Children’s TV ‘Is Linked to Cancer, Autism, Dementia’
February 20th, 2007And some people think Becky and I are weird for not having a TV in the house?
Via: Scotsman:
IT HAS long been blamed for creating a nation of couch potatoes. But a new report today claims that Britain’s love affair with television is causing far more damage – both physically and psychologically – than previously thought.
The findings have been compiled by Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist who has previously written about the effects of television on the viewer. His report, analysing 35 different scientific studies carried out into television and its effect on the viewer, has identified 15 negative effects he claims can be blamed on watching television.
Among the most disturbing findings are the links he claims to have found between long hours of television viewing and cancer, autism and Alzheimer’s.
The effects on children watching TV have been well publicised in Britain. Fears of a timebomb of obesity have sparked a wave of ministerial initiatives to promote sport and tackle the couch-potato lifestyle.
However, today’s report suggests the consequences of television are far more serious. They range from myopia and attention deficit disorder to diabetes, autism, Alzheimer’s and a generation whose brains are being numbed by on-screen imagery.
His report, published in the respected Biologist magazine, claims the problem with television lies in the length of time we spend in front of the set. For most people, watching television now takes up more time than any other single activity except work and sleep. According to the British Audience Research Bureau, by the age of 75 the average Briton will have spent more than 12 years of their life watching television.
Dr Sigman, an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society and author of Remotely Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives, said arguments over how educational programmes are were a distraction. He said: “The medical studies I have looked at are about the medium of television, irrespective of the programmes children are watching. It is the number of hours and the age at which they start which produces the biological effects. It is because of the medium, not the message, that these effects are occurring.”
Dr Sigman’s research draws from studies by groups including the American Academy of Paediatrics, Cornell University, Stanford University Medical Centre, the British Market Research Bureau and medical publications such as the Lancet and the Journal of Sleep Research.
The stage for the harm Dr Sigman believes television is doing is being set, he claims, by the vast amounts of it we watch – by the age of six, a child will already have spent one year in front of the television. When time in front of a computer is added, the psychologist claims watching a screen of some kind is the dominant activity for older children – those aged 11 to 15 now spend 55 per cent of their waking lives, or seven and a half hours a day, watching television and computers. According to today’s report, that represents a 40 per cent rise in a decade.
At any given moment any species faces any number of evolutionary challenges to which it must adapt or die. Industrialism has presented humans (and of course millions of other species) with its own set of challenges. Today one challenge is television. Do you watch it regularly? Then you are maladapting to the challenge. You do not evolve. Go to the back of the class. Interesting how industrialism itself is an adaptation to overpopulation. A maladaptation, of course. Stick with industrialism—whether it be television watching, building your life around your automobile, relying on high-tech medicine—and die out. Manage to survive without those things, and eventually the human race will be defined by your genes and those of others who have made the same adaptations. Good luck.
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