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News, Advice, and Tips for Parenting Teenagers

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Monday, February 01, 2010

Too Much TV Linked to Heart Attacks, Premature Death

Keeping your child's television time down to two hours or less a day will decrease their risk of dying prematurely, according to a new study of the lifestyle habits of 8,800 Australians.

People in this study who watched TV for four or more hours a day were 46 percent more likely to die prematurely and 80 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those who limited TV to two or less hours a day.
Participants in the study were an average age of 50 years old at the beginning of the study in 1999 and 2000.
Six years later, 284 of them had died, including 87 from cardiovascular causes and 125 from cancer.
The researchers did not find a correlation between watching TV and getting cancer. However, the risk of death from any cause increased by 11 percent for each hour a day of reported TV watching, and death from cardiovascular disease increased by 18 percent.

Dr. David Dunstan, lead author, explained that it's not about getting vigorous exercise versus TV watching.

"It's the incidental moving around, walking around, standing up and utilizing muscles that [doesn't happen] when we're plunked on a couch in front of a television," Dr. Dunstan said.

This study appeared in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association.

Labels: health, heart attack, television, tv

posted by ByParents-forParents at 4:41 AM

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