Middle-aged couch potatoes may be ‘planted’ more than 30 years earlier, study concludes

Parents should routinely switch off the TV and take young children out for a walk or some other exercise in order to increase their chances of growing up to be fit, healthy adults, new research suggests.

And if it isn’t feasible to go outside, children could perhaps be encouraged to play interactive video games that involve physical activity.

Researchers at University College London have reached these conclusions after comparing the TV viewing habits of more than 6,000 British people at age 10 and age 42.

The study revealed that children who watched a lot of TV at age 10 were much more likely to spend more than three hours a day in front of the screen at age 42 than those who had watched relatively little television in childhood.

Eighty-three per cent of the 1,546 cohort study members who reported watching more than three hours of TV at 42 had also watched TV “often” at age 10.

The study also showed that 42-year-olds who watched TV for at least three hours a day were more likely to be in only “fair” or “poor” health and to report that they were either overweight or obese.

They were also more likely to have had fathers who were overweight and in routine or manual jobs at the age 10 survey. The sons and daughters of manual workers were, in fact, twice as likely as managers’ children to watch more than three hours of TV a day at 42, even after their own educational qualifications had been taken into consideration.

The researchers analysed information collected by the British Cohort Study, which is following the lives of people born in England, Scotland and Wales in the same week of 1970. The cohort study is managed by the IOE’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) and is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

“The problems that we have identified are not experienced exclusively by working-class families,” Dr Mark Hamer, one of the UCL researchers, will tell the CLS research conference in London today (March 16).

“However, parents from a lower socio-occupational class are more likely to be physically active at work and may compensate for this by spending more time sitting down during their leisure hours. Their children may then model their mothers’ and fathers’ leisure activity patterns.

“It is important that children keep active. And if they can be encouraged to participate in sports, so much the better.”

Previous research has suggested that parental participation in physical activity may be a predictor of childhood activity levels. The UCL study is, however, believed to be the first to use a large, representative birth cohort to identify childhood factors that are associated with television viewing habits in middle age.

“Our work indicates that parents’ health-related behaviours may at least partly influence children’s TV viewing habits more than three decades later,” Dr Hamer says. “This has important implications for policy and practice.

“It suggests that interventions to reduce passive TV viewing time should target children and their parents. Such initiatives could not only help today’s children but help to reduce passive TV viewing in future generations.

“That could be extremely beneficial as research has also shown that TV viewing is associated with other health-risk behaviours, such as the consumption of energy-dense foods and cigarette smoking. Prolonged TV viewing has also been linked to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”

The paper that will be presented at the CLS conference is “Childhood correlates of adult TV viewing time: a 32-year follow-up of the 1970 British Cohort Study”, by Lee Smith, Ben Gardner and Mark Hamer of UCL’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. It will be published in a future issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Further information

David Budge
d.budge@ioe.ac.uk
07881 415362

Notes for editors

1. The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) is following the lives of more than 17,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1970. Over the course of cohort members’ lives, the BCS70 has collected information on health, physical, educational and social development, and economic circumstances, among other factors.
2. At age 10, the BCS70 cohort member’s mother provided information regarding how often their child watched TV and played sports (categorised as: never/sometimes/often). A health visitor recorded height and body mass for the calculation of BMI. Parents provided information on their occupation. At age 42, BCS70 members reported how many hours they spent watching TV per day and how often they participated in 15 types of physical activities and sports. They also rated their health (excellent/very good/good/fair/poor) and assessed their own weight (about right/underweight/overweight/very overweight). The final analytic sample of the study reported in this press release comprised 6,188 participants.
3. The Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) is an Economic and Social Research Council resource centre. It is based at the Department for Quantitative Social Science, UCL Institute of Education. CLS is responsible for running four of Britain’s internationally-renowned cohort studies: the 1958 National Child Development Study, the 1970 British Cohort Study, the Millennium Cohort Study and Next Steps (previously known as the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England).
4. The CLS Cohort Studies Research Conference is being held on March 16 and 17 at Mary Ward House, 5-7 Tavistock Place, London WC1. The conference will showcase research using cohort data and will cover a broad range of themes relating to the life course, such as health and wellbeing, child development, education and social mobility.
5. The UCL Institute of Education is a world-leader specialising in education and the social sciences. Founded in 1902, the Institute currently has more than 7,000 students and 800 staff. In the 2014 QS World University Rankings, the Institute was ranked number one for education worldwide. It was shortlisted in the ‘University of the Year’ category of the 2014 Times Higher Education (THE) awards. In January 2014, the Institute was recognised by Ofsted for its ‘outstanding’ initial teacher training across primary, secondary and further education. In the most recent Research Excellence Framework, 94% of our research was judged to be world class. On 2 December 2014, the Institute became a single-faculty school of UCL, called the UCL Institute of Education. www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe
6. Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world’s top universities, as reflected by performance in a range of international rankings and tables. UCL currently has over 35,000 students from 150 countries and over 11,000 employees. Our annual income is over £1bn.
7. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s largest funder of research on the social and economic questions facing us today. It supports the development and training of the UK’s future social scientists and also funds major studies that provide the infrastructure for research. ESRC-funded research informs policymakers and practitioners and helps make businesses, voluntary bodies and other organisations more effective. The ESRC also works collaboratively with six other UK research councils and Innovate UK to fund cross-disciplinary research and innovation addressing major societal challenges. The ESRC is an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter in 1965, and funded mainly by the Government. In 2015 it celebrates its 50th anniversary. www.esrc.ac.uk