Little ways back I read this article demonizing TV for creating unhealthy kids and ran into some serious causality issues. Perhaps because I plan on letting my kid watch TV I’m predisposed to come to its defense, but there’s just some sketchy conclusion-jumping going on here.
The upshot of the article is that according to a recent study, while all sedentary behavior is bad for you, TV-watching is the worst. It results in higher blood pressure than, say, sitting in front of a computer all day. So the study’s authors reach the conclusion that, “TV-viewing really is the worst of all possible sedentary activities.”
But when pressed for an explanation as to why TV watching would be worse, the first theory put forth is…
“…children may be compounding their sloth by eating junk food. ‘A full bag of chips or a plate of hot dogs can disappear a lot more quickly while watching TV than they might at any other occasion,’ says Ludwig. And the types of foods that children are likely to be eating in front of the tube, like salty snacks, can push up blood pressure readings.”
So, really, sitting and staring into space can raise your blood pressure if you do it while eating Cheetos. So isn’t the lead here that eating unhealthy foods makes you unhealthy? By the same token, would you get the same results if those kids were eating broccoli while watching TV?
Now, you could argue that the reality is most people eat junk food while watching TV, which may be true, but that isn’t the same thing as saying TV is making them eat crappy food. That would require another study.
That having been said, the study author points out that watching lots of commercials for unhealthy food can influence eating habits, which probably wouldn’t be hard to prove, assuming it hasn’t been proven already. But that’s not the same thing as a blanket injunction against television itself. First off, TiVo now means you can skip all those commercials and secondly, if the kid is sitting there watching PBS, they’re not getting pitched Cap’n Crunch every fifteen minutes.
Of course, the reality is that they’re not watching PBS, but that’s still not the same thing as an empirical TV = high blood pressure equation.
Another point has to do with watching TV too close to bedtime resulting in worse sleep patterns because of overstimulation, but that’s an issue of when kids watch TV, not whether or not kids watch TV.
I’m probably taking the argument to an unnecessary extreme because I’m generally wary of “blame technology” arguments that trace outcomes to a device rather than a behavior. Take the Internet, for example. Many people blame the Internet for ruining civility, causing people to be more insular and close-minded about the information they acquire, and being a boon for confirmation bias. In reality, all of those behaviors were there to begin with, the Internet simply revealed how badly people wanted to indulge in them.
I support the theory that just because people tend to use a technology a certain way, they don’t have to. More to the point, it is not inherent to most technologies to be used in a certain way. For example, the Internet allows for people to broaden their scope of information retrieval more than they have ever been able to. Just because they choose to do the opposite is not the fault of the Internet.
TV doesn’t necessarily provide the same opportunity to be healthy as the Internet provides to be well-informed, but it certainly doesn’t require the eating of fast food (and, not for nothing, could just as effectively promote healthy eating as unhealthy). As a diabetic who loves TV, I tend not to eat junk food while I watch (and have to try to exercise when I’m not). When I was diagnosed, my doc didn’t say, “Well, you’ll have to cut out TV, cos’ it raises your blood pressure.” Instead, he said, “Stop drinking Coke.” (Actually, I figured that one out before he said it.)
Point is there is a very big difference between using a technology to enable unhealthy behavior and the technology itself being unhealthy behavior. So the headline: “Watching TV: Even Worse for Kids Than You Think” is more than a little misleading.
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