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According to the experts,

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 “… motor vehicles discourage walking.”
What an insight!

Car owners with a television are 27 percent more likely to suffer heart attacks than people who have neither, according to a global study on physical exercise and heart disease published Wednesday.

It’s hard to know where to begin. The article tells us that the lead researcher is “Claes Held, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden” and that the study was published in “the European Heart Journal.” We are also told that the study covered “more than 29,000 people in 52 countries.” Isn’t that nice? A sample that represents 4/1000th of 1% of the population.
Of course, there’s no actual link to the study, or even any real citation information. But here’s all you need to know from this scientific study– at least all the unnamed author of the article thinks you need to know. All emphases mine. 

(Information on Mississippi also below the fold.) 


Held and colleagues also investigated whether owning an automobile, motorcycle, stereo, TV, computer, land or livestock influenced heath outcomes.

[snip]

“Subjects who owned a car and a TV” — 25 percent of the respondents in poorer and middle-income nations, and two-thirds in rich ones — “were at higher risk of myocardial infarction,” the medical term for a heart attack, the researchers concluded.

Careful throwing those medical terms around. (Why is poor relative and rich absolute?)

[snip]

Possessing these coveted consumer items made it about four times more likely in poorer and middle-income countries — and twice as likely in wealthy ones — that people would be sedentary, especially at work.

Let me see if my poor stupid Mississippi brain has this right. Owning a car and a television causes– that’s what it says, “made it”– the probability that people will sit down at work to increase. 

What if you own more than one television set? Are you then 2X four times more likely to sit at work?

The implication, in other words, is that TVs breed couch potatoes, and motor vehicles discourage walking.

That’s some stretch, isn’t it? This isn’t just science– this is ROCKET SCIENCE! (And how about those TVs spitting out couch potatoes when no one was looking!)

“If we want to support healthy longevity, we should put a stop to the pandemic of sedantism,” Emiline Van Craenenbroeck and Viviane Conraads, both of Antwerp University Hospital Belgium, noted in a commentary in the same journal.

Expert commentary. I take it you both were walking to work while you penned that proclamation? Of course not. You take the train.

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According to the New America Foundation, 8% of Mississippians have heart disease, putting Mississippi at #3 (bad) among the states. According to the Centers for Disease Control, between 2000-2006 the average annual mortality rate due to heart disease in Mississippi was 597 per 100,000 population. US average was 428.

Stupid common sense suggests that if more Mississippians did more walking and less television watching Mississippians would be a healthier lot. But just how, exactly, are the experts going to “put a stop to” our sitting instead of walking? Are they going to come and take my TVs? My truck, too? 

ROTFLMAO. Can’t you just see that? Some expert Belgiums coming to Mississippi to take away our TVs and trucks.

Let’s think this through a bit more. I’m guessing here, but I’d bet the number of people in Mississippi who don’t own or have access to a car is greater than the number who don’t have a television in the place where they live. So not counting the number who have no car and no TV by choice (some Oxfordians, maybe?), my guess would be that Mississippians with no car and no TV have a lot more strikes against them with respect to heart disease than those who watch TV and drive. If you look at the map at the CDC link, you might be tempted to think living in The Delta causes heart disease.


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I truly wish this “study” had been conducted by “researchers” in the US. I’d have loved to see how big their grant was.

3 Responses

  1. It tells me that they live in a relatively poor country, where cars are not an option.

    They probably don’t die of heart attacks because they die of other causes before they have a chance to die of heart attacks…

  2. True that.

    One of the things that I cannot get away from here at the Farm is being critical of science reporting. I’m critical of science– back in the old days criticism is what drove science, so I’m a fan of being critical of science– but science reporting is horrible. Just horrible.

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