It’s our guilty pleasure: Watching TV is the most common everyday activity, after work and sleep, in many parts of the world. Americans view five hours of TV each day, and while we know that spending so much time sitting (36)_____ can lead to obesity (肥胖症) and other disease, researchers have now quantified just how (37)_____ being a couch potato can be.
In an analysis of data from eight large (38)_____ published studies, a Harvard-led group reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that for every two hours per day spent channel (39)_____, the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes (糖尿病) rose 20% over 8.5 years, the risk of heart disease increased 15% over a (40)_____, and the odds of dying prematurely (41)_____ 13% during a seven-year follow-up. All of these (42)_____ are linked to a lack of physical exercise. But compared with other sedentary (久坐的) activities, like knitting, viewing TV may be especially (43)_____ at promoting unhealthy habits. For one, the sheer number of hours we pass watching TV dwarfs the time we spend on anything else. And other studies have found that watching ads for beer and popcorn may make you more likely to (44)_____ them.
Even so, the authors admit that they didn’t compare different sedentary activities to (45)_____ whether TV watching was linked to a greater risk of diabetes, heart disease or early death compared with, say, reading.
