Spending hours glued to your television screen during childhood causes an increased risk of obesity and other health problems during later life, according to research to be published in the Lancet medical journal.

Researchers from New Zealand concluded after a decades-long study that high levels of exposure at a young age to television, with its aggressive barrage of advertising for unhealthy food products, was correlated with increased body mass later in life, the article said.

Robert Hancox from the University of Otago and his colleagues studied around 1,000 children born in New Zealand town of Dunedin in 1972-3, who were tested over numerous intervals up until the age of 26.

"A clear association was found between extensive television viewing (more than two hours a day) among children and adolescents and increased BMI (body mass index), raised cholesterol, greater proportion of smoking, and poor cardiovascular fitness at age 26 years," the Lancet said.

The study comes amid increasing concern about the global obesity epidemic, with the UN's World Health Organisation estimating that one billion adults worldwide are overweight, and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, the worst hit country is the United States, where a total of 30.6 percent of the adult population is obese, and the tally is 16.5 percent among the six- to 19-year-old group.

And a British parliamentary report said that Britain had the fastest-growing fat problem in Europe, with cases of obesity growing by almost 400 percent in 25 years and three-quarters of adults either overweight or obese.

In a commentary with the Lancet article, David Ludwig of the Harvard Medical School said that the research of Hancox and his team has strengthened the case for a ban on food advertisements aimed at children.

"In an era when childhood obesity has reached crisis proportions, the commercial food industry has no business telling toddlers to consume fast food, soft drinks, and high-calorie low-quality snacks, all products linked to excessive weight gain

"The multifactorial nature of the problem should not be an excuse for inaction. Measures to limit television viewing in childhood and ban food advertisements aimed at children are warranted, before another generation is programmed to become obese," he wrote.

Hancox said that children's television viewing should be limited to less than one hour a day.

Reference Source 89
July 16, 2004

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