IS the latest exercise claim, no doubt aimed at couch potatoes, merely another health scam doing the rounds or sound advice?

Some boffins now say running is good for everyone reducing certain health risks, yet previous research discovered that the act of just standing is best.

Do these people have nothing better to do other than use aggregated data to inaccurately speculate what is right on an individual basis and devise silly tests to alarm? Some tests seem bizarre, such as standing on one leg with eyes closed to predict potential for the knacker’s yard.

Mystics suggest yoga and meditation, and admittedly, sitting peacefully in reflection watching the second hand of a watch tick by at 60 ticks a minute for several minutes is preferable to obsessing about how much faster heartbeats and pavement passed by than on a prior run.

Apart from dodging cars and fumes, cyclists, lamp-posts, irate dogs, sneers and tripping over shoelaces there is the dilemma of free radicals, which increase during intense exercise causing damage and ageing to cells.

Some of the slowest creatures live longest, and it seems counter-intuitive to imagine a tortoise, and most humans, in shorts and vest, stopwatch around neck.

Tom Scaife, Manor Drive, York.