Television is bad for kids .... apparently

I heard something on the news last weekend which I wanted to write about, but was away from my computer, and thus it isn’t done before now.

A Danish media (www.dr.dk) reported on the 2007-11-04 from a study done in the USA that children/young people had higher risk of increased blood pressure if they spend 2 hours a day watching television.

Now, we’ve heard of the dangers of television for many years, so that aspect in itself was not really enough to make me focus on it.

However the caveat was not actually the television watching itself, but - now this is fun – the fact that the children were sitting still when they did so. (if I could roll my eyes in text, I would)

Now, I don’t know about everybody else, but …. *hmmmm* that sounds odd.

If it is because the kids were sitting still for 2 hours a day, does it actually have anything at all to do with television?
Because from that wording of the conclusion, it would seem to me that they might as well could have said that 2 hours of reading a book a day increases the risk of high blood pressure. Or sitting outside on a hill enjoying the view for 2 hours a day increases the risk. If you jumped up and done once every hour, would you half that risk, even though you watched TV?
But of course, it would be bad if the media went out and said that reading a book for 2 hours were bad for your health. Imagine the outcries from librarians.

Being a person who enjoys comptuergames, we often in that setting hear the usual suspects being blamed for all trouble in the world – oh, he watched violent movies, or he played violent computer games, so of course he got run over by that car by the drunken driver.

However, I do not understand how television was suddenly implicated into that conclusion, when it was the action of sitting still which was okay.

Unfortunately there wasn’t a link to the study itself, simply a vague reference to Swedish Television, and I did not really feel up to doing the detective work to find it, but either a) the study is populistic and rather useless, or b) the media simply conveys things uncritical and flawed or c) all of the above.


My money is currently on c.