by Awe Busuyi Rapheal

Created on: August 20, 2010   Last Updated: August 21, 2010

Are you one of those who find the temptation and habit of watching most TV programs difficult to resist? If your answer is yes, then you need to adjust or totally shun the habit. The story of the benefits of life without TV is that of the toll it takes on our brain, body and general health.

Today, TV is such an important item in every home that a home without it is considered incompletely furnished. More so, with today’s technological advancement, television viewing has been made so facile that one cannot only watch it at the comfort of his living room but also watch it on the go on his phone. But the technological repercussion is that for every hour you put into TV viewing, it is one foot in the grave as researchers have pointed out. Yet, drug addiction is even easier for some to break than tele-addiction because it is an important source of recreation.  

You may think that TV is a stress buster, but it does more harm than good. You may have to change the habit completely because scientists are now revealing that each hour you spend watching TV increases your risk of dying from heart disease. Scientists at the Epidemiology Unit of the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council in June 2010 found that for every hour you spend watching TV, your risk of death from heart disease increased by %7 even after risk factors such as lack of exercise, smoking obesity and poor diet had been taken into consideration. For almost a decade, the researchers studied 13,197 middle aged healthy men and women in England. At that time, 373 of the participants died from heart disease. The researchers estimated that 30 of these deaths could have been averted if people had cut back on their TV viewing time from the U.K. average of 4 hours per day to just 1 hour. The findings are really a red light to couch potatoes who spend most of their time watching programs after programs on different TV channels, that the habit is endangering their health. The reason is that our bodies are not designed to sit for long and as we put our feet up watching favorite programs, we are put at an increased risk of heart disease.

If watching TV for too long can increase our risk of heart disease, there is then the possibility that any job that requires sedentary lifestyle, that is lack of adequate exercise, could also increase the risk of heart disease. It is normally recommended that an adult should have 30 minutes of exercise everyday for at least three days in a week. Exercise burns off

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