Children with TV in bedroom more likely to be overweight, study finds

The study found girls are more at risk of being overweight if they have a TV in their room
Rex

Children who have a TV in their bedroom are more likely to be overweight by secondary school age, a major UK study warned today.

It found that 11-year-old girls were 30 per cent more at risk and boys 20 per cent more if they had a TV in their room from age seven.

Experts said parents who feared their children could become overweight should think twice before allowing them to have a bedroom TV.

They said the University College London-led study highlighted the scale of the childhood obesity crisis and provided further evidence of the need for a ban on junk food ads before 9pm.

Researchers studied 12,556 children between the ages of seven and 11.

They measured their amount of screen time on a TV and computer, noted whether they had a TV in their bedroom, and compared it with their body mass index, fat mass index and weight.

Dr Anja Heilmann, of UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care, said: “Childhood obesity in the UK is a major public health problem. In England, about one third of all 11-year-olds are overweight and one in five are obese.

“Our study shows that there is a clear link between having a TV in the bedroom as a young child and being overweight a few years later. Childhood obesity prevention strategies should consider TVs in children’s bedrooms as a risk factor for obesity.”

The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, which follows the generation of young people born across the UK in 2000-01 to provide a detailed portrait of the children of the new century.

It found that more than half of the children surveyed had a TV in their room by age seven. It found that the more TV girls watched, the more likely they were to be overweight — though this was not true for boys.

The researchers took other obesity-linked factors into consideration, such as household income, mothers’ education, breastfeeding duration, physical activity and irregular bedtimes.

Professor Russell Viner, of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the “high-quality study” showed “having a TV in the bedroom from seven increases the risk of being overweight four years later, regardless of the child’s weight in earlier childhood”.

Professor Nick Finer, consultant endocrinologist and bariatric physician at UCL, said: “The authors rightly do not say parents should not put a TV in their child’s bedroom, as this will take studies where this is tested as a prevention strategy.

However parents concerned about their child’s risk of becoming overweight might appropriately consider not putting a TV in their young children’s bedrooms.”

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