Children who watch TV are at higher risk of overweight, raised cholesterol.

2004 AUG 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Children who watch more than 2 hours of television a night are at a higher risk of becoming smokers or being overweight, unfit, or suffering from high cholesterol as adults, according to a new study.

Watching TV in childhood and adolescence has long been linked to adverse health indicators, including obesity, poor fitness and raised cholesterol levels, but the study published in The Lancet was the first to track a group from birth to adulthood.

David Ludwig, MD, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston, and Steven Gortmaker, a senior lecturer on sociology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the data "indicate that television viewing in childhood has serious long-term consequences" and "strengthen the case for a ban on food advertisements aimed at children."

Researchers from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit assessed some 1,000 individuals born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972-73, at regular intervals until the age of 26. They investigated the associations between earlier TV viewing and body-mass index, or BMI, cardio-respiratory fitness, serum cholesterol, smoking status and blood pressure.

They found that even an average weeknight viewing of 1-2 hours in children between the ages of 5 and 15 was associated with higher body-mass indices, lower cardio-respiratory fitness, increased smoking and raised serum cholesterol.

"These associations persisted after adjustment for potential confounding factors such as childhood socio-economic status, body-mass index at age 5 years, parental body-mass index, parental smoking and physical activity at age 15 years," they reported.

"In 26-year-olds, 17% of overweight, 15% of raised serum cholesterol, 17% of smoking and 15% of poor fitness can be attributed to watching television for more than 2 hours a day during childhood and adolescence."