Are Telechildren Getting Tubby?

This essentially explains how people have consumed food over time. There is incredibly strong evidence that caloric intake, not television, is related to obesity. Actual scientific studies put television at the bottom of the list of causes of obesity, if at all. In contrast, searching for what most people say via Youtube and Google gives results that society blames TV and often puts it at the top of the list. Click here for an example of a video that blames childhood obesity on television. Click here for the source of the above graph and where the table was derived.

Do American children become obese from watching television? The Internet and health classes are full of claims that watching television causes adolescence obesity. Yet upon examining the multitude of studies conducted in this area, the results may be surprising: television is not to blame for the adolescent obesity epidemic.

Almost all studies show that television viewing does not cause adolescence obesity. The International Journal of Obesity states that the correlation between watching television and obesity is, "too small to be of substantial clinical relevance." The Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics found, in an in-depth study, that there was no correlation between body composition and television viewing behavior. Again, the Journal of Adolescence states, "Studies examining the relationship between television viewing and obesity in children and adolescents have consistently found weak, if any, associations between the two phenomena." Statistically speaking, the very weak correlation between body fat levels and television means that it is essentially impossible to prove that watching television causes obesity.

There are many other factors that are strongly correlated to obesity, and should receive the blame.  The International Journal for Obesity suggests that the data indicates that television is "unfairly implicated" as a cause of obesity. Rather, there are clearly other factors that statistically and clinically strongly correlate to childhood obesity, such as depression, lack of exercise, high caloric intake, and quality of food.

Television is not the cause of adolescence obesity, but this does not mean all Americans should advocate more television viewing time. Yet it is important to understand that TV is not the root cause of childrens' rising obesity levels, so that the real causes can be understood and changes made. Clearly, television should not receive the blame for causing adolescent obesity.