Too much TV adds to children’s waistlines: study

It’s common sense that being planted in front of the TV for hours on end isn’t good for kids, but new research tracks exactly how unhealthy it is.

A study by researchers at the Universite de Montreal and the St-Justine Mother and Child University Hospital suggests years in front of the tube gradually increase a child’s waistline, affecting their athletic ability — or lack of it — later on.

For example, the study indicated that a 4 1/2 year-old child will gain just under a half-millimetre for every extra weekly hour of TV they watch on top of what they watched when they were 2 1/2.

While that may not seem like much, the numbers add up. The data suggests a child who watches 18 hours of TV per week at the age of 4 1/2 will have an extra 7.6 millimetres of waist by the age of 10.

As well, each weekly hour of TV at 29 months of age translated into a decrease of about a third of a centimetre in the distance a child could jump.

“I was surprised that the effects were so measurable,” said Dr. Caroline Fitzpatrick, one of the study’s authors.

“We have children in our sample that are watching 15 hours of television a week, 20 hours of television a week and when you multiply that by a third of a centimetre or a quarter of a centimetre, you start seeing these quite noticeable differences in terms of their waist size and noticeable differ- ences in terms of their decreased performance on the tests of muscular fitness.”

Fitzpatrick said it’s the first time research has measured waist size in relation to how much TV people watch and defined a quantifiable effect on their waistline several years later.

She says it’s also the first time there has been an examination of the effects of television viewing on athletic performance in later childhood.

Researchers began following a group of children in 1998 when they were five months old and they are still being tracked, she said. The 1,314 children were drawn from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development database.

“We’re not just showing that children are watching more television (and) they’re less active, we’re showing that there’s some kind of physical price associated with television viewing,” Fitzpatrick said, noting at increased waist size can contribute to heart problems and other health issues later in life.

A lack of physical prowess and muscular fitness could also contribute to a child being less interested in sports because they’re not as adept as other, more fit, children.

“Children’s perceived competence, how well they’re performing in sports at a young age, I think is an important way to keep them involved in sports and keep them interested in sports,” Fitzpatrick said.

It can also affect how the child relates to others.

“A lot of what children do is physically based,” she said. “Any game that children play in the schoolyard, playing tag, being able to sprint and run faster, these are all related to muscular fitness.”

She pointed out that muscular fitness carries into adulthood and usually means such things as fewer back pains and injuries.

Fitzpatrick said the Internet and video games weren’t as popular when her study was started but an excess of time in front of any screens by children isn’t ideal for their development.

Research into the effects of different sedentary behaviours such as watching TV is an emerging field, said Dr. Mark Tremblay, director of healthy active living and obesity research at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute in Ottawa.

“The evidence is accumulating that the worst of the whole batch is TV viewing in terms of its relationships to health outcomes,” he said in a telephone interview. He said research he has participated in indicates there are “no redeeming features” to TV viewing.

“Because sedentary behaviour is so incredibly prevalent in our population, the impact on the health of the population is unmatched,” said Tremblay, who hadn’t yet seen Fitzpatrick’s study.

He expected more studies to surface as researchers expand their view beyond the effects of exercise and look more closely at how it interacts with sedentary behaviour.