Health & Fitness Bulletins

November 29, 2025

Too Much TV Kills but
The Most Active Have Immunity

Your mother probably told you this, but you thought she was just making it up. Actually, over the past 40 years, a number of studies have shown negative health effects related to watching TV for hours each day. A recent study, however, finds there is a way you can get away with this sedentary behavior!

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a large meta-analysis covering 1.3 million patient years. Researchers found that watching an average of two hours of TV per day is associated with a 20% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes and a 15% higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Most alarmingly, people who watched two hours of TV per day were 13% more likely to die during the studies. They also found that the more TV people watched, the greater the mortality rate.

Of course, researchers pointed out that TV doesn’t directly have negative health effects. It’s the fact that people tend to eat less healthy foods and remain sedentary during television viewing.

Researchers have been digging more deeply into the association between TV time and disease. Recently, Ulf Ekeland (Norwegian Institute of Public Health) and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of nine studies. They focused on the association between TV time, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. TV time is also associated with cancer. Their twist was to divide people into four groups of physical activity levels from most active to least active. People in the bottom quartile of physical activity saw the worst effects from time spent being sedentary. However, among people in the upper quartile of physical activity levels, there was no association between TV time and cardiovascular disease or cancer.