Study Reveals TV Ups Calorie Intake

The latest diets call on the health conscious to cut out meat, carbohydrates, and sweets from their diet, but a new study suggests that for children, cutting down on television just might prevent packing on those extra pounds.

The report, co-authored by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and published this month, revealed that increasing television-viewing results in increasing caloric intake in children.

While the link between viewing television and obesity has been well documented in the past, studies have often hypothesized that weight gain from television-viewing comes from being sedentary and from the tendency for viewers to snack while they watch television. This new study, authored by Harvard Senior Research Scientist Jean L. Wiecha, found that the increase in caloric intake occurs independently of those factors.

“It’s not just while you’re watching television, it’s that when you’re driving around and see something that you saw on TV, maybe you’re more likely to go get it,” Wiecha said. “This is the first time that we have evidence that television drives up calorie intake, independent of exercise.”

To test the correlation between calories and couch potatoes, the Harvard researchers—including Wiecha, Professor of the Practice of Health Sociology Steven L. Gortmaker, Associate Professor of Nutrition and Society Karen E. Peterson, Research Fellow Juhee Kim, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics David S. Ludwig—conducted an observational study with over 500 children in four Boston communities. The researchers measured dietary intake, weight, physical activity, and television-viewing time before and at the end of the study.

Among the subjects, whose average age was 11.7 years, each hour increase in television-viewing resulted in an additional 167 kilocalorie intake. According to the study, television advertisements compose about 75 percent of food services’ advertising expenditures. Wiecha used television-viewing time as a proxy for exposure to advertising, assuming that more television-viewing leads to more exposure to food advertisements.

“Kids eat what they watch, they eat what they see on television, and when they do that they run the risk of really ratcheting up their caloric intake,” Wiecha said. “This work really supports the idea that it’s important for parents to limit television-viewing.”