From The Metro:
People who spend more than four hours a day in front of their PCs are as likely to suffer from heart problems as those who watch lots of TV. That is the conclusion of a study, which also found that those who spend all day glued to their screens doubled their risk of heart failure.
We're all doomed I tell you, doomed.
Tuesday 11 January 2011
Health Scare Story Du Jour
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6 comments:
It's ironic that the more of these sorts of articles I read, the more I feel I would welcome heart failure.
"those who spend all day glued to their screens doubled their risk of heart failure."
And glue poisoning.
Another pointless study: who pays for these things? Spending hours in a sitting position is as likely to give you heart problems as spending hours in a sitting position. Well duh!
OP, these articles are intended to increase people's stress levels and thus cause what they predict.
R, LOL.
B, and these blighters probably spent ages 'glued to the screen' cooking up the statistics to prove it. The idea that watching TV shortens your life span is complete nonsense, or else we wouldn't be living longer than we did fifty years ago when hardly anybody had a telly (and if they did, wouldn't have spent hours watching it).
The Telegraph reports on the same research that "the scientists called for recreational guidelines to be issued because a majority of working age adults spend long periods being inactive while commuting or being slouched over a desk or computer".
Not so much a "nudge" more an order from Control Central.
BTW the Abstract of the paper notes that "recreational sitting, as reflected by television/screen viewing time, is related to raised mortality and CVD risk . . ." Does this mean correlation rather than causation? Not being a regular reader of medical research papers I don't know. However, I suspect that were causality more certain the conclusion would state it so rather than leave this in the air as it were. Meanwhile I think we can safely ignore this scare for no other reason than that the population sample was selected from notoriously unhealthy Scots whose CVD record is appalling at the best of times.
It is also (at best) a correlation not a cause. The sort of people who spend their lives watching TV or in front a PC are perhaps more likely to take less exercise. But it's the lack of exercise that's the problem; the TV and the PC are not the cause. Sadly the confusion between correlations and causes is all too common.
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