TV Watching Linked to Shorter Lifespan

(Television)Watching too much television may shorten your life by years. Australian researchers tracked the medical conditions of 8,800 healthy adults for several years; the more television the participants watched, the more likely they were to have died during the years examined. On average, for every hour per day spent watching TV, a subject was 18 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease, 9 percent more likely to succumb to cancer, and 11 percent more likely to die of any cause. The culprit is the inactivity TV promotes.

“Prolonged watching of television equals a lot of sitting, which invariably means there’s an absence of muscle movement,” study author David Dunstan tells CNN.com. Long, unnatural periods of doing nothing physically, he says, clearly lead to premature death. The antidote is to “just get up and move” he adds.

“The more you move the greater the health benefits are likely to be.