Sometimes the examples are sillier. Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became "Why stilettos are the secret to shapely legs", for the Mail "Stilettos give women shapelier legs than flats", for the Express "Stilettos tone up your legs".

Yet anybody who read even just the press release would immediately see that this study had nothing whatsoever to do with shoes. It didn't look at shoe heel height, it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance from the back of your ankle joint to the insertion of the achilles tendon. It was just an interesting, nerdy insight into how the human body is engineered: if you have a shorter lever at the back of your foot, you need a bigger muscle in your calf. The participants were barefoot.