Watching an hour of TV after the age of 25 can shorten the viewer's life by just under 22 minutes, according to researchers in Australia.
The AFP news agency said scientists at the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland studied 11,000 Australian adults who were aged at least 25 in the year 2000.
The academics checked their data against an estimate from 2008 that Australians aged 25 or above watched TV for 9.8 billion hours. This was associated with the loss of 286,000 years of life, the AFP said.
An extrapolation of these figures found that a single hour of TV was responsible for the loss of just under 22 minutes of life, the news agency reported.
Smoking two cigarettes has approximately the same effect.
The problem is not actually TV itself but the lack of activity by the viewer for long periods, the researchers said. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, excess weight and other health problems are associated with a sedentary lifestyle.
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