sport on TV_Obesity [BMC Public Health].pdf (158.38 kB)
Watching sport on television, physical activity, and risk of obesity in older adults
journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-29, 13:52 authored by Mark Hamer, Richard Weiler, Emmanuel StamatakisBackground:
Television (TV) viewing has been associated with obesity although the effects of specific TV content on health and other behaviours remains unknown. We examined the association between watching sport on TV, physical activity levels, and risk of obesity.
Methods:
We studied 6,733 (aged 64.9 ± 9.2 yrs) men and women from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a prospective study of community dwelling older adults. Data were collected on self reported TV time and content, and physical activity. Nurses measured height and weight for the calculation of body mass index.
Results:
On average, participants reported viewing TV for 5.3 ± 4.1 hours per day and 30.3% of the sample watched sport on TV at least twice a week. There was no association between watching sport and physical activity levels. Participants that watched sports every day were at higher risk of obesity [odds ratio = 1.39, 95% CI, 1.15, 1.68) after adjustment for age, sex, smoking, alcohol, physical activity, total TV time, disability, and self-rated health.
Conclusions:
Watching elite athletes may have no role in the promotion of physical activity in older adults, which has implications for staging large sporting events with physical activity legacy promises.
Funding
The funding is provided by the National Institute on Aging in the United States (grants 2RO1AG7644-01A1 and 2RO1AG017644) and a consortium of UK government departments coordinated by the Office for National Statistics. MH is supported by the British Heart Foundation (RE/10/005/28296); ES is supported by a National Institute for Health Research Career Development award.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
BMC Public HealthCitation
HAMER, M., WEILER, R. and STAMATAKIS, E., 2014. Watching sport on television, physical activity, and risk of obesity in older adults. BMC Public Health, 14(10), doi:10.1186/1471-2458-14-10Publisher
© The Authors; licensee BioMed Central LtdVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International (CC BY 2.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/2.0/Publication date
2014Notes
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.ISSN
1471-2458Publisher version
Language
- en