It was suggested today that pancakes might help keep cancer at bay, despite their high fat content. A special report in the Daily Express cited a study that implied regular pancake ingestion every February reduced incidences of stomach cancer.

The two-month study of six people training to run in the London marathon discovered that in almost two-thirds of those studied, stomach cancer tended not to occur in those who claimed to regularly eat pancakes on pancake day. This was about 2.9 people out of 5. One couldn’t remember if they actually had any pancakes that year, but their confusion was put down to hot weather.

Out of the six people studied, only one didn’t eat pancakes. They also didn’t get stomach cancer. This was not statistically significant.

The reason is thought to be because the fat in pancakes is ‘good’ fat, and contains special dimochyhaldihides, usually found in superfoods like blueberries and expensive nuts.

There are calls for pancakes to be classed as fruit and to become a staple of kids’ school lunch boxes. Warnings from health experts to take the recent findings as provisional at the very least have been laughed off as annoying.

A government think tank suggested calling them pancaketastics instead of pancakes, because the more syllables a food has in its name, the more healthy and important it sounds.

The Daily Express has started a petition to make poor people eat more pancakes, not out of health concern, but because they like starting petitions that interfere in other people’s lives.