Watching too much TV can shorten your life

New York (dpa) – Spending less time sitting and fewer hours in front of the television means a longer life, according to a new study conducted at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in the US state of Louisiana.
People who sit for fewer than three hours a day on average could increase their lifespan by as much as two years, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal. And fewer than two hours per day spent watching television lengthens lives by around 1.4 years, the research team led by Peter Katzmarzyk found.

”The outcomes indicate that long periods of sitting and watching television are cutting the life expectancies of the American population,” according to a press release issued by the team, which evaluated data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a databank on US lifestyles.
Additional US studies taking in a total of 167,000 adults were used to compile data on the amount of time spent sitting and causes of death of all kinds. Analysis of these studies provided an indication of the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle on longevity, but the results should be treated with caution, the researchers said.
The conclusions drawn were purely theoretical and failed to take into account differences in the various age and population groups.
In addition, the analysis was based on data on sitting and television time provided by the subjects themselves, implying that errors or false information could have contaminated the study.
”The NHANES data indicate that adults spend 55 per cent of their day sitting on average,” the research team wrote. They called for a marked behavioural change to secure noticeable increases in longevity.
The data showed that people across 20 countries surveyed recently spent an average of five hours a day sitting, ranging from three hours in Portugal, Brazil and Columbia to six hours in Taiwan, Norway, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Japan.