Watching Too Much TV Might Shorten Your Life

A new study says that watching too much TV might actually shorten your life. The study was conducted by researchers at the University Of Queensland in Australia. The scientists say that watching television for 6 hours or more each day might shorten lifespan by up to 5 years. That would rival other well known lifespan limiters such as obesity and smoking.

The researchers utilized data collected over approximately a ten year time span, during which they asked survey participants how much television they watched over the previous week. They then correlated results over time and came up with the estimates. They are not sure why the results factored out as they did, but one obvious reason would be the sedentary lifestyle created by staying in front of the tube for so many waking hours. Lack of exercise leads to well known problems such as obesity, high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke.

If we're going to watch tv so much, maybe we should do a couple of hours viewing while running on a treadmill. That might counter the negative effects nicely.
(via WebMD.com)