If You Watch TV You Will Die

First, an announcement (and then an explanation for the title of today's post). Now that I'm not watching television I'm getting a lot of reading done, so for the next ten weeks Thursdays' posts will cover my top ten favorite novels of all time, counting down from 10 to 1. Time for a little contest - whoever can guess the most books on my top ten list will win a copy of Think No Evil, a book I helped write about forgiveness and the Amish school house shooting. I know, I know, random. How do you have any idea what my favorite books are? Well, you could try listing your top ten and see if we have similar taste. Guesses need to be in before book #10 gets posted on Thursday morning.

Okay, so now on to why you are going to die if you watch tv. I know that we're all going to die anyway so I just as well could have written "shop at Abercrombie and you will die" or "Eat Healthy and you will die" or "read Shawn Smucker's blog and you will die (of boredom)". But check out some of these interesting findings from a recent article on CNN Health (thanks to Bryan Allain of BryanAllain.com for forwarding me this article - check out his blog - he's much more entertaining than I am - just don't start reading his blog instead of mine - okay, on to the article):

Too Much TV May Mean Earlier Death (I'm guessing they'll only report this online and not on their television network)

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/11/television.tv.death/index.html

1) The more time you spend watching TV, the greater your risk of dying at an earlier age -- especially from heart disease, researchers found.

2) The study followed 8,800 adults with no history of heart disease for more than six years. Compared to those who watched less than two hours of TV per day, people who watched four hours or more were 80 percent more likely to die from heart disease and 46 percent more likely to die from any cause. All told, 284 people died during the study.

***Hold on a second . . . 284 people died during the study?!?! Did they die from heart disease or from "any cause"? Did the "any cause" include researches sneaking up on the 4-hour-or-more tv watchers and clubbing them on the head in order to pad their numbers?

3) Each additional hour spent in front of the TV increased the risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent and the overall risk of death by 11 percent, according to the study, which was published Monday on the Web site of Circulation, an American Heart Association journal. (The study will appear in the Jan. 26 print edition.)

***This gives a whole new significance to the decision about whether or not to watch one NFL playoff game or two (by the way BA, your comments about John Gruden have been duly noted and we will throw down about that at a later date)

4) Television isn't lethal in and of itself; the real problem appears to be that sitting is the "default position" for TV viewing . . . "Prolonged watching of television equals a lot of sitting, which invariably means there's an absence of muscle movement," Dunstan says. If your muscles stay inactive for too long, it can disrupt your metabolism, he explains.

***"Television isn't lethal in and of itself" . . . who wrote that line? Did anyone actually think that one potential result of picking up the remote and pressing power was instant death???

5) The amount of television a person watches is a good index of the overall time they spend sitting, Dunstan says. But there's also some evidence that watching TV may be unhealthier than other sedentary activities, says Peter Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., an exercise scientist at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

"Reading or doing homework doesn't seem to be associated with risk factors as much as television viewing," says Katzmarzyk, who was not involved in the study but has studied the health effects of sitting time.

Thank you CNN for taking up my cause.

So, the next time you pick up that remote, think twice. There might be a television-hating researcher waiting to sneak up behind you and club you on the head, just so that they can list your death under "any cause".

Don't forget: ten favorite novels. Take a guess. Tune in tomorrow for book #10 on my all time favorites list and the winner of the contest (Maile, you are not allowed to guess).