奇速英语

从小看电视，影响一辈子

It may be all too easy to leave your child in front of the television at the end of a busy day - but scientists warn you may be creating the habit of a lifetime. A study lasting three decades reveals that children who spend their evenings watching television are likely to become lifelong couch potatoes.

The research, based on data from 6,000 British people, suggests that childhood pastimes can influence someone’s health for decades to come. Scientists at University College London, who carried out the study, warned parents to pay attention to the findings and encourage their children to have a more active lifestyle.

Public health expert Dr Mark Hamer says: ‘This has important effect for policy and practice. It suggests that passive TV viewing time should be reduced. Such proposals could not only help today’s children but help to reduce passive TV viewing in future generations. That could be extremely beneficial as research has also shown that TV viewing is connected with other health-risk behaviors, such as the consumption of energy-dense foods and cigarette smoking.’

The research was based on information from the 1970 British Cohort Study, a huge dataset from thousands of people born in a single week in 1970. In 1980, when the participants were aged 10, scientists conducted a set of interviews about their health and leisure habits. The scientists went back in 2012, when the participants were aged 42, and again asked them about their lifestyle, with the answers given in number of hours of television watched per week. They found the childhood habits had ‘tracked’ into adulthood. Some 83 per cent of the participants who watched more than three hours of TV at 42 had watched TV ‘often’ at age 10, they found.

The study also showed that 42-year-olds who watched TV for at least three hours a day were more likely to be in only ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ health and to report that they were either overweight or obese. They were also more likely to have had fathers who were overweight.