But the risks associated with watching TV seemed striking. For every two additional hours a person spent watching TV, the risk of death from heart disease jumped by 44 percent, cancer death risk climbed by 21 percent and the risk of premature death went up by 55 percent for all other causes, compared to people who said they watched less than an hour each day.
But why???
Gonzalez said even the researchers were skeptical about their findings.
They wondered, for example, whether people already gravely ill might watch more TV because they weren’t physically able to do anything else. So they ran the numbers a second time, excluding the 35 deaths that happened in the first three years of the study, hoping to knock out people who might have been very sick. But the results only got stronger.
People tend to consume more processed foods and sugary drinks when they watch TV, so the researchers adjusted their results to control for the effects of added snacks and sweetened drinks. Again, the results got stronger.
They continued to try to eliminate things that might explain the results, such as smoking, age, sex, weight, and whether or not people followed a Mediterranean diet. Nothing seemed to really affect the results.
It’s not the first study to find a link between TV time and premature death. But, the new research didn’t prove that prolonged TV watching leads to an early death, it just found a connection between the two.
“For me, the major take-home message is to avoid spending many continuous hours watching television, to limit the time to one or at most two hours a day,” Gonzalez said.
The VERY Surprising Reason Your TV Might Kill You was originally published on elev8.com
