TV, Physical Activity and Cardiovascular Risk

Posted on May 15, 2008
Filed Under Heart Disease |

Childhood obesity is a growing problem in our societies. Over 150 million children worldwide are overweight and between 30 and 45 million are obese.

Being overweight during childhood is a matter of concern because it is one of the known metabolic risk factors that increase the likelihood of developing diabetes, heart problems or stroke in adulthood. Other metabolic risk factors are the accumulation of fat in the abdomen, disorders of blood fat, high blood pressure and problems in dealing sugar and insulin in the blood.

In summary
According to this study, watch television (and playing with the computer or console) and physical activity should be treated as separate targets in programs designed to reverse the epidemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome in children.

Until very recently, obesity and these other metabolic risk factors only seen in adults, but are now increasingly common in children. Environmental changes and behavior probably contributed to the increase in the metabolic syndrome in children. As a group, and today, children tend to be less physically active and eat more often larger portions of food more energy. Watching television in childhood (and the use and abuse of other media such as video games and computers) has also been associated with increased obesity and poorer health in adulthood.

One popular theory says that watching television could affect obesity and other metabolic risk factors to displace and replace the physical activity. Instead of playing in the street when leaving the school, the theory suggests that children feel watching television. However, we do not have much scientific evidence to support this idea and healthcare professionals need to know if watching television and physical activity are related and how they affect metabolic risk factors to improve the health of children.

In this study, watching television and physical activity are independently associated with metabolic risk in children. European youth heart study; researchers examined the association between watching TV, physical activity and metabolic risk factors in European children.

Involving nearly 2,000 children from two age groups (9 and 10 years and 15 and 16 years). The researchers measured height, weight and BMI of these children; they felt their body fat by measuring skinfold thickness, measured their blood pressure and examined their levels of glucose, insulin and different fats in your blood. The children completed a computerized questionnaire on time spent watching television and how often they watched television while eating. His blood pressure was measured with a device called the accelerometer that each child took over 4 days.

The results showed that watching television was associated with slightly as metabolic risk group, ie the average of multiple individual metabolic risk factors. This association was due to the association between watching television and obesity, ie, children who watched more television tended to be fatter children. However, watching television was not associated with physical activity. The more active children were not necessarily those who were less television. More importantly, physical activity was related to all individual risk factors except obesity and risk factors together. These associations were independent of obesity.

These results suggest that watching television will not harm the health of displaced children in physical activity, as is popularly believed. The finding that the association between watching television and clustered metabolic risk factors is mediated by obesity suggests that direct actions on behaviors such as eating while watching television the child might be a good step towards improving children’s health.

They conclude that these results suggest strongly that promoting physical activity is beneficial in relation to metabolic risk factors but not in relation to obesity in children. Watching television and physical activity should be treated as separate targets in programs designed to reverse the epidemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome in children.

Children already know: more physical activity, television in moderation and, above all, does not gain excess weight!

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