TV: Bad for your health?

It seems like every month we hear that TV is bad for your health. But the real picture isn't so clear.

A study by Robert Hancox and colleagues was published earlier this month in the esteemed British academic journal, The Lancet. No public internet link, sorry.

What strikes my about the sexy titled article, "Association between child and adolescent television viewing and adult health: a longitudinal birth cohort study," brings little new insight as to the health costs of watching TV. Simply put, obesity--which is their main proxy for health--is not a flawless health measuring instrument. In other words, there are many potential reasons for obesity. The greatest predictor is genetic.

But what is clear is this: If you consume more calories than you use, you get fat.

So what did Hancox's study show? In a large sample of participants whom they tracked since adolescence into adulthood, they found that those who watched more TV were, on average, fat. They also looked at whether they smoked, high blood pressure, and other factors.

We know that smoking and high-blood pressure are associated. We know that obesity and high blood pressure are associated. But do we know if TV watching is associated with high blood pressure, obesity, and smoking? That's the key question.

The problem of Hancox's study, and others like it, is that it suffers from inappropriate conclusions: simplifying complex social and scientific phenomena to a flawed result.

If long-term TV watching is bad for your health, why then are so many TV watchers actually healthy?

What if one watched 4 hours of TV a day, and 2 of those hours were on a treadmill or an elliptical machine? You can see where I am going with this argument without discussing the weaknesses of the study in academic verbiage.

I suggest like most things, moderation is best when it comes to television viewing. And Hancox's study making it to the top-ranked journal, The Lancet, just goes to show that politics plays in research, too.