Herr's Snacks

Americans love their televisions - and they show it by listening for more than four hours per day. (1) With digital cable and satellite reception, hundreds of food items directly into the electronic box in your living room or family room. Add TiVo or DVR functionality and you can sit and watch programs on any subject, anytime, anywhere.

Modern Marvel Messenger or Morbid?

Watching television can be, depending on how you use it. On the one hand, television can be educational and entertaining and refreshing. It allows you to travel the world, you expose yourself to delicious ideas and encourage you to learn and try new things.

On the other hand, it can become a liability, the activity that stultifying waste of your productive time and make you a passive spectator, also known as couch potato "common". Prolonged television viewing is strongly associated with higher rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes because of higher energy intake. This is refl ected in the consumption of more calories later in the day - from dinner to bedtime snacks (2).

An early influence

It is evident from more than 4,000 studies on the effect of television viewing on children, the programming starts early in life. A television market is totally directed towards the crowd toddler and branches into shows targeted to each age group thereafter. Bearing in mind that 99% of U.S. households own at least one television - 66% 3 or more - we must think in terms of balance (3).

I know you are well aware of the result of excessive TV viewing on children: lack of physical activity to play out, time not spent in organized sports, music and art, the lack of time for reading and family dinners. But do you know that these same effects can be observed in adult life later?

Scenario Adult

Yes, we may deplore the effect of television and video games on our youth, but recent studies show alarming trends among the elderly as well. The relationship between watching television and general health indicate that greater amounts of TV time definitively correlated with overweight, high cholesterol and hypertension, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome (4 ).

In contrast, a study on women who have watched at least 10 hours of television per week and took a lively 30 minute walk each day showed a 30% reduction in obesity and the incidence of 43% less diabetes. (5) It is also important that these women have limited their exposure to all ads for junk food that air regularly on national television!

The happiness factor

One of the most amazing studies that I read on the television viewing has been done by sociologists at the University of Michigan and was published in December 2008 in the journal Social Indicators Research. It concluded that the unfortunate people watch television much more - at least 20% more - that happy people do. (6.7) Why?

It turns out that people really happy to get more pleasure from pursuit, such as reading and socializing. "TV does not really seem to meet people in the long term how social engagement or reading a newspaper does," says sociologist at the University of Maryland John P. Robinson, coauthor of the Study and a pioneer in studies of schedule. "It is more passive and can guarantee an evacuation - especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggests that the habit of television may offer short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term discomfort. " (8)

Dealing With Hard Times

We are currently facing an economic crisis that has caused widespread unemployment and idle time for many Americans. Vegging in front of the television can be a way to fill the time spent, work. But all this may seem like a natural turn of events, I wanted to share that research with you so that you know that this is probably not the dr.