Image courtesy of Aaron Escobar

As we human beings have raced through the modern era there seems to be, in every generation, some form of popular entertainment that the previous generation looks down upon as being a symbol of the impending doom of society as a whole.  I say modern era because I have a hard time picturing such a thing happening in ancient times, but I suppose it IS possible (“I worry about the boy, Banafrit.  He spends all day messing around with those damned hieroglyphics!  When I was his age I was dragging stones to Giza.  Uphill!”).  From Rock and Roll to Mini-skirts and everything in-between there has always been some crazy thing “the kids” were in to that was simply an affront to the sensibilities of those who came before them.

The big villain on the block these days is video games, but I grew up in the 80’s during the height of the Saturday Morning Cartoon era.  Back then our parents were convinced that television was going to rot our brains, give us cancer, and turn us into pasty blobs who lived on nothing but junk food.

Turns out that, in some ways, our parents were right.

A study conducted by researchers in the United States and Spain has come to the conclusion that, of all the sedentary activities that kids take part in these days, television was the worst of the bunch.  Worse than video games or computer use, even!

Researchers came to this “stunning” conclusion after tracking the moments of 111 children for a week using an accelerometer.  Unlike a pedometer an accelerometer measures acceleration on a vertical plane instead of distance covered.  The children who were the least active in the study (those who watched 90 to 330 minutes of television every day) actually had higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings than those children who watched 30 minutes of television or less.

The study offered up several reasons for why this could be the case.  The first (and most obvious) of them being that television watching is a truly passive activity, but they also mentioned that it was “easier” to overeat if you snacked while watching television.  They also pointed out that children who watched television before going to bed tended not to sleep as well, which can also cause elevated blood pressure levels.  The biggest contributor to the poor health of the television watching children in the eyes of the study authors, however, was the influence of food commercials on eating habits.  Apparently children who watch a lot of television see a lot of commercials for unhealthy food.

Makes sense to me.  I don’t recall seeing a lot of commercials for Bananas when I was growing up, but I can still sing you the Big Mac song.

As much as we may not want to admit it, those of us from Generation X totally owe our parents an apology for getting on us over how much time we spent in front of the tube.  On the flip side, we shouldn’t feel bad for sounding like our parents when we encourage OUR kids to turn it off and go outside every once in a while….or at least do something that isn’t QUITE so unhealthy….

Like play some video games.