You may be at a higher risk of coronary heart disease if you are a couch potato who spends a great amount of time watching television every day. According to a new study, decreasing the amount of time people spend watching television to less than an hour per day could avoid nearly 11% of cases of coronary heart disease.
‘Reducing time spent watching TV should be recognised as a key behavioural target for prevention of coronary heart disease, irrespective of genetic susceptibility and traditional risk markers,’ Dr Youngwon Kim, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and one of the study’s authors, told The Guardian.
Kim and his team didn’t say what was creating the association, but he did say that previous research had revealed an association between excess television viewing time and increased glucose and cholesterol levels in the body. He added, ’Unfavourable levels of these cardiometabolic risk markers may then lead to increased risk of developing coronary heart disease.’
The researchers used data from the UK Biobank, which included 373,026 British people aged 40 to 69. When they were recruited for the biobank, none of the individuals had coronary heart disease. The researchers looked at the national death registry and hospital admission records and found that 9,185 people in the study had coronary heart disease.
According to the study, the more television one watches, the greater the chance of developing coronary heart disease. After taking into account each participant’s overall risk of coronary heart disease as well as various other factors such as age, sex, smoking habits, diet, body mass index and physical activity, the researchers reached this conclusion.
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