 The study, headed by Gary Bennett, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health, claimed that television addicts, who in America are watching the box for close to thirty hours a week, are also sixteen per cent less likely to walk the 10,000 steps a day recommended by many government health departments.
The study involved 486 participants who lived in low-income housing in Boston, USA. Each participant wore a pedometer to measure their daily stepcount (the pedometers did not display the count in order to prevent participants deliberately influencing results), and recorded their daily television viewing habits.
The amount of television watched daily appeared to correlate directly with the amount of steps taken, with the highest hours viewed by the least active study participants. Researchers concluded that daily television viewing results in an average reduction in walking of 520 steps.
It must be assumed then that these results also apply to other sedentary activities, like sitting reading a book or newspaper, or maybe knitting (although these activities do at least require varying degrees of hand movement, even if it doesn’t exactly constitute ‘exercise’).
Source: WebMD, 27 July 2006
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