Television and Obesity: A Deadly Combination

Posted on Jan 25th 2010 12:00PM by Jonny Bowden

Filed Under: Jonny's Take, Diet & Weight Loss

We don't know for sure why there's a relationship between television watching and obesity, but there is. And it's a doozey.

Theories abound. The more time you spend in front of the tube, the less time you have for exercise (which assumes you'd be exercising if you weren't watching "Friends" reruns). Watching TV leads to mindless eating (no kidding). And finally, some researchers have floated the theory that staring passively at the screen in some way changes brain waves and lowers metabolism.

There's also all those hours of exposure to commercials for fast food, and don't think for a minute that doesn't creep into our subconscious. Whatever the mechanism -- or mechanisms -- there's no doubt about the fact that the more television you watch, the greater the risk of being overweight. And a new study suggests it may even increase the risk of dying.

The new study, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, found that every hour spent watching television actually increases the risk of dying from any cause by 11 percent, and increases the risk of suffering a cardiovascular disease-related death by a scary 18 percent.
But I digress.

I don't think it really matters why television makes us fat. The question is what to do about it. One interesting suggestion made by a recent diet book is to watch one hour of television for every hour you spend being active. No exercise, no TV.

Another suggestion -- one I've made myself in books and specifically in my Diet Boot Camp program --is to not eat and watch TV at the same time. In fact, to the extent that you can make eating it's own activity and not an accompaniment to other stuff like driving, working or surfing the Internet, the more you help increase mindfulness about your food. That's always a good thing when you're trying to lose weight.

If you have kids or teenagers, consider this little factoid from a study done last year: The number of hours spent watching TV in childhood and adolescence is a significant predictor of dietary habits in the future. Teenagers who watched five or more hours of TV a day while the researchers collected their data had a significantly higher intake of trans fat, fried foods, fast food menu items, snacks and soda ... five years later!

There's absolutely no reason to think these relationships between TV viewing and overeating don't continue as we get older. So here's a good tip for turbo-charging your weight-loss program: Watch less television. That tip has nothing to do with food, supplements, or exercise, but it might just be one of the most effective tips of all.

For more information from Jonny on this topic, visit his Web site.

Jonny Bowden, author, nutritionist and weight loss coach cuts through all the misconceptions about diet and fitness to help you transform your body, your health and your life.

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Tags: diet, Diet Boot Camp, eating, jonny-bowden, television, weight loss, weight-loss

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Dawn 1-25-2010 @ 12:50PM

Initially I was thinking that this might be included with computer use as well but I find that my hands are too busy typing and working the mouse to eat much... most of the time I drink water or coffee while I'm on the computer..however, when I watch tv I can easily grab a bowl of popcorn and soda and it will be gone before the first commercial and I'm still hungry.

I've cut back on my tv watch because of this.

u262f 1-25-2010 @ 10:42PM

That's the same logical fallacy and so-called "science" that Big Food used to sell the "no-fat" lies that made everybody obese...

Correlation does not equal causation. The correlated trends between TV and death could very easily be due to some third factor, like people eating junk food while they watch TV.

In fact, when I was working 16-hour days and watching no TV at all, I was obese, I had high blood pressure, and I was borderline diabetic. After I started watching insanely huge amounts of TV (often 10 hours per week!), I lost 65 lbs, and I've been at a normal BMI for almost two years now.

In my case, watching TV was part of me deciding to make the time to pamper and take care of myself instead of just working all the time, just like taking the time to cook and exercise. (Working only 8 hours per day instead of 16 means I can have 2 hours per day for TV, two hours for exercise, two hours to cook and clean, and 2 more hours to shop, read, sleep, or goof off on the Internet.)

I actually do eat while watching TV, but what I eat while watching TV are vegetables (no dressing or croutons or dip or anything else - vegetables and water only). I can mindlessly consume my day's worth of vegetables without having to worry about how they taste. I do agree with people that TV is mindless brainwashing, but I'm brainwashing myself into eating my vegetables, so it helps my health overall.

I'm rather certain that watching TV by itself doesn't cause obesity. If we understand what's truly happening and why (instead of leaping from survey numbers cranked through theoretical formulas to an assumption of causation), we can use the underlying mechanisms to our advantage instead of just being afraid of them and avoiding them.

anchen84 1-26-2010 @ 4:48PM

5-6 hours of TV a day? That's just insane! Who has that much free time on their hands? I grew up in the second world country, and the guidelines were no more than 40 minutes of TV a day, or 2 hours every 3 days or so. Granted, the TVs we had were not the plasma flat-screen ones, that are more gentle on the eye, but still... unless one is a stock broker and must watch the news 24/7, why kill that much time? there's real life out there to be lived.