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The TV diet

In Brief

The TV Diet

Cutting hours watched reduces weight gained

Most people can stave off weight gain by simply spending less time watching television.

A recent study reports that overweight adults who cut television time in half were more active, burning more calories as a result.

Even mellow activities including reading, writing and talking on the phone used more energy than TV watching.

“Really, almost any activity burns more calories than watching television, aside from sleep,” says Jennifer Otten, PhD, postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and lead author of the study, which she conducted while earning her doctorate at the University of Vermont.

The study, published in the Dec. 14, 2009, Archives of Internal Medicine, determined how reduced television watching affected calories eaten, energy used, body weight, time spent sleeping and the balance between calorie ingestion and activity in obese and overweight adults.

On average, American adults watch five hours of television a day, the third most time-consuming activity in our lives — after sleep and work. And the more time adults spend in front of the television, the more likely they are to suffer from obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, says Otten.

The study followed 36 adults, weighing in above the healthy range, who watched an average of five hours of television daily. After three observation weeks, half of the participants were limited to 50 percent less television for three additional weeks, using monitors that controlled their screen time. For the last week of each three-week period, participants wore activity-monitoring armbands, kept sleep logs and answered phone surveys about their diet.

The group instructed to halve their television did not change their calorie intake but burned 120 more calories a day on average, creating a trend of negative energy balance. “The energy burned is equivalent to walking more than a mile,” says Otten. “We don’t know if these short-term changes will translate, but the results may be similar in a longer term study and could prevent weight gain.”

The study was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Hatch Funds Act and the National Institutes of Health.

— Jennifer Welsh

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