One Hour of TV Means 144 Fewer Steps

Sure, we could watch TV and walk, on a treadmill, for instance, but we don’t. We watch TV or walk. And for every hour we watch TV we don’t walk 144 steps, according to a new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana Farber Center for Community-Based Research. The research, published in The American Journal of Public Health, required 500 people, predominantly racial/ethnic minority residents of low-income housing in metropolitan Boston, to wear pedometers for five days and keep track of the hours of television they watched. Researchers found that for every hour of TV watched, a person walked 144 fewer steps, and the more TV watched the less likely a person was to walk the recommended 10,000 steps a day. Read more about the study in the New York Times.