EATING AT THE TABLE AND UNDER IT.
There is a running joke about how politicians put on the pounds after getting into office because well, the chaps are eating, both literally and figuratively. However it would appear there exists a closer link than previously thought. In 2021, Ukrainian scholar Pavlo Blavetsky was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize (a play on the word ignoble) for his study, ‘’ Obesity of politicians and corruption in post-Soviet countries .’’ The study highlighted a positive correlation between the weight of officials and the level of corruption. He discovered that the higher the median weight of national politicians was against the average weight of the population of each country, the worse the placement of the country was in the corruption rankings. Further evidence of this can be seen in China where Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign of 2012 inadvertently led to an improvement in the health of civil servants from over 40% being overweight before the crackdown to around 11% in 2018. In China, political