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| March 2009 |  |
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group of study participants in Boston walked 144 fewer steps per day
for each hour of television they watched, according to a report in
The American Journal of Public Health. And the more time they
spent looking at TV, the less likely they were to walk 10,000 steps
five days a week—the level recommended by the President’s
Council for Physical Fitness and Sports. For this research, a team led by Gary G. Bennett, Ph.D., of the Dana-Farber Center for Community-Based Research and Harvard School of Public Health, asked an ethnically diverse group of 500 women and men to  wear
pedometers for five days and to keep track of how much TV they watched.
The pedometers were masked, so the subjects could not see how well
they had done.The participants, many of whom were overweight, reported watching from zero to 14.5 hours of television a day, with an average of about four hours. This reflects the national average of four hours a day: watching TV is now the most time-consuming activity in the United States, after work and sleep. Watching TV has also been linked to excess body weight among both children and adults—perhaps because time that might otherwise be used to engage in physically active pursuits is used to watch television programs and/or because media content promotes unhealthy foods choices. It’s just not enough to encourage people not to watch television if it means they will replace it with other sedentary (typically “screen sucking”) activities, says Dr. Bennett. Physical inactivity has become pervasive in many neighborhoods that are perceived as unsafe for one reason or another (no sidewalks, crime, empty dwellings, etc.). Exercise need not be a time-consuming, all-or-nothing activity, however. In fact, you don’t have to think of it as an activity at all. For example, there are many ways to fit a few extra steps into your daily routine. The President’s Council encourages people to start small and think creatively about ways to add steps to your day. Here are a few suggestions: Take the stairs as often as possible, at home, at work and in stores. Walk to do shopping or other errands. Park several blocks from your destination and walk the rest of the way. Park at the rear of a well-lit shopping center parking lot or at the opposite end of the mall from where you need to shop. Walk your dog. Walk with your child to the park. 
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