Watching TV is taking years off your life, according to scientists nobody asked

By Sean O'Neal  |  August 16, 2011 | 9:09pm
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It’s been two whole months since a research study reminded you that sitting around eating crappy food and watching television isn’t healthy behavior, so jolly good that the British Journal Sports of Medicine came along to reaffirm that you’ll be dead soon. According to Australian researchers, who put down the Tim Tams and Vegemite for a moment to shake their index fingers in a gentle shaming motion, watching as little as one hour of TV a day can shorten the human lifespan by 22 minutes—the same effect as smoking two cigarettes and, not coincidentally, the average running time of an episode of Entourage.

Extrapolating those figures into what it termed a “lifetime risk framework,” these scientists who must be a lot of fun at parties concluded that watching six hours of TV a day can reduce a person’s life expectancy by 4.8 years, which you’ll never get to spend catching up on really good TV shows. Of course, this is one of those increasingly frequent “correlation does not equal causation” studies, where the real killer is your consumption not of a wealth of life-enriching entertainment, but bowl after bowl of Fiddle Faddle. That, plus the overall associated behavior pattern of remaining sedentary, as scientists recently determined that just sitting there, like you’re doing right now, is killing you. So if you people would just try to limit your television watching to those times when you’re exercising, out running errands, or working your manual labor job, maybe you’d live longer. [via MSNBC]

 
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