Telly trauma

We're watching more television and doing less exercise than we should, with increasingly adverse effects on our health.

The reasons people give us for their watching include: "I work hard and need TV to relax," "Why should I give up something I like to do?" and "I am too tired to do anything else."

We often need reasons to change our habits, so here are some compelling data from recent studies on TV watching:

1. Kids are spending more time with so-called "entertainment media". A new US study from the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that teens and younger children spend almost eight hours a day watching television, playing video games or surfing the internet. This has increased by more than an hour in the past five years.

2. TV watching may shorten your life. A study published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association found every hour per day on average spent in front of the television brings with it an 11 per cent overall greater risk of premature death and an 18 per cent greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

3. Television watching is linked to obesity and high cholesterol. Higher viewing hours are associated with higher body mass index numbers, lower fitness levels and higher blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels, according to a study published in 2008 in the International Journal of Obesity.

4. TV watching is linked to a bigger belly, flabby arms and a risk of heart disease. Decreasing the amount of TV-watching might be effective as a first step in reducing atherosclerosis. Risk factors such as television-watching have an unfavourable association with the following measurements: BMI, waist girth, waist-to-hip ratio, and sub-scapular and triceps skin-fold thickness, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's Family Heart Study published in Atherosclerosis in 2000.

6. Watching TV increases the risk of diabetes in men and women. The Nurses' Health Study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2003 studied more than 50,000 women and noted that TV-watching and other sedentary behaviours led to an increased risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes mellitus in women.

7. Similarly, for men, data on almost 40,000 men published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2001 showed increasing physical activity is associated with a significant reduction in risk for diabetes in men aged 40 to 75.

Conversely, a sedentary lifestyle indicated by prolonged TV- watching is directly related to an increased risk for diabetes.

8. Cutting television time burns energy. People who watched 50 per cent less TV a day burned off 120 more calories (504 kilojoules), according to the December issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

9. If all of the above haven't convinced you, perhaps this will: less TV equals better sex. Men who watched three or more hours of TV a day were much more likely to have erectile dysfunction than men who watched less than an hour a day, according to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Medicine.

So now you're convinced the box is not all that good for your health, what can you do?

A quick and easy first step is calculating what you watch in a week, and the following week, cutting it down by 50 per cent. Moderation in all things, including our time spent as couch potatoes, is a step closer to great health.

Compiled by doctors Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden, medical directors of Sutter Downtown Integrative Medicine, California.

- AAP