American Obesity: Caused from Watching Television
Summer Snell, Staff Reporter
otterrealm@csumb.edu
May 9, 2008
There are few inventions that have played a role in the shaping of American Society as television. Before the late 1940s the number of households with at least one television set could be solely measured in the thousands. By the late 1990s, according to Michael Stephens of New York University, 98 percent of homes in the U.S. had one television set and of those, the sets spent more than seven hours a day tuned in. The average American spends two and a half to five hours a day in front of their television. Since the advent of television, activities such as reading, writing and family time have drastically decreased and obesity has become an American epidemic, especially with our youth.
According to the A.C. Nielson Company, 99 percent of households in the U.S. possess at least one television. The number of TV sets in the average U.S. household is 2.24. While 66 percent of U.S. homes have at least three TV sets and the number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home is 6 hours, 47 minutes. 66 percent of Americans watch TV while they are eating dinner, which is said to be one of the reasons behind this country’s obesity problem. This all leads up to the grand number that is 250 billion hours are spent in the U.S. watching TV annually. The monetary value of those hours assuming that the average person makes at least $5 an hour is $1.25 trillion. Just for perspective there are 6 million videos rented in the U.S. on any given day of the week but there are only 3 million items checked out at a public library daily. However, there are some guilty Americans out there, at least 49 percent say they watch too much television, and have done nothing to curb that fact.
It seems more and more apparent that the more industrialized our country has become we have forgotten that the most important years of a child’s life are the first five. This is when the brain is in the most crucial time of development. With that being said the average child spends 1,680 minutes per week watching television, which translates to 26 hours and 40 minutes of television. The average minutes per week that a parent spends meaningful time with their child is 3.5. Day care centers throughout the country use the television as a babysitter. 70 percent of them admit that children watch television when at day care. Only 73 percent of parents limit the amount of television their children watch. When a group of children ages four to six were asked if they would rather spend time with their fathers or watch TV 54 percent of them said they would rather watch TV. American youngsters spend 900 hours per year in school and they spend 1500 hours per year watching television. One should probably wonder what this does to their attention span?
By the time a child in this country reaches the age of 12 they have seen 8,000 murders on TV. At the age of 18 they have seen an average of 200,000 violent acts displayed on TV. 20,000 commercials are seen by an average child and 2 million commercials will be seen by the time those children reach age 65. According to Dr. John Nelson of the American Medical Association, “2,888 out of 3,000 studies show that TV violence is a actor in real-life mayhem, it's a public health problem." Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse as defined in the official psychiatric manual, according to Rutgers University psychologist and TV-Free America board member Robert Kubey.
A National Health and Nutrition Survey found that 4.7 million children between the ages of six and 17 were severely overweight, which has more than doubled since 1960. The children in this survey watched an average of more than 22 hours of TV per week and had a high-calorie diet. A study in the early 90s showed that there were an average of 200 junk-food commercials in a 4 hour period of Saturday morning cartoons. It is plain and simple in the case of obese children inactivity is the culprit and TV plays a party to the inactivity. "The easiest way to reduce inactivity is to turn off the TV set,” according to Dr. William H Deitz, pediatrician and obesity expert at Tufts University in Boston. Who goes on to say “Almost anything uses more energy than watching TV.”
The obesity issue in this country does not just effect children. In a study done by the American Health Journal the results were clear, an adult who watches three hours of TV a day is far more likely to become overweight than an adult who watches less than one hour. The problem is not solely focused on obesity either. 75 percent of American women believe they are too fat. This negative body image stems from the fact that supermodels and models on TV are 23 percent thinner than the average woman and 95 percent thinner than the female population at large. Critics say that obesity is the epidemic, however judging from these statistics it sounds as if TV is the epidemic.
In a world where TV is the center, it might be hard to steer from the box we love so much but for our health and the innocence of our children maybe we should start spending more time with the babies and less time connected to the tube. The statistics clearly shows that Americans watch too much TV and spend little time with their family or engaging in physical activity. America, we might need to re-establish our new favorite past time from watching TV to baseball again, wouldn’t you agree? Our children and families will most likely become more healthy, happy and fit, according to these facts.