(Photo By Flickr User Ryan Heaney)
If you’re on the verge of developing diabetes, parking yourself in front of the TV might be one of the worst things you could do for your health, a new study suggests.
Every extra hour a person with pre-diabetes spends watching TV each day, raises their risk of developing full-blown type 2 diabetes by 3.4%, according to research published this month in the journal Diabetologia and blackamericaweb.com.
The study couldn’t prove cause-and-effect; but the increased risk associated with being a couch potato occurred whether or not the study participants were taking diabetes drugs, or whether or not they were eating healthy diets and exercising, the researchers found. However, people who tried to prevent diabetes through healthy lifestyle changes did end up watching less television over time, the study found.
The new study relies on data from participants in the Diabetes Prevention Program, a federally funded study published in 2002. That study included slightly more than 3,200 overweight U.S. adults between 1996 and 1999. The study’s goal was to delay or prevent type 2 diabetes in high-risk patients, either with the diabetes drug metformin or via lifestyle changes.
Since they’d proven that physical activity can forestall diabetes, researchers decided to take the opposite tack and explore whether sitting around for extended periods can raise diabetes risk, said study author Bonny Rockette-Wagner, director of physical activity assessment at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health.
Prior research has indicated that long periods spent sitting motionless can have negative effects on metabolism, Rockette-Wagner explained:
“If you think about it, we all recognize the fact that when we sleep our bodies are at rest, and everything sort of slows down,” she said. “When we’re sitting for long periods of time, our body also starts to slow down. It might not be in a sleeping state, but it goes into a more rested state and things start to slow down.”
Prior to the study, participants in the Diabetes Prevention Program all spent the same amount of time watching TV, an average of 140 minutes per day.
But people engaging in lifestyle changes ended up reducing their TV time by 22 minutes a day over the course of the study. By comparison, people taking metformin reduced their TV watching by just 3 minutes a day, and those following no plan at all watched 8 minutes fewer per day.
The researchers then investigated the impact of sedentary behavior over time on diabetes incidence. For participants in all three groups, the risk of developing diabetes increased approximately 3.4% for each hour spent watching TV, after the researchers adjusted for other variables.
Get more information and visit the U.S. Department of Labor website at www.bls.gov/news.release for more on Americans’ television viewing habits.
