Watching too much TV can be slowly killing you: study

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Watching television for long periods of time has been linked to developing deadly illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, according to a new study.

The recent study published online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that watching TV for longer than three hours a day can increase the risk of developing and dying from eight deadly diseases including Parkinson's disease, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and influenza. They also found that people who watch more than seven hours of TV per day were 47 percent likelier to die from the diseases mentioned above. Even when researchers factored out attributes such as smoking, alcohol intake and how much they eat, the associations were the same.

The study was conducted by the National Cancer Institute and looked at the TV watching habits of more than 200,000 people ages 50 to 71 who did not have underlying chronic diseases at the start of the study period.

"We know that television viewing is the most prevalent leisure-time sedentary behavior and our working hypothesis is that it is an indicator of overall physical inactivity," said Dr. Sarah Keadle, lead author from the National Cancer Institute, via Eureka Alert. "In this context, our results fit within a growing body of research indicating that too much sitting can have many different adverse health effects."

Additionally, 80 percent of US adults watch 3.5 hours of TV per day and it was observed that older adults take up most of the demographic.

"Older adults watch the most TV of any demographic group in the US," Dr. Keadle explained, as reported by Daily Mail. "Given the increasing age of the population, the high prevalence of TV viewing in leisure time, and the broad range of mortality outcomes for which risk appears to be increased, prolonged TV viewing may be a more important target for public health intervention than previously recognised."

The researchers also found that physical activity cannot cancel out the negative effects of excessive television watching.

"Although we found that exercise did not fully eliminate risks associated with prolonged television viewing, certainly for those who want to reduce their sedentary television viewing, exercise should be the first choice to replace that previously inactive time," Dr. Keadle said via Nature World Report.

According to the report by Medical Daily, excessive tv watching can also affect mental health. Those who spend most of their time watching the idiot box have been known to report feeling alone and lonely. As for children, those who spend time indoors with the TV may be bullied growing up.