Remember when you were a kid and you would watch cartoons hours upon hours after school and your mom would barge into the living room and yell, “Your watching too much TV, You are going to go blind!” If not, I do. My grandma especially would emphasize the casualties of watching too much TV. Here I am in science 200 and it is time to find out if that is actually the case.

We first need to analyze how much TV do we really watch. According to Nielsen Holdings N.V. ,an American global information and measurement company, the average American watches 34 hours a week give or take a couple hours watching recorded television. These calculates to around 5 hours a day of television which makes sense because I can knock out an easy 3 to 5 hours of House of Cards on Netflix a day if I tried. But we are all guilty of our favorite shows or a Netflix binge watch series. But is it worth it?

Here to help this difficult question is a study published by US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health. It’s a mouthful but according to the study the method they used was, “a life table model that incorporates a previously reported mortality risk associated with TV time. Data were from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study, a national population-based observational survey that started in 1999-2000. The authors modeled impacts of changes in population average TV viewing time on life expectancy at birth.” After reading this I am bit concerned at the study and its certainty. But I didn’t give up yet. I analyzed the results and found this. The amount of TV viewed in Australia in 2008 reduced life expectancy at birth by 1.8 years for men and 1.5 years for women. These aren’t large staggering numbers but it is a loss of years off your life. But in order to see how effective this truly is to the people who watch an average amount of TV we have to look at the people who watched a lot of TV. Those who spend a lifetime average of 6 hours a day watching TV can expect to live 4.8 years less. On average, every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 min. According to the study the uncertainty interval is 95% and I see a little correlation but nothing strong. The theory is backed up with the idea that watching a lot of TV recues physical exercise and social engagement which takes time off your life but there is still a lot of third party variables involved in this.

This being said I sought out a new study to help put together some missing pieces.  After doing so I stumbled across something interesting. We have been looking at physical abnormalities with health and life expectancy but what if TV does more damage to worst; such as your emotional well being. One study published onto science daily. This question is addressed by a new 30-year analysis of US national data of nearly 30,000 adults by John Robinson and Steven Martin from the University of Maryland in the US. Examining the activity patterns of happy and less happy people in the General Social Survey (GSS) between 1975 and 2006. In short the researchers found that the people researched who surveyed to be happier were more socially active, voted more, and read the newspaper. That makes complete sense in my mind. But in order for the study to be relevant they compared these people with avid television watchers. In the same study the categorized unhappy people watched more television. “These conflicting data suggest that TV may provide viewers with short-run pleasure, but at the expense of long-term malaise,” said Professor Robinson. Avid TV Viewers do not have to expend their energy when choosing to watch TV rather then go out, join an organization, or become physically active. You don’t need to plan anything, you can do it by yourself, and you can practically do nothing but press a button.  This becomes an unbeatable combination when combined an enjoyable short run experience. It entirely explains why TV takes up half of American’s free time. Unfortunately this isn’t hard evidence what so ever. It is a correlation but it can defiantly be reverse correlation. People who aren’t active may watch TV more and people ho are active may just not have time to watch as much TV.

Unfortunately we are at a stand still. There are many cofounding variables that still remain. We do see a sense that TV may take some time off your life and it may make you unhappy but these studies shouldn’t change anything except the fact that everything in moderation is good. We may not have found strong evidence but I personally can suggest get out there join a club, go for a walk, and experience real life. That has more benefits than sitting and watching hours of TV. But for now we must wait for more evidence to come out.