Your TV is killing you, according to a March 5 story on msnbc.com.
The story refers first to a report in Circulation: the Journal of the American Heart Association which found (simplifying here) that every hour spent in front of the TV translated into an 11 percent increase in the risk of death from any cause. This finding was based on a six-year Australian study and was consistent even in participants who "didn't smoke, were thin, ate healthy diets, and had low blood pressure and cholesterol."
Well, wow. That means if I, on any given night, spend an hour sitting on the couch watching "Holmes on Homes" and two hours watching a movie, I'm 30 percent more likely to die than if I ... did what? Moving on ...
Okay, next scary bit: a report in Alcohol and Alcoholism found that viewing "films and commercials in which alcohol was prominently featured" resulted in male university students drinking 1.5 times more than those who watched material "in which alcohol played a less prominent role." We do what we see, I guess. I would be more surprised by this result if the population studied were, say, employed single women.
Then the next scary bit: teens who watch a lot of TV including sexual content were twice as likely to get pregnant/impregnate a partner. This doesn't surprise me a bit, since it's highly likely kids watching that kind of stuff are home alone, i.e., not getting parental supervision or conversation about things like birth control. And heaven knows TV doesn't provide any good information about THAT. ... If you see behavior that is presented as desirable and attractive and appears to have no negative consequences, and if you are too ignorant to contextualize that behavior, then, yeah. Ignorance is a natural condition of youth; it's why we send them to school. And, ideally, talk to them.
A fourth scary bit: a study in the Journal of Pediatrics reports that the more TV kids watch, the less bone they grow - making them more susceptible to disease, fractures, and osteoporosis later in life. Again, no surprise here, as every hour kids watch TV they are not out running around in the yard or playing sports or dancing or doing anything else active to promote healthy development. They are probably also getting fat, which in itself is a risk factor for disease, fractures, and osteoporosis later in life.
And the final scary bit: if you have the TV on, you're paying less attention to your family (surprise!), according to a study in Child Development. This seems so obvious I can't believe a reputable journal published a study on it, but there you go.
Now for my rebuttal.
I'm mostly looking at the first point, the lead, which produced the title and is in fact the only study quoted as actually finding a correlation between TV viewing and increased death risk. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with those findings. But I have a feeling the msnbc story left out a lot.
The study as reported by msnbc doesn't say what pre-existing conditions any of the study participants may have had, what their average age was, what their professions were, how active they were, what their marital status may have been, or where they lived. All of these factors affect total death risk.
You can be a thin non-smoker with healthy blood pressure and cholesterol and still have diabetes, for example; by year 6 you might have died from insulin shock.
You can be in perfect health in year 1 but work the graveyard shift with a 100-mile round-trip commute; by year 6 you might have died from sudden cardiac arrest, suicide, or a car accident (all associated with the suggested factors).
For that matter, you can be in perfect health in year 1 but be 70 years old. By year 6 you might have died from one of the myriad diseases which catch up with us, some swiftly, in old age.
All I'm saying is, the TV might not be the deciding factor here. The biggest question left unanswered was, among people who watched less than two hours of TV a day, what were they doing with the rest of the time? If they watched an average of two hours of TV, but ran or biked or danced or surfed for an average of an hour every day, how would that skew the result?
The original study may have answered all these questions. I'm just pointing them out by way of illustrating that news stories are often incomplete, and the sensational headlines may be misleading.
Because really, I don't believe that watching TV for three hours a day is inherently worse for me than sitting and knitting by the radio, or reading, or painting, or anything else sedentary, for three hours a day
It's all about balance, folks.
And by the way, please talk to your kids about birth control. A story that ISN'T getting much attention is that of sexually active adults who don't want to get pregnant, 20% either don't use contraception at all or use it inconsistently/incorrectly (see Feministe). These are people who say they DON'T want to get pregnant! People, I have news for you: if you really don't want to get pregnant, you HAVE to use contraception, probably two kinds at once. This is not something to leave to chance. IMO, if you don't use contraception, you DO want to get pregnant, and you're not too fussy about when or with whom. Go ahead, flame me.
Comments