By Ruth Manuel-Logan
Couch potatoes take heed, every hour that you spend watching television raises your risk for premature death from heart disease by as much as 18 percent.
Australian researchers followed the TV-viewing habits of nearly 9,000 participants over a six-and-a-half-year period. Folks who watched four hours-plus of TV a day had a whopping 80 percent greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who sat in front of the boob tube for two hours. According to David Dunstan, Ph.D., study lead researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, being sedentary for long periods of time can raise blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Watching too much TV is an apparent major contributor to an inactive lifestyle, which leads to weight gain. The link between an earlier death and too much TV watching was found not just among the overweight and obese but also among people who had a healthy weight and exercised.
“Previous studies had linked increased sedentary time, in general, to cardiovascular events and mortality risk. But the relationship between mortality risk and television viewing, the predominant lesiure-time sedentary activity had not been studied,” says Dr. Dunstan.
According to Dr. Dunstan, folks living in Australia and Great Britain watch way less TV than Americans. They sit an average of three hours watching TV. Americans, on the other hand, however, spend way too much time propped up front and center of the television: an average of eight hours.
In the United States, where obesity is at alarming proportions and two-thirds of Americans are overweight, Dr. Dunstan offers some sound advice: “Too much sitting is bad for health. Avoid sitting for prolonged periods and keep in mind to move more, more often.”
