When it comes to watching television, maybe vigorous exercise isn’t quite enough to ward off the dangers associated with a largely sedentary lifestyle.  Based on an October phone survey of 10,000 Americans of various weights, an expected pattern emerged: people who engaged in lots of physical activity weighed less than those who didn’t.  But when the researches factored in the amount of time spent watching television and movies, a far different pattern emerged:

No matter how much TV they watched, if they didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t exercise, they had high BMIs (body mass index?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùa measure of obesity).  But even among people who exercised more than an hour a day, those watching more than an hour of TV per day had significantly higher BMIs than those who did not.  In fact, for respondents who watched more than an hour of TV, whether or not they exercised no longer predicted BMI.

Does this mean that watching TV and movies makes you overweight, regardless of how much exercise you get?  Not necessarily?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthis is just a correlation, not a controlled experiment. It could be that some other factor is responsible.  It might be that people with higher BMIs just like TV more.  Or that they are eating and drinking more while they watch TV, compared to other activities.

This is not to say, though, that there’s not a possible upside to plopping down around the flatscreen to watch The Soup.  Another recent study of a thousand villages in Tamil Nadu, India, reveals that after a TV’s introduction into a village, “the standing of women improved dramatically.  Villagers were more likely to say it was wrong for a husband to beat his wife, and women had greater autonomy and lower rates of pregnancy.”

(via Seed)

Good thing TV is a dying medium.  But what about Video Gamers?  If you plant your ass on the couch and play Madden for hours does that equate a high BMI?