There’s a special category of bad news that deals with being fat. And it is often linked to watching TV. It is ‘the cheeseburger of guilt’ because it combines two of our favourite unhealthy pleasures in one bad package. The simple story is this: Americans watch more TV than anybody else and they are, as well, the fattest people on the planet.
We have all heard the numbers for television watching and it’s always a shocker: the latest report says that American households watch 8 hours a day, almost twice as much as the rest of the world. Many studies have come up with similar results and they’re all bad. More or less at random, I picked a Harvard study of nurses in the US that revealed they watched an average of 35 hours of TV each week. Those of us who don’t watch much of the tube shake our heads and wonder how that is possible! Here’s the math:
Hours in a day: 24
Subtract:
Sleep: 7
Work or school: 9
Commute: 2
Left over hours of free time: 6
Multiply by days in a week: 7
Free time in a week: 42 hours
Estimate time spent watching TV: 35 hours
Percentage of free time spent watching TV: 83%Reaction: YIKES!
It gets worse, of course, because while TV addicts watch, they eat. Again, there are a million studies of obesity and we’ve all seen or heard the numbers; the latest reports are here and here. The result is simple: Americans are by far the fattest people. The various ways to measure fatness are suspect because a person can be plump and be perfect healthy and happy. (And it certainly is a good thing that such people have their own association now.) But, as a rule, if your Body Mass Index is over 30, you are in health trouble and as many as 25% of Americans are in that shape (a cool map from CNN shows the problem getting worse over twenty years). In fact, fat is now so common that many obese people see themselves as ‘fine’.
Would that it were so. Obese people spend a lot more money for health care; they have much higher rates of diabetes; and their lives are shortened by as much as 5 years! They even add a billion extra gallons to gasoline consumption every year – being big ain’t even green!
But does TV watching cause fat? And, for those of us interested in using more technology in teaching, the next question is: Will more internet use also add to obesity? It’s a particularly interesting question given the recent reports that connect being obese to having fat friends; it turns out that your ‘network’ of family and friends establish a norm and you tend to move closer to that norm. So will the web add impetus to that process by connecting you with even more sedentary surfers stuffing themselves?
Time for the researchers to study the situation. But my (biased) guess is that the internet will help more than it will hurt and here’s why.
- It’s not being sedentary that does the real damage; it’s being brainwashed! TV junkies are trained by commercials – and the conditioning begins very early. One diabolical study calculated that, for each hour of TV watched, a 3-year old kid will add 167 extra calories to their daily intake! And there’s a deluge of those sugar-pushing ads aimed at kids: 77% of all food, soft drink and fast food ads are slotted in times when kids are watching TV.
However, ads of this type have not worked online, as yet. Why? Because the web encourages clicking and if an ad gets in the way, you’re gone. The TV remote means you can do the same thing but, if you switch channels, you simply move to another channel showing a similar commercial. If we can keep web advertising under control, there’s a possibility that it won’t grow into the involuntary feeding tube that is TV.
- TV once captured our attention but now that we’ve seen the breadth and depth of interest that can be accessed on the web, it is all too easy to see that TV is by-and-large dull and desperately grabbing for our ‘fake attention’: the speed of editing on TV has significantly increased, the volume has gone up, the ‘zap’ factor is eye and mind boggling, and the content is…well, desperate seems the right word. If all you can give me is another ridiculous ‘reality’ show and the abuse of American Idol, I have two choices: go to the refrigerator and keep myself awake with calories or turn off the TV and get online. (Really keen folks will go for a walk but let’s not get too carried away!)
Of course, there’s nothing magic about the web. There is even more junk online than on TV. It’s just so much easier to avoid it because you can find what you want or you can make what you want. Online there is the possibility of being more genuinely interested in what we’re watching and thinking about than we are with the swill served up by the majority of TV. The web provides a new type of screen activity that does not need to be supported by the refrigerator.