{"id":541,"date":"2016-01-24T10:00:32","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T08:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/?p=541"},"modified":"2020-09-27T17:28:53","modified_gmt":"2020-09-27T14:28:53","slug":"paidiki-paxysarkia-kai-parakoloythis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/paidiki-paxysarkia-kai-parakoloythis\/","title":{"rendered":"TV watching and obesity in children"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Toddlers<\/a>Obesity is associated with many conditions. It is in this respect that the increasing numbers of obesity around the world are a major public health concern<\/strong>. The spike in those numbers does not only concern adults but children a well. There is a need to identify those factors<\/strong> that expose us to the risk of becoming obese. The current article is based on an analysis of studies on the link between TV watching and childhood obesity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The relationship between watching TV<\/strong> and obesity was quantified as follows: Each extra hour<\/strong> of viewing per day led to an increase in the risk of obesity<\/strong> by 13%. In children specifically, obesity and TV viewing were observed to be linearly<\/strong> related. Meaning that the more a child watches the more the probability of obesity increases. Risk level was more or less the same between boys and girls.<\/p>\n

Why does TV watching lead to increased chance of obesity? There are a few possible explanations. One is that many eat<\/strong> while\"Children<\/a> watching TV. As was described in a previous article, when eating and watching we tend to overeat<\/strong>, this usually occurs in the form of energy dense foods which fatten more for a given quantity.<\/p>\n

Another reason is that the more time we spend in front of a screen the less<\/strong> time<\/strong> we want to spend undertaking physical activity<\/strong>. Physical activity and viewing seem to be negatively related. Furthermore it looks as though TV watching is associated with other \u201csitting down\u201d activities like for example video gaming<\/strong>. A third reason is that a significant part of the viewing experience comes in the form of commercials, and many of those are food commercials which increase appetite and compound to the overeating <\/strong>mentioned above. Lastly people in general and children in particular who watch a lot of TV and play video games a lot tend to disrupt their sleeping patterns. Sleep deprivation can also contribute to overeating<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Keeping TV watching at a minimum while having in mind the mechanisms described above can lead to important benefits in terms our health.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reference<\/h2>\n

Gang Zhang, Lei Wu, Lingling Zhou, et al. (2015) Television watching and risk of childhood obesity: a meta-analysis, European Journal of Public Health<\/a>, Epub ahead of print.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obesity is associated with many conditions. It is in this respect that the increasing numbers of obesity around the world are a major public health concern. The spike in those numbers does not only concern adults but children a well. There is a need to identify those factors that expose us to the risk of becoming obese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dimakopoulosi.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}