Yes, too many hours playing video games is bad for your health.
Your Back Pager scribbler counts himself lucky to have been born so long ago that as a teenager video games were still in their infancy and had little impact on an otherwise easily distracted adolescence.
We were vaguely aware that a phenomenon called Space Invaders had invaded our space, but we were much too busy pooling our resources for the clandestine acquisition of alcohol to be much bothered by it.
Fast-forward several decades and things are very different. So much so that boffins at Australia’s Curtin University have taken a deep dive into the playing of video games to ponder the question of how much is too much?
Publishing their findings in the most recent edition of the journal Nutrition, the researchers have come up with the nice round number of 10 hours – a week that is.
For the parents of teenage or 20-something gaming fans out there, that’s less than an hour and a half per day.
Any more than that amount of screen-twiddling could have, the study says, a “significant impact on young people’s diet, sleep and body weight”.
To reach this conclusion, the study team surveyed 317 students from five Australian universities with a median age of 20.
Using self-reported data on hours spent playing video games, the participants were spilt into three cohorts: low gamers (zero to five hours a week), moderate (five to 10 hours) and high (more than 10 hours a week).
The team found while low and moderate gamers reported similar health outcomes, results worsened significantly once gaming exceeded 10 hours a week.
Deleterious health effects included increased obesity rates and poorer quality diet and greater sleep disruption.
Importantly, the researchers found that it was not the gaming itself that led to these outcomes, but the time spent on the activity that was the critical factor.
“The real differences emerged in those gaming more than 10 hours a week, who showed clear divergence from the rest of the sample,” Professor Mario Siervo from the Curtin School of Population Health, said in a media release.
“Each additional hour of gaming per week was linked to a decline in diet quality, even after accounting for stress, physical activity and other lifestyle factors,” he said.
Unfortunately, these findings do little to combat our stereotypical image of a heavy gamer as being an overweight, pizza-munching youngster with greasy lank hair.
It may be quite unfair, but if the XXL black death-metal T-shirt fits, then you’ve got to wear it.
Healthier screen-time options include sending story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
