Step Away From the TV: Your Life Depends On It

If you want to extend your life, step away from the TV and exercise, two new health studies suggest.

Image: iStockphoto

Most of us know that watching TV isn’t the healthiest activity on earth, but did you ever think Keeping Up With the Kardashians might send you to an early grave?

A new study examining mortality data finds that for those over the age of 25, every hour of TV viewing results in their lives being shortened by 22 minutes. The team, out of Australia, used TV viewing data from more than 11,000 participants and found that those who watched an average of six hours of TV a day lived 4.8 years less, on average, than those who didn’t watch any television. What’s more, the researchers say, if we all lived in a TV-less utopia, life expectancy would be 1.8 years longer for men and 1.5 years longer for women.

The study, published Tuesday, follows on the heels of a Taiwanese study, also released this week, that concluded people could add three years to their lives with just 15 minutes of daily exercise. The research, published in the Lancet, included medical screenings over a 12-year-period of 400,000 Taiwanese residents and found that those who exercised for an average of 92 minutes per week, or about 15 minutes a day, were about 14 percent less likely to die for any reason over the next eight years, and 10 percent less likely to die from cancer.

Combine the two studies and they raise a lot of real-life questions: What if you watch the Real Housewives while jogging on the treadmill? Is it enough to undo the damage and extend your golden years? What if you watch TV, but it’s mostly a lot of documentaries on PBS? Shouldn’t you be granted a few extra years of life for supporting public television and trying to learn something?

And exercise entrepreneurs: How about a spinoff of 10 Minute Abs that could play up the life expectancy stats: Maybe something like 15 Minutes of Crunches and You’ll Live to Collect Social Security?

Truthfully, the reasons that watching TV shortens your life really don’t have anything to do with the content—and we don’t mean to pick on the Kardashians or Housewives, both of which include some successful, entrepreneurial-minded women on their casts who inspire people to chase their own dreams. It’s the fact that when you’re sitting on the couch, instead of engaging in physical activity, you inevitably end up eating cookies or chips while watching the foibles of your favorite sitcom characters.

The TV study looked at the activity issue. It notes also that people who report low levels of physical activity lose nearly 1.5 years in life expectancy compared with those who exercise a moderate amount, an effect similar to that of watching just over two hours of television a day.

The bottom line: If TV fans find time to get off their bottoms for part of the day, they’ll be around long enough to see what type of reality shows will be airing in 2050.

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