Does watching TV shorten your life span ?

"Study suggests the sedentary behavior that is the hallmark of TV watching is linked to shorter lives : watching 6 hours or more of TV per day could shorten the average life expectancy by nearly 5 years, a study suggests. Researchers say it's the first study to look at the loss of life associated with this sedentary activity.

J. Lennert Veerman, researcher at the University of Queensland, Australia, says : "TV viewing time may have adverse health consequences that rival those of lack of physical activity, obesity and smoking. Every single hour of TV viewed may shorten life by as much as 22 minutes".

Previous studies have already linked sedentary behavior with a higher risk of death, especially from heart attack or stroke. Watching TV is known to account for a large amount of sedentary activity. But researchers say until now its impact on life expectancy has not been measured independently.

In the study, researchers used a combination of survey data starting in 1999-2000 until 2008 and death figures for Australia to calculate life expectancies associated with TV watching. The people in the survey answered questions about how much time they had spent in the previous week watching TV or videos.

Based on the results, researchers estimated that Australian adults aged 25 and older watched 9.8 billion hours of TV. 1 hour of television watched after age 25 was associated with a 22-minute reduction in average life expectancy.

Researchers say their calculations show that an adult who spends an average of 6 hours/day watching TV can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than someone who does not watch TV."

Source.

You want to watch The Wire ? Do it, but when you're done, you will have lost 22 hours of your life (you'll have seen 60 hours of awesome TV though... worth it). Or maybe you want to watch all 9 seasons of Seinfeld ? If you do, it will cost you a day of your life.

You can't stop thinking about watching all 8 days of 24 (192 episodes = 137 hours) ? Don't hesitate for a second, but if you don't have a heart attack while watching the show, you'll still have your lifespan reduced of 50 hours. Or perhaps you feel like watching all 120 episodes of Lost ? Hell, you can call the reaper and tell him you're rescheduling, you want your front-row seat 31 hours earlier !

Where's the limit ? Does it work for looking at a computer screen too? For all we know, you might have lost 2 minutes of your life by reading this post (well, you definitely lost time reading this, but according to this study you may have lost even more than you think !).

Bottom line, if you're watching TV with someone, you say you go out 30 minutes for a smoke and that person says it's bad your health, now you can reply : "sitting here, you're killing yourself as much as me" [studies have shown smoking a cigarette reduces your lifespan of ± 11 minutes). That'll set the mood.

And never forget that you can get hit by a bus at any time if you go for a walk in order to expand your life span instead of watching TV.