By Barbara Berkeley
My daughter and her friends have been posting excited messages on Facebook for weeks. “Lost”, ABC’s blockbuster mystery-on-an-island, is back for its final season! This is an occasion for special t-shirts, viewing parties and intense discussion. For fans of faux-terror, “24” is also back. “American Idol” has returned fueling speculation about its life without Paula and about who will replace Simon. Television takes up time. A lot of time. The SuperBowl is coming up. There’s a war going on for late night supremacy. And if you live in Cleveland, as I do, there are weekly hours of obligate viewing as LeBron, Shaq, and the Cavaliers continue their domination of the NBA.
Believe it or not, I am actually able to remember a time when television DID NOT EXIST! My father had a friend who owned a local furniture and appliance store and as a result was able to get one of the first TVs on the block. Most of the time there was a test pattern on the screen when you turned it on. Later, there was Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Ding Dong School. Not much else. As time passed, the broadcast schedule grew and television watching became a family activity. This seemed to culminate in my preteen years when the whole family gathered to watch shows like Man from Uncle, The Defenders and Dr. Kildare. But television was still not primary in our lives. School activities, playing out in the street in front of our house and congregating on the stoop took up a lot more time and were a lot more fun.
When I first moved to Cleveland over 20 years ago, I remember being invited on a house tour that included some of the fanciest homes in the neighborhood. I remember being shocked by one house in particular which had TVs in just about every room and not a single book. Now, my own house has multiple TVs in many of the rooms and that includes one of those big flat screen babies…the better to watch every detail of every Cavs game.
So the question is: is all this TV good for us? In January, a study from Australia announced some sobering findings. Researchers studied 8,800 adults for a median time of 6½ years while looking at things like exercise, smoking, weight and television viewing time. Amazingly, each daily hour of television was associated with an 18% increase in death from heart disease and an 11% increase in death from all causes. This translated to a whopping difference between those who watched less than two hours of TV per day and those who watched over four. In fact, the big time viewers were 80% more likely to die of heart disease and 46% more likely to die of anything than those who showed viewing restraint! (By the way, a person’s weight was not a factor in this study.) The study authors postulated that this significant risk came from sitting still for prolonged periods. That interpretation is certainly possible, but is it necessarily true?
When we read the results of studies as reported in the news, it’s tempting to accept them at face value. But it is important to understand that epidemiologic studies like this one can prove association only…not causation. In other words, we can see that TV viewing and shortened life exist together, but not that one caused the other. Nevertheless, we must be intrigued by the relationship. It would have been interesting to look at those people who watched TV while on a treadmill or at those who frequently jumped around while watching (like certain basketball fans!). This might shed some light on whether it’s the sedentary behavior that causes the problem or something inherently unhealthy about living life vicariously through little images on a screen. Do Ph.D. candidates who spend hours in the library live shorter lives? Are some sedentary activities – say, writing poetry or meditating for extended periods – more conducive to health than others? We simply don’t know.
In the meantime, I doubt that this study will stop anyone from turning on the tube. For those of us of a certain age, though, its results remind us poignantly that there once was a world where playing on the street and sitting on the stoop seemed far preferable to parking yourself in front of an electronic gadget.
