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Americans watch a lot of television - an average of 3.5 hours a day for 80% of the country. That's more than half of people's leisure time.
But the next time you're sitting down for a "Game of Thrones" marathon, you may want to stop, get up, and move after each episode.
A recent study examined the connection between time spent watching television and death in the US, and it found that time in front of the tube is associated with an increased risk for eight leading causes of death.
We already knew that TV time was associated with cardiovascular disease and cancer - the top two causes of death. But the more time people spent watching TV, the more likely they were to die from diabetes, lung disease, influenza or pneumonia, Parkinson's disease, liver disease, and suicide, too.
But this isn't really about TV: It's about behavior, especially sitting or being sedentary, according to the study.
In order to figure all this out, the researchers began with data from a study that surveyed 567,169 US people aged 50 to 71 about their diet and health. The researchers compared that initial survey data (collected in 1995 and 1996) with follow-up data (collected 15-16 years later) and were left with 221,426 people who had started the time period healthy and answered questions about watching TV.
The data suggests that risk of death starts to increase when people watch more than a couple of hours of TV a day. People in the study who watched 3 to 4 hours a day were 15% more likely to die, compared to those who watched less than an hour or two, and those who watched 7 or more hours a day were 47% more likely to die.
People who spent more time watching television were also more likely to sleep too little; have high cholesterol; be obese; smoke, eat, and drink more; and have less education.
But even after controlling for all those factors, the association remained: The more time people spent watching television, the more likely they were to die. Even exercise didn't eliminate these associations.
It's possible that somehow, controls used to calculate these risks didn't capture all of the things that could lead to death, and perhaps something else played a role. The new study couldn't control for mental health, for example, which can have serious adverse effects on physical health - perhaps depressed people spent more time watching television.
But Dr. Sarah Keadle, the lead investigator on the study, attributes the increased chance of dying to sedentary behavior.
"Our results fit within a growing body of research indicating that too much sitting can have many different adverse health effects," Keadle said in a press release.
Besides while watching TV, many of us are sedentary for much of the day at work, though the effects of that time (or driving time, or other sedentary time) haven't been followed as closely. And standing doesn't seem to help, according to a recent study, if you are otherwise sedentary. Moving around and getting regular exercise is essential.
So the next time Netflix asks you if you're sure you want to continue watching another episode of "House of Cards," maybe you should get up and go for a stroll instead.