Life expectancy shortened with 6 hours of daily TV

Want to live longer? Stop watching TV – that is the latest anecdote that we have managed to uncover from trawling the Internet. The British Journal of Sports Medicine published that watching TV for an average of six hours daily could play a part in hastening your appointment with the Grim Reaper, by nearly five years. This is serious stuff, considering that other (in)famous behavioural risk factors such as smoking and the lack of exercise do have such an impact as well.

I do wonder – does this mean that sitting in front of the monitor all day long, churning out post after post would also “qualify” me for this “plan”? Hopefully not, but it seems that watching TV has now been classified as a major contributor to the amount of sedentary activity, and researchers have more or less begun to assess its impact on life expectancy.

Previously published data on the relationship between TV viewing time and death from analyses of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab) were used, in addition to figures from the Australian national population and mortality for the year 2008, in order to develop a lifetime risk framework.

Edwin Kee
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Tags: TV