Guys, I have some bad news. Are you ready? You might want to sit down, I’m not sure your ticker can handle the shock: according to a majorly depressing new study, our bodies are so profoundly impacted by TV-viewing that watching more than one hour a day is highly likely to have serious health consequences. Better hope there’s no buffering in the afterlife.
Dr. Martinez-Gonzalez of Spain’s University of Navarra warns
Our findings suggest adults may consider increasing their physical activity, avoid long sedentary periods, and reduce television watching to no longer than one to two hours each day.
That suggestion might seem like common sense, but the team’s research showed that deviating even slightly from the one hour limit could have a surprisingly negative impact on the flawed flesh-bags that house our brain. For the study, the researchers observed 13,284 volunteers over a period of four years, and determined that “Participants reporting three or more hours a day of television viewing had a twofold higher risk of mortality than those reporting less than one hour a day.”
According to ABC, for every two hours of boob-tube time over the recommended limit watched per day, subjects were
44 percent more likely to die from heart disease or stroke, 21 percent more likely to die of cancer and 55 percent more likely to die from something else, and that’s taking in account their age, sex, whether they smoked, whether they were obese and whether they ate a healthy, Mediterranean diet.
Although it stands to reason that TV watching could be a “high risk” activity because of it’s relationship to other unhealthy habits (those Bugles aren’t gonna eat themselves, yo) , the research indicates that, even without accounting for any extenuating factors, TV time is simply dangerously sedentary. Martinez-Gonzalez explains that “compared to driving a car or doing work on a computer, television is a very passive activity,” and suggests there may be a link between binge watching shows and disease-causing inflammation or high cholesterol.
If, like me, you’re in full-blown panic mode right now, the researchers suggest taking “a walk around the block,” but I think they’re underestimating the amount of TV I have to watch daily to drown out feelings. That is too many blocks.
Before I shuffle off this mortal coil, I leave you, dear readers, with my Netflix and Hulu accounts. So long to My So Called Life.
- Netflix, Hulu users prefer binge watching to pacing themselves
- Netflix and the changing face of television
- Charmed and Supernatural on list of top-ten binge watched shows
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