Death By Television

Television kills.

• Television Viewing and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease, and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-analysis
  • Anders Grøntved, Frank B. Hu, JAMA 2011;305(23):2448-2455

• https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2011.812

The article claims that two hours of television per day, for a year, causes 104 deaths per 100,000, and 260 morbidities per 100K (type 2 diabetes and other disabling conditions). Nielsen estimates that Americans watch, on average, 4.7 hours of television per day, so the numbers are 244/100K and 611/100K in the US. With a current population of 313 million, that works out to 760,000 mortalities and 1,900,000 morbidities per year due to television habits.

One hour of television watching, per viewer, causes 1.42E-6 deaths ( 104/100K*2*365.24 ) and 3.56E-6 ( 260/100K*2*365.24 ) morbidities . Alternately, that is one death per 700,000 hours of television watching.

Worldwide average television watching is estimated at 17 hours per week. With a world population estimated at 7 billion people, that extrapolates to 9 million deaths and 22 million morbidities per year, approaching the annual death toll during World War 2.

The Grøntved paper does not determine a specific cause. Sedentary behavior, stress, social isolation, and bad eating habits (foods advertised on TV) may all play a role. All these behaviors vary from country to country, so the Grøntved study may exaggerate effects in some countries and underestimate them in others.

Note: This is not a result of "electromagnetic" effects. Electromagnetic emissions are easy to measure, tiny for broadcast sources and power lines compared to personal device use. The measured emissions are small for flat screens compared to cathode ray tube displays. The emissions of displays are small compared to electric blankets and next-to-head cell phone use, and the studies for those "major" sources of electromagnetic exposure show effects that are down in the noise, difficult to differentiate from no effect at all. Studies that show big effects cherry-pick data and ignore associated co-factors. Of course, so may some of the studies that Grøntved and Hu included in their paper.

My own bias is based on the observation of family and friends - more TV viewing seems associated with overweight, bad health, disinformation, and poor vocational prospects. I hate seeing this destruction of people I care about.

Health improves with wealth and income. Wealth and income correlates with education, and people watching television have less time for education. Malcolm Gladwell estimates that a world class career skill (professional sport, concert grade musician, PHD scientist) requires an investment of 10,000 hours of training and practice. So the United States is losing as many as 147,000 world class skills a day. The average American forgoes a world class career skill every 6 years.

Do you watch television? Are you overweight? Are you under-skilled? STOP NOW.

Nielsen top shows

March 12, 2012 http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/top10s/television.html

Note that while the top 10 shows kill 10,000 people a year, that is a tiny fraction of all the television watching. If viewers exercised some discipline, and only watched two or three favorite shows a week, the television death rate would plummet, and the education level and economic wellbeing of the United States (and the world) would skyrocket.

If viewers used their television time more responsibly (never eat while watching TV, run on a treadmill instead), that could make television viewing less deadly, too.

If viewers spent their time learning, loving, helping their community, and doing science, the value of our community increases. An average "employee labor hour" contributes $33 to the economy. So the 18 million people watching one episode of American Idol (including the kids who should be learning, helping their community, or sleeping) are wasting about $600M worth of productivity. About 25% of the cost of a Mars lander, or prenatal care for 300,000 pregnancies. The next time someone talks about wasting money on the space program ($18G/year) talk to them about the 500 billion hours (@30hrs/wk) the US wasted on television last year, and the seventeen trillion dollar value of those hours.

International Effects

Most of the above is US-centric; my apologies to my friends worldwide. There are international studies that conflict with Nielson's "4.7 hrs/day" (33 hrs/wk) numbers that show fewer hours for US viewers (either 28 or 21 hrs/wk, but still "leading" the world in a tie with Japan and the UK - see http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20023091-17.html and http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_tel_vie-media-television-viewing ). Given the vast expenditures the United States makes on sedentary entertainment, and that TV saturated the US market in the 1950's, long before the rest of the world, it is no wonder that our health status is abysmal. Health care is quite different than medical care; healthy living is what you do as an individual to avoid needing medical care.

With proper differentiation between "health care" (individual behavior) and "medical care" (doctors and drugs), US expenditures on "health care" are a large negative number (we spend vast amounts to get sick), hence the lowest in the world (negative is lower than zero). US "medical care" expenditures are huge, an attempt to ameliorate the irreparable damage we do to ourselves. Breaking things is always cheaper than fixing them, and fixing is usually not possible.

The main thing the US can learn from Europe is not how to organize and pay for medical care, but how to take care of ourselves so we don't need it. Europeans do a lot more walking, spend more time with family and friends, and spend a lot less time driving like maniacs and robbing convenience stores. In the past, Europeans balanced their healthier habits with the occasional continental war, but lately they've found better ways to absorb their spare time and excess young men. I hope they keep improving.

Meanwhile, Asia is polluting and and studying and working crazy long hours to achieve first world status. I hope they get there, and on the way learn to work more efficiently so they have family time, healthy surroundings, and serenity. The Japanese live a long time while watching a lot of TV - I'm interested in how they manage television's effects on their lives.

Economics

The Apollo moon program cost $20B dollars, or $110B in 2010 dollars. The peak spending was $6B in 1966, when the program employed 400,000 people at NASA and (mostly) at NASA contractors. Averaging around 1966, a guesstimate for the total hours spent is (20B/6B)*400K*2K or 2.7 billion hours. Americans watch 10 billion hours of television a week; if that time was spent on moon programs instead, we could pay for three moon landings a day. The next time someone yammers about "wasting all that money" on space instead of fixing problems on the earth, tell them that shutting down television for two days and investing that time in the community and their own future instead could have the same outcome as forgoing a moon program, saving 4000 lives from TV-related deaths as well.