Does watching TV make you fat?
In recent research in the USA Dr Harvey Anderson found a great way to involve teenagers in research on diet and weight gain. Link to article on television and eating
He provided the teenage boys with free pizza and television sets to watch “The Simpsons” when they were eating. Dr Anderson is a specialist in nutrition and has done a variety of experiments in the area. He is particularly interested in childhood obesity.
You may recall our previous article on fructose and obesity where the presence of fruit sugar in foods is implicated in a variety of changes to metabolism and potential weight gain. This is a particularly interesting area. Dr Anderson has also done work here.
In the recent article published in Pediatric Research he looked at the particular area of satiety factors.
It is apparent that our food intake is reasonably well-controlled and balanced between energy consumed versus energy burned. There has been considerable controversy over the role of television in weight gain. More TV does correlate with weight gain in children.
There has also been concern about food advertising on television contributing to the obesity. This research looked at whether watching television itself rather than the content of the TV, was having effect on the amount of food consumed. In particular though he was looking at whether children were eating whilst watching TV.
In this study the children arrived two hours after breakfast at home and then half of the group was given calorie-free sweetened water while the other group was given water sweetened with glucose. This is often called an energy or caloric pre-load.
They served the meal 30 minutes after that. Some ate whilst watching “The Simpsons” on TV and the others ate without TV. They found that children who watched TV consumed an extra 228 calories. Overall that is not a large energy intake but given that this would be repeated on a regular basis for those watching TV frequently, this could contribute significantly to weight gain in children.
It seems that eating in front of TV blocks the brain pathways that cause us to feel full.
There is more information on scientific basis of weight loss on other pages listed below. We would welcome any comments you may have. We shall have a seminar in the near future on the effects of different means of managing obesity in the workplace.