THAT'S MEN:TV guides should come with a health warning, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
WHAT IS the most dangerous room in the house? Most of us would vote for the bathroom because we’ve read that you have more of a chance of slipping and falling there than anywhere else at home.
New research would suggest, however, that the most dangerous room of all is the living room because that’s where the sofa and the family television tend to be.
Australian researchers found that slumping back on your sofa or in your big, soft armchair watching television is associated with an increased risk of death.
They worked out that an hour a day watching television was linked to an 11 per cent rise in your risk of death. The risk of a heart-related death rises by 18 per cent and of death from cancer by 9 per cent.
Luckily, for most of our lives our risk of death at any given time isn’t all that high or else teenagers would expire in their millions in front of the TV set. Still, if margarine, say, increased the risk of death by 11 per cent we’d be banning it.
What of the truly dedicated television watcher who clocks up more than four hours a day?
These viewers increase their risk of death by 46 per cent compared to the risk faced by those who watch TV for less than two hours a day. They have an 80 per cent greater chance of dying from heart disease.
It's rather scary, isn't it? Walk down any street and you'll see people sitting immobile in their living rooms staring at the TV. They are in fact dying. And if they're watching That's All We've Got Time For, RTÉ's imitation Have I Got News For You, they are probably already dead.
I am always fascinated by the extraordinary benefits of exercise and have written about them before. This is the first time I’ve seen such striking evidence of the potential damage done to physical health by sedentary behaviour.
The usual image of the couch potato is of somebody overweight – often a guy, though I don’t know why – perhaps with a packet of crisps in one hand and a can of lager in the other (oh, bliss!).
But here’s the really, really bad news if you love your television: the researchers found that these detrimental effects applied not just to the overweight but also to Slim Jims with a healthy body weight.
So slumping in front of the TV when you get home from work is not a good idea no matter who you are – better to put out the bin, wallpaper the bedroom and walk the dog.
The effect may be cumulative. The researchers point out that we don’t really move a lot any more. We sit into our comfortable cars or buses to go to work. We sit and stare at computer screens all day, giving the mouse more exercise than we give ourselves. Perhaps we eat lunch at our desks. Then we sit into our cars or buses for the journey home. Then we sit in front of the TV.
Spending hours in front of the computer, the research suggests, is also detrimental because it’s not the actual television that’s killing you – it’s sitting there for hours in a body that was designed to move about a lot, hunting mammoths and the like.
What does all this mean? Probably that if you want to watch TV you should do so from the safety of an exercise bicycle. That way, you will not have shortened your life by anything more than the time that has elapsed since you started watching.
The research was done by the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia, which analysed the behaviour of almost 9,000 adults. They chose television because watching TV tends to be our most common sedentary behaviour. The results are reported in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association.
Here’s the catch: in our present society there’s not a lot we can do to counteract this, is there? I bet even the researchers spent hours slumped in front of their computer screens as they worked out their results.
I hope they feel it was all worth dying for.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Livingis published by Veritas.