The longer children spend in front of the television, the greater the risk is of them having a (too) large waist measurement by the age of 10. Today, a new study points the finger at the sedentary lifestyle of our young people. And it is something that appears to be having a devastating effect, from the earliest years of life.

In total, 1,314 children registered on the database of a long-term study being conducted in Quebec – the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development – took part in this study. But it wasn’t just the children who were involved: their parents were too… Their parents recorded the number of hours their children spent in front of the television during the week and at weekends. The age bracket under investigation – children between the ages of two and a half and four and a half – did not lend itself to the children responding to the questionnaires themselves. All the children also underwent a long jump test.

“We found that for every hour a week that a child aged 29 months spent watching television there was a reduction of around a third of a centimetre in the long jump length they were able to achieve”, explains Professor Linda Pagani of Montreal University.

The principal author of this study, she also demonstrated the influence of a sedentary lifestyle on waist measurement. Among the 15% of children who, at four and a half years old, watched 18 hours of television a week, she observed an average increase in waist measurement of 7.6 mm by the age of 10. Professor Pagani sums up by saying, “Put simply, it’s not good to watch too much television”. Especially for young children