Too Much TV, Screen Time May Mean Earlier Death

Wow. Pretty grim title, eh? If you’re reading this, you probably need to read this:

David Herbin goes to the gym every day after work and exercises like a demon for two hours. Then he comes home, flops on the couch and watches sports until bedtime.

Actually, now that the NFL playoffs are in full swing, he’s glued to the tube even more than usual, often up to four hours per game even when there are multiple games on per day including the weekends. Though his wife Pegine admits his prolific TV viewing sometimes drives her crazy, she can’t argue with the fact that the 57-year-old is still in great shape.

Or can she? A new investigation reported in today’s Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) begs to differ.

According to the study conducted by a group of international researchers, anyone who devotes more than four hours daily on screen-based entertainment such as TV, video games or surfing the web, ups their risk of heart attack and stroke by 113 percent and the risk of death by any cause by nearly 50 percent compared to those who spend less than two hours daily in screen play — and this is regardless of whether or not they also work out.” Get more here: Too Much TV, Screen Time May Mean Earlier Death – ABC News.

Thanks to Endomondo, I’ve logged 200 workout sessions since I rebooted my exercise routine in March. Now, I’m learning that’s not enough. Sitting at the computer is literally killing me. So, I’m making some changes to get myself off my dead a$$ and break up the sitting routine…

So, I’m going to try a little experiment. I set up a tall table in the corner of my office and put my least used the computer there. I’m configuring it as an e-mail station and plan to only do e-mail in a standing position. Besides getting me up off my seat I anticipate this should make me more productive as well. With this change, I don’t plan on doing e-mail is my main workstation except occasionally sending files or other such things. This way, when I’m doing website development or social media ‘mechanicing’ I’ll be focused on that; every once in a while when I need to take a break, I’ll stop by the email station…

I’ll keep you posted on the results!