August 8th, 2006
Exercise: TV Matters: When Watching Affects Walking
By Eric Nagourney
New York Times
Many studies have suggested that there is a connection between watching television and physical inactivity. Now, researchers have tried to prove this is the case by asking volunteers to wear pedometers to see if there was a link between how much television they watched and how much they walked.
There was.
The study, published in July in The American Journal of Public Health, found that for each hour of television, participants took an average of 144 fewer steps.
They were also less likely to walk 10,000 steps a day — the level some argue is desirable for fitness.
The researchers, led by Gary G. Bennett of Harvard and the Dana-Farber Center for Community-Based Research, asked almost 500 people to wear the pedometers for five days and keep track of how much TV they watched.
The instruments were masked, so the subjects could not see how well they had done.
The volunteers, all residents of low-income housing projects and many of them overweight, were asked to wear the pedometers from the time they woke up till bedtime.
On average, the participants reported watching about four hours of television a day. Those who did so were much less likely to reach the 10,000-step-a-day mark.
Still, the researchers said they would have expected to see a greater effect if it had been true that too much television played a role in the obesity of the subjects.
They also said it was not just enough to encourage people not to watch television if it meant they would replace it with other sedentary behaviors.