Heart survey is bad news for drivers who watch television

Date Published: {J}

You do tend to wonder why people get paid for this stuff, but a new global survey – released last week – has concluded that people who own cars and televisions are more susceptible to heart attacks than those who don’t.

I know five year olds who could have told you that for nothing – but can watching the 6.1 News really be bad for your health? Is it all the job loss stories or the doomsday economists? Or is it actually the weather forecast with perennial predictions of rain?

Could they not have included people with armchairs on the basis that sitting down for too long aren’t doing enough exercise either? What about those who haven’t mastered the art of standing and typing at work – or bus drivers who just sit around and drive people crazy all day?

Wouldn’t walking to work be a health hazard if you lived a couple of miles out of town and you were shuffling along every morning along the increasingly soft margins? Either that, or the incessant rain would give you double pneumonia before your heart ever skipped a beat.

The headline findings of this Swedish survey reveal that car owners with a television are 27 per cent more likely to suffer heart attacks than people who have neither. This is very bad news for the electronic and motor industry at a time of year when many of thinking of updating one or other.

But what would life be without a car or a television? There are, of course, those clean living people who choose to live an entirely fulfilling life without either and there are those who can afford neither – but by and large, transport and entertainment are an acceptable part of the normal fabric of family life.

So telling people they’ll live longer if they walk and don’t sit down is hardly at the cutting edge of new medical thinking – but blaming it on cars and television might well be seen as passing the buck for the difficulties so many have in receiving medical attention when they need it because consultants are so overpaid and health care is so overpriced.

And though this research was headquartered in Sweden, it’s a global study – covering more than 29,000 people in 52 countries – which showed that working up a light sweat may be the best preventative medicine against heart failure.

If a good sweat is the secret to success, Christy Moore will live forever.

It didn’t take this study, published in the European Heart Journal, to determine that exercise is good for the heart. But it’s quite a jump to basically suggest everyone who owns a telly is a couch potato.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.