continuously look for something that they think might bring them happiness. The older I get, the more I realise I have much to be grateful for and that gives me a sense of contentment too.  

One of the things I remain grateful for is my reasonable health. Yes, I do get a little help in the shape of a daily dose of statins, and regular cholesterol and blood pressure tests. And now it seems, such ‘simple to do’ health checks are to be made available to many more folk. The new NHS initiative, to be launched next Spring, will be in the form of digital health checks accessed by one’s phone, tablet or computer. Leaving aside for a moment the many people who won’t be digitally literate or won’t own a smart phone, this initiative sounds like a great way forward.

The digital health check is expected to ‘identify tens of thousands of cases of hypertension, and see hundreds of stroke and heart attacks prevented’. Apart from having your blood pressure taken at a pharmacy, people will be able to record the result of a self-administered cholesterol test and chart their height and weight. Reading the story, it was at this point I started to wonder about bathroom scales.

I wondered if everyone owned bathroom scales. We do. It is one of the simple electric digital types, although I find it difficult to turn on. And I think it also lies about my weight. Whilst they might be marginally better than the older mechanical scales that have a pointer that moves around to tell your weight, both can be wildly inaccurate. Indeed, since 2003, it has been illegal for hospitals or GP practices to use domestic bathroom scales in medical situations because they can be so inaccurate.  

It's not just the scales that can tell lies about how much someone weighs. We might do that too, particularly when you think you have lost some weight and yet the scales tell you something different. It must have been that extra glass of wine or second helping at dinner last night, so this weight gain is not real, a temporary blip. And we all know that’s not true! So, I hope reading this little blog has resulted in the ‘scales falling from your eyes’ and you can see more clearly, a relationship between honesty, happiness and good health.