From The Daily Mail:
Every hour spent watching TV, DVDs and videos as an adult reduces life expectancy by almost 22 minutes, a study suggests. And viewing TV for an average of six hours a day can cut short your life by five years.
The research claims that a sedentary lifestyle is as bad for health as smoking and obesity, because of the dangers posed by inactivity and the greater opportunities it offers for unhealthy eating...
Yadda, yadda, blah, blah. The write up in The Metro says that an hour's TV shortens your life by 22 minutes, and smoking one cigarette shortens your life by 11 minutes. Is this cumulative or consecutive? If you smoke two while watching an hour's TV, do you shorten your life by 44 minutes?
But that's not the point: look who did this 'research':
The researchers, from the University of Queensland, used information from the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study, together with population and death rate data...
The UK bansturbulary must be wriggling with envy at what you can get away with Down Under.
The Mirror Men
1 hour ago
8 comments:
I like the first (earliest) comment under the article.
"Actually, watching most TV programmes could make you mentally ill."
And we never hear the darker side of all this longer life blather. I live a healthy enough life, but I don't want to live too long.
I've seen how that that ends up and I definitely don't want to spend my declining years sitting in my own urine thanks very much.
Maybe I should take up smoking.
God this sort of stuff annoys me. The way it is reported suggests that sitting on a sofa causes obesity and ill-health. There appears to be no understanding or no wish to understand cause and effect. I despair at the general levels of statistical and scientific illiteracy in society.
I humbly submit that an hours tv shortens your life by 1 hour, just like an hour spent doing anything.
Damn. Just come from the gym, where I did 40 mins on the treadmill whilst watching the TV. Do you things the telly watching has cancelled out the good done from the running?
Actually I think this could be bad journalism.
I got the impression that the original report said if you watch more than 6 hours a day do nothing it shortens your life. Not all TV shortens your life.
(6 hours a day is a lot, I wish I had that much free time).
What about an hour spent reading? Why is it always TV which is used as an example? Surely it isn't because the middle-class progressive wankers who conduct these propaganda shitfests have a sneering disdain for 95% of the population?
Personally, I welcome articles like this. It undermines still further people's trust in faux-science.
Rob, indeed, or what about an hour spent attending church, or sitting down for a family meal, at the opera, meditating or doing other such righteous things?
By rights, every book ought to have a warning label on the front cover telling the buyer how many minutes of his life he will lose if he reads it (over and above the time spent reading it).
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