  Giomi and Mahadevan [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 238104 (2010)] study the
statistical mechanics of elastic ribbons and claim to provide evidence for "an
underlying helical structure" of ribbon-like polymers even in the absence of
intrinsic curvature (or, in the authors' words, "of a preferential
zero-temperature twist"). They find a persistence length that is over three
times that of a wormlike chain having the same bending rigidity. We show that
these results are an artefact of the authors' flawed formulation, which
produces a helical bias, and that no support for the described effect can be
claimed.
