“Children with higher weight status spent moderate
amounts of time playing electronic games, while children with lower weight
status spent
either little or a lot of time playing electronic games,” say Elizabeth
A. Vandewater, Ph.D., and colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin
in the
Journal of Adolescence. “Moderate” play, while it
sounds benign, can have a great impact, given the large number of American
children
who
play electronic games.
The researchers surveyed 2,831 children age 1 to 12, recording media habits
of the children and calculating their body mass index, a ratio of height
to weight that indicates how fat or thin a person is.
“While both television and video game play can be reasonably be
considered sedentary activities, video game play was related to children’s
weight status while television was not,” she says. “This
may mean that video game play, but not television use, is indeed displacing
the time children spend in more physically demanding pursuits.”
How might viewing the tube lead to overweight children?
One long-standing view could be called the “couch potato hypothesis” — kids
sit, immobile, watching a screen instead of playing sports. A second
view ties TV watching to eating, either through a barrage of ads (mostly
for
food) or because children snack while watching.
Vandewater says she finds the persistence of the view that watching television
makes kids fat puzzling, given much research to the contrary. The connection
between obesity and the television screen is weak, she says.
In her study, children with higher BMIs seemed to play video games moderately
but read or used computers for non-game purposes either very little or
a lot more than those with a lower BMI. The heavier children spent more
time in sedentary activities than thinner kids did, but they did not spend
any more or less time being moderately or extremely active.
Children with lower BMIs, on the other hand, used print or computers for
non-game purposes moderately, and video games either more or less than
their heavier peers. Their weight status also bore no relation to their
activity levels.
The relationship of weight to activity might seem paradoxical.
That heavier children were more sedentary makes some sense, but that
they were just
as active as thinner children doesn’t. Yet Vandewater found no
connection between weight and activity. She suggests that while they
spend more time
sitting down, heavier kids may also become more active at other times
in an attempt to lose weight. That would equalize activity levels in
high
and low BMI groups.
Vandewater cautions that the study reflects an association
of factors, not causes. For instance, she found that electronic game
use was connected
to weight among girls but not among boys. That doesn’t mean that
playing games made these girls heavier. It may be that overweight girls
turn to electronic media because they felt socially isolated.
For children as well as adults, media fills up free time, she says. Overweight
children are more sedentary and have fewer friends and may simply find
themselves with more free time on their hands. This implies that media
use is a result of obesity, rather than the other way around.
“It would be wonderful if there were a quick and easy solution to
the problem of obesity in American youth,” Vandewater says. “Unfortunately,
the data available to date do no support the notion that turning off the
television or unplugging the video game console amounts to a ‘magic
bullet’ which will reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity.”
