Childhood obesity is a major public health problem, and its incidence has increased dramatically over the last decade.  There are so many factors that can cause one’s obesity such as genetics, parenting, food choices, etc.  But what some people don’t know is the influence that television can have on a child’s physical health.

Children increase their risk of becoming obese by 7% for every hour of TV watched on weekends at the age of 5.  In addition, children watching more than 2 hours per day on weekends are more likely to become obese adults.  This is alarming.

Research conducted at Harvard first linked TV watching to obesity more than 25 years ago. Since then, extensive research has confirmed the link between TV viewing and obesity in children and adults, in countries around the world. And there’s good evidence that cutting back on TV time can help with weight control—part of the reason why many organizations recommend that children and teens limit TV/media time to no more than two hours per day.  Researchers have hypothesized that TV watching could promote obesity in several ways: displacing time for physical activity; promoting poor diets; giving more opportunities for unhealthy snacking (during TV viewing); and even by interfering with sleep.

On National Center for Biotechnology Information, the relationship between television viewing and obesity has been examined in a relatively large number of cross-sectional epidemiologic studies but few longitudinal studies.  Several experimental studies of reducing television viewing recently have been completed. Most of these studies have not tested directly the effects of reducing television viewing behaviors alone, but their results support the suggestion that reducing television viewing may help to reduce the risk for obesity or help promote weight loss in obese children. Finally, one school-based, experimental study was designed specifically to test directly the causal relationship between television viewing behaviors and body fatness. The results of this randomized, controlled trial provide evidence that television viewing is a cause of increased body fatness and that reducing television viewing is a promising strategy for preventing childhood obesity.  However, this study could have been a lot more convincing if they included the sample size and other information the reader needs to take into account.

According to the International Journal of Obesity on Google Scholars, obesity prevalence has increased as a function of the number of hours that TV networks devote to target children populations.  TV shows and cartoon programmes addressed to a very young audience are now aired every day on both public/nation-wide and private/commercial channels.  In more recent years, even pay channels exclusively devoted to children have extensively spread all over the world.  Most of times the new way of approaching children with dedicated programmes is sponsored by companies producing toys and/or unhealthy food, including high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat and high-salt products.

In another study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , it found that the more hours spent watching television, the more likely children were to be both fatter and less physically active. 89 children from Scotland between the ages of 2-6 years were recruited for the study, in which total energy expenditure and physical activity were measured, and the parents asked to fill out questionnaires detailing television viewing habits. The researchers found a significant association between the number of hours of television watched per day and body fat mass, with every extra hour/day spent watching television associated with a 2.2 pound increase in body fat.

However, the increased fatness could not explained solely by the differences in physical activity, and the researchers concluded that additional factors, such as changes in eating patterns associated with television viewing, played a part in this as well.  I found this study to be a good indicator of the negative influence that television can have on the body, but I do realize that television is not the only factor that this study’s results can be based off of.  There are definitely many confounding factors in these studies that are not taken into consideration such as quantity of food, quality of food, physical activity, etc, which somewhat weakens these studies.

We have many reasons to limit and reduce children’s television watching time in order to prevent an obesity epidemic.  Of course not all people are obese due to excessive watching of television, but there is significant evidence that shows it leads to an unhealthy lifestyle.  It’s important to not have the television on during meal times and it would also be beneficial to keep the TV’s out of children’s rooms.  So, be careful how much you watch–it could affect your whole future without you even realizing!