Watching TV shortens life span, study finds
Australian researchers find that each hour a day spent in front of television is linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and an 11% greater risk of all causes of death.
Watching television for hour upon hour obviously isn't the best way to spend leisure time -- inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease. But a new study quantifies TV viewing's effect on risk of death.
Researchers found that each hour a day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, an 11% greater risk of all causes of death, and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer.
FOR THE RECORD:
Effects of TV viewing: The headline on an article in Tuesday's Section A that said "Hours sitting in front of TV found to shorten life" overstated the results of a study. As the article stated, researchers found a statistical relationship between long hours of TV viewing and a shortened life span, but the study did not go so far as to find a direct cause. —
The study, released Monday in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Assn., looked at health data among 8,800 men and women older than 25 who were part of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study. Participants recorded their television viewing hours for a week, and researchers separated the results by amount of viewing: those who watched less than two hours of TV a day, those who watched two to four hours a day, and those who watched more than four hours a day.
The subjects also had oral glucose tolerance tests to determine blood sugar and gave blood samples to establish cholesterol levels at the beginning of the study. People with a history of cardiovascular disease were not included. In a follow up about six years later, 87 people had died due to cardiovascular disease and 125 of cancer.
Researchers found a strong connection between TV hours and death from cardiovascular disease, not just among the overweight and obese, but among people who had a healthy weight and exercised.
People who watched more than four hours a day showed an 80% greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 46% higher risk of all causes of death compared with those who watched fewer than two hours a day, suggesting that being sedentary could have general deleterious effects. The numbers were the same after the researchers controlled for smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, an unhealthy diet and leisure-time exercise.
"What we showed was that irrespective of a person's exercise level, sitting for four or more hours watching television was linked to a significant increase in risk of death compared to watching lower amounts of TV," said Dr. David Dunstan, lead author of the study and professor and head of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia. "The message here is that in addition to promoting regular exercise, we also need to promote avoiding long periods of sitting, such as spending long hours in front of the computer screen."
To him, the results weren't unexpected. "When we're in that sitting posture, we're not using our muscles, and we know from extensive evidence that muscle contractions are important for the body's regulatory processes, such as the ability to break down glucose and use it as energy." That can cause insulin resistance, which can trigger a spike in blood sugar levels, possibly leading to type 2 diabetes.
Dr. Prediman K. Shah, director of the cardiology division of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, agreed. He pointed out that muscles become deconditioned when not used, triggering harmful physiological changes. "If your activity is slowing down, you metabolize cholesterol less and synthesize it more," he said.
Even sporadic exercisers who sit for long periods need to increase their daily activity.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/12/science/la-sci-tv12-2010jan12
A Safe Escape The biggest trap of watching too much TV is that it becomes a safe way to escape your own life instead of looking at it square in the eye. If you find yourself watching hours of television everyday, it might be good to think about whether or not it’s a subtle indication to yourself that your life is not what you want it to be, that it’s not interesting enough so you feel the need to immerse yourself in the lives of others. People who gossip have the same problem. Their lives aren’t interesting enough so they feel the need to know everybody else’s business and spread the word to whoever will listen. The person who watches television for hours on end is no different. They end up so wrapped up in the lives of others that it becomes their entire life. People literally “sleep through life” by watching hours of television a day. It’s a tragedy that they cannot see the time they spend there can be used to better their own life, so they don’t have to feel the need to escape it.
Mind Deterioration. When you watch TV, you’ll find that it does all the work FOR you. You don’t need to “create” in your mind like you do when reading. When you read, your brain has to use its imagination to come up with the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the pictures, and the feelings described in the book or article but when you watch TV, all of that is already done for you (at least the hearing and seeing part). If you ever wonder why your brain feels so “empty” after watching television, that’s exactly why. Your brain shuts off because it has no job to do. Use it or lose it indeed. Along the lines of that, have you ever tried to do get things done after watching TV? It’s as if you’ve become “mind paralyzed” and you have to wait for your brain to slowly get back in gear. I call that time period the “dead zone” and even after that, you’re still not working at peak efficiency.
An Easy Addiction This is the worst part of watching too much television. TV can be just as addictive as any illegal substance on the market today. It’s easily accessible, pleasurable, and makes you forget your troubles for the day. Sound familiar? You watch one show and when it ends, the TV says “Coming up next…stay tuned for blah blah blah”, so you become curious, you watch it and you like it and BOOM, you add another rotation to your weekly TV schedule. Those hours add up and once you get vested in the shows, they’ve got you for life. Watching television for hours on end is the easy way out and many people choose to take it. Why? Because watching television for hours a day switches off our brains so we don’t have to think about our own lives and when it’s time to turn the TV off and reality comes to bite us in the rear, what do the majority of us do then? We retreat into the safe confines of television once again. TV can easily become the biggest time thief of all and yet, people don’t realize it. They don’t become indignant at the opportunities in life that they lose. It’s amazing how people take the time to buy the best security for their home so their precious belongings don’t get stolen, but when it comes to protecting their mind and their time, two of their biggest assets, the doors are wide open for easy pickings. People have got to realize that the quality of their lives can become so much better if they just take the time to stop watching TV and channel that toward creating the life they want to live. Here’s a thought. Unplug the box and put it high up in your closet so it's a pain in the butt to reach it. You’ll learn to live without it. The sun will shine that much brighter, food will taste that much better, and life will be that much sweeter. When it’s all said and done, watching too much television provides you with a safe escape from looking at your own life, deteriorates your mind, makes you unproductive, and can lead to a dangerous addiction. It truly is one of the most dangerous drugs out there on the market today and the sad thing about it is, most people don't even realize it.
http://briankim.net/blog/2006/10/the-harmful-effects-of-watching-too-much-television/
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