According to our new research, watching too much TV can make you feel a bit brain-dead. What’s more, it also shows that watching too much TV might take years off your life. The more time you spend on watching TV, the greater your risk of dying at an earlier age -- especially from heart disease, researchers found. The research followed 8,800 adults with no history of heart disease for more than six years. Compared to those who watched less than two hours of TV per day, people who watched four hours or more were 80 percent more likely to die from heart disease and 46 percent more likely to die from any cause. All told, 284 people died during the study.
Each additional hour spent in front of the TV increased the risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent and the overall risk of death by 11 percent, according to the study, which was published Monday on the Web site of Circulation, an American Heart Association journal. (The study will appear in the Jan. 26 print edition.
The pattern held even after the researchers took into account the education level and overall health of the participants -- their age, whether they smoked, and their cholesterol and blood pressure, for example.
Television isn't lethal in and of itself; the real problem appears to be that sitting is the "default position" for TV viewing, says lead study author David Dunstan, Ph.D., the head of the physical activity lab at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, a national research center in Victoria, Australia.
"Prolonged watching of television equals a lot of sitting, which invariably means there's an absence of muscle movement," Dunstan says. If your muscles stay inactive for too long, it can disrupt your metabolism, he explains.
What's more, exercise doesn't necessarily make up for long sessions in front of the tube. Dunstan and his col
"You can be active and also watch high amounts of television," Dunstan says. Television isn't necessarily replacing our exercise time, he explains, but it is replacing everyday, "non-sweaty" movements as basic as standing and walking from room to room. The positive health effects of these seemingly negligible activities are underestimated, he says.
Modern technology has virtually engineered a lot of incidental, non-sweaty activity out of our lives.
Previous studies have reported a link between sitting time and the risk of heart disease and death, but this is the first to focus on television watching, which is one of the most common leisure activities. Adults in Australia, where the study was conducted, average about three hours a day; in the United States, the average has been estimated at up to five hours.
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