WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Children who eat their meals in front of a television set tend to sit there long after dinner is over, which in turn could cause them to gain dangerous amounts of weight, researchers said on Friday.

Each meal eaten in front of television adds 38 to 73 minutes of time to total TV-watching in a day, US researchers said.

"It's unlikely that it takes children this long to eat meals," Brian Saelens, a psychologist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio who led the study, said in a statement.

"It is more likely that parents in these homes are more permissive and have fewer rules regarding TV watching," he added.

Several studies have shown that the more time children and adults spend in front of a television, the more likely they are to become obese. More than a quarter of the US population is obese, meaning they risk health consequences from their weight such as diabetes and heart disease.

"Recent reports suggest that more than half of households now indicate having the TV on during meals, although this practice appears to be less common among families of higher socioeconomic status, with two parents, and with parents of higher educational attainment," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

"Helping families reduce the frequency with which children eat meals while watching TV may be step toward lowering children's TV time and decreasing childhood obesity," Saelens added.

Saelens and colleagues at the University of California San Diego studied 169 families with children aged 6 to 12.

The older the children were, the more they watched TV. Children were also slightly more likely to watch more television if they had more televisions in the house and if they had videotape recorders.

The more educated the mother was, the less television the children watched.

'DOMINANT MEDIA BEHAVIOR'

The researchers only counted broadcast television, not taped movies or video games played on the television.

"TV remains the dominant media-related behavior among youth, with the average child watching approximately 20 hours of TV weekly," the researchers wrote.

"About 80 percent of 8- to 16-year-old children report watching more than 3 hours of TV daily. TV watching generally increases through early to middle childhood, peaking between the ages of 10 and 14 years."

There are other reasons parents may want to limit the amount of television their children watch.

In March, a team at Columbia University in New York reported that teen-agers who watch more than an hour of television a day are much more likely to become violent.

The link between watching television and behaving violently was clear even after the researchers accounted for other factors such as childhood neglect, low family income or a psychiatric disorder during adolescence.

Reference Source 89

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