Beware: Ninja Tellys!

After a six hour train journey, I'm now sat in a central Oxford hotel watching television before retiring for the night, a pastime that I've always thought relaxing but according to an article in today's Times is actually hazardous to my health ("TV is as harmful as smoking"). Indeed, every hour spent slumped in front of the box is as "serious a public health problem as smoking or obesity" and can reduce the viewer's life expectancy by 22 minutes, or in other words, you'll live 5 years less if you watch TV for 6 hours a day.

So does that magic box in the corner of the room emit some previously secret carcinogenic rays?
Does a seemingly endless stream of reality drivel, soap operas and gameshows have an adverse affect on the will to live?

Nope, "research" published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has compared the mortality rates of couch potato Australians with those who had "more active lifestyles". Then, after doing a few sums, the University of Queensland "experts" worked out that every hour spent glued to the screen shortened life by 21.8 minutes, and the "top 1 per cent of the population who watch six hours of programmes a day can expect to live 4.8 years less than a person who does not watch TV”.

So that's not a slow-acting electric assassin in the corner of the room after all. Not only will it not kill me, it won't even reduce my life expectancy, because all these "researchers" have actually done is correlate some data which shows that more active people tend to live longer. Wow!

On the other hand, the report also quotes a Lancet article claiming that "as little as 15 minutes of physical activity every day can increase lifespan by three years", which by my calculations means that I only need to do around 3 minutes of exercise for every hour's telly watching and they'll cancel each other out.

Fortunately for the reputation of the academic community as a whole, and as the participants in tomorrow's scholarly activity workshop will be told at 10.00am, getting your work published isn't quite like Homer Simpson once said, "Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true....."