Later On

Thanks to Joel for passing along this link. Anne Harding writing for CNN’s Health.com:

Spending lots of free time glued to the TV or computer screen can hurt your heart and shorten your life, no matter how much exercise you get when you’re not riding the couch, a new study suggests.

People who spent at least four hours per day watching TV, playing video games, or using a computer for fun were more than twice as likely as those who kept their recreational "screen time" under two hours to experience a heart attack, stroke, or other serious cardiovascular problem, the study found. Couch potatoes were also about 50 percent more likely to die of any cause during the four-year study.

The link between screen time and heart problems barely changed when the researchers factored in the amount of moderate-to-vigorous exercise the study participants did, suggesting that the health benefits of exercise don’t cancel out all that time in front of the tube or computer. (The researchers also controlled for obesity, smoking, diabetes, social class, and other factors.)

The study doesn’t prove that watching TV or playing computer games is inherently unhealthy, says the lead researcher, Emmanuel Stamatakis, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at University College London, in the U.K. The real culprit may be what people tend to do during those activities: sit.

Why is sitting harmful? It’s not entirely clear, but animal studies have shown that prolonged sitting slows down the action of an enzyme (lipoprotein lipase) that breaks down fats in the blood, such as cholesterol and triglycerides. When the enzyme activity slows, levels of those substances climb. This is a "very plausible explanation" for the findings, Stamatakis says…

Continue reading. The article includes this link: Health.com: 9 surprising heart attack risks, and the risk from taking calcium supplements surprised me, though my doctor already told me to cut the calcium supplement to 500 mg QD and to take the calcium with a Vitamin D supplement of 2000 IU.