Video games, not TV, linked to obesity in kids. source: Healthy Ontario

Despite what many people think, simply watching television isn’t necessarily contributing to childhood obesity. New research points the finger at video games.

North American researchers surveyed 2,831 children age 1 to 12, recording their media habits and calculating their body mass index, a ratio of height to weight that indicates how fat or thin a person is.

Are you at a healthy weight? Calculate your Body Mass Index

“While both television and video game play can reasonably be considered sedentary activities,” says Elizabeth Vandewater, Ph.D., “video game play was related to children’s weight status while television was not,” she says. “This may mean that video game play, but not television use, is indeed displacing the time children spend in more physically demanding pursuits.”

Obesity among Canadian children between 7 and 13 years of age has more than doubled in recent years and the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute says more than half of kids between the ages of 5 and 17 aren’t physically active enough for optimal health and development.

How might watching tv lead to overweight children? One long-standing view could be called the “couch potato hypothesis” — kids sit, immobile, watching a screen instead of playing sports. A second view ties TV watching to eating, either through a barrage of ads (mostly for food) or because children snack while watching.

However, Vandewater says she finds the persistence of the view that watching television makes kids fat puzzling, given much research to the contrary. The connection between obesity and the television screen is weak, she says.

Vandewater cautions that the study reflects an association of factors, not causes. For instance, she found that electronic game use was connected to weight among girls but not among boys. That doesn’t mean that playing games made these girls heavier. It may be that overweight girls turn to electronic media because they felt socially isolated.

For children as well as adults, media fills up free time, she says. Overweight children are more sedentary and have fewer friends and may simply find themselves with more free time on their hands. This implies that media use is a result of obesity, rather than the other way around.

“It would be wonderful if there were a quick and easy solution to the problem of obesity in youth,” Vandewater says. “Unfortunately, the data available to date do no support the notion that turning off the television or unplugging the video game console amounts to a ‘magic bullet’, which will reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity.”