Before you settle in to binge the new season of “The Bear” or watch Team USA go for the gold at the Paris Olympics, think twice about the amount of time you spend on the couch in front of the TV. Your future self may thank you.
A new study by Harvard researchers links the popular pastime of sitting and watching television to the likelihood of reaching one’s senior years in a state of good health: the more time spent doing the former, the lower the odds of achieving the latter.
The problem doesn’t seem to be with sitting in general. After controlling for a variety of risk factors such as diet quality and smoking history, the researchers found no relationship between time spent in a chair at work and the chances of aging well. Ditto for sitting in cars or at home doing something besides watching TV, such as reading, eating meals or paying bills.
Yet for every additional two hours spent in front of the boob tube, a person’s chance of meeting the researchers’ definition of healthy aging declined by 12%, according to their study published this week in JAMA Network Open.
That does not bode well for the United States, where 62% of adults between the ages of 20 and 64 say they watch TV for at least two hours a day, as do 84% of senior citizens.
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The findings are based on data from more than 45,000 women who participated in the Nurses Heath Study. All of them were at least 50 years old and had no major chronic diseases back in 1992, when they answered a slew of questions about their health and what they did all day.
For instance, the nurses were asked how much time they spent standing or walking around at work or at home. They were asked about various types of exercise, including jogging, swimming laps, playing tennis and doing yoga. They were asked if they mowed their own lawns.
And they were asked how many hours they spent doing all kinds of sitting.
You might not be surprised to learn that the most popular type of sitting was sitting while watching …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
