03 | 19 | 2008 Posted By Regan Zambri & Long

Interventions to Restrict Kids' Television, Computer Time Result in Weight Loss: New Study

Reducing the television and computer time of obese children by half can subsequently reduce the amount of food they eat and help them lose weight -- even if those children don't increase their physical activity at all.  The finding is the result of a new study published in a recent edition of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

In this latest study, researchers studied 70 obese children between the ages of 4 and 7 who watched television or played computer games at least 14 hours per week.  The researchers installed monitoring devices on every TV or computer used by one half of the 70 children -- devices designed to automatically reduce their screen time by 10% per week until a 50% reduction had been achieved.  Each user of the equipped televisions and computers was issued a unique identification code to help track his or her own viewing time.  The other 35 children participating in the study received no viewership-restricting devices.  All 70 children in the study were rewarded for the entire length of the study with incentives such as stickers or small amounts of money for reducing their own screen time. 

By the end of the study, researchers observed that children without electronic time-limiting devices reduced their television viewership by an average of 5.2 hours per week.  The children who used electronic time-limiting devices, however, achieved an average reduction of 17.5 hours per week.

Furthermore, the children with time-limiting devices also achieved greater weight loss than their unrestricted counterparts -- a somewhat unusual phenomenon, as researchers noted no significant differences in the level of physical activity of each group.  Authors of the study attribute the difference in weight loss to a mix of several mechanisms, including television disruption of normal dining patterns and exposure to fast food and beverage commercials on television, among other considerations. 

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