How come couches are now synonymous with potatoes?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Few phrases out there capture an image quite as succinctly as a couch potato – and yet when you think of it, this makes no sense at all.

Then again neither does a couch surfer but at least that suggests movement and exercise – but what would a potato be doing on a couch?

Yes, the lumpen shape of an old spud on a sofa with ugly eyes growing out of it may well capture a certain image aligned with a human being slouched into the seat with square eyes from watching far too much telly.

But why, of all foods that form part of our staple diet, potatoes – wouldn’t a couch cabbage or a sofa swede be equally, if not even more, appropriate?

Instead, the spud gets a bad name because lazy sloths would prefer to watch exercise than partake in it – and there’s nothing they can do about it.

The British Heart Foundation reckons that one in three Brits is now officially defined a couch potato; the last time we had that many spuds in these parts probably predated the Great Famine.

And in truth, it’s no laughing matter because the human form of the couch potato does not live a long and healthy life.

Indeed a team of scientists from the University of Liverpool recently established that as little as two weeks of life as a couch potato is all it takes to cause muscles to waste away, waistlines to expand and metabolism to be harmed.

If that were true, I’d struggle to fit through Shop Street, never mind the front door.

But these scientists took 28 ordinary citizens who didn’t do much formal exercise but who did take about 10,000 steps a day and told them to move less for two weeks while eating the same diet.

Activity trackers showed that their daily time spent being active fell from more than two hours to half an hour.

After two weeks they had lost 360g in muscle mass, mainly in the legs; their waist circumferences had expanded by an average of 0.7cm; their fitness levels had fallen and levels of fatty molecules in the blood linked to insulin resistance had risen.

Even fitness freaks can turn to blobs – but why recast the gym bunnies into couch potatoes?

But surely in a world of political correctness, it’s only a matter of time before someone sets up a movement to protect the proud potato from this association with obesity.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.