“… motor vehicles discourage walking.”

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.

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

“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.

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.

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

“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.

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.

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