Small habits lead to big weight: TV and soda pop

Small choices that add up. Potato chips or corn chips while I watch my reality TV stars? Maybe I’ll take a side of 16.8 pounds with that and good dose of diabetes. It all adds up.

The first long term study to determine the affect of sitting around snacking has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the results are a little alarming. Slow steady weight gain goes unnoticed, but when you see the data, charted on a graph it’s hard to feel anything but panic.

The study was led by a Harvard team that followed over 120,000 people, tracking their personal data and lifestyle changes every three months for twenty years. These people were all normal weight when they started. Over the course of the study, they gained almost 3.5 pounds every four years for a total of 16.8 pound weight gain average.

Foods that added the most weight included potato chips, potatoes, sugar sweetened beverages unprocessed red meats and processed meats. All this weight increases diagnoses of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease and some cancers. Obesity related diseases cost the US $147 billion a year.

The Harvard team suggests that just tiny changes could have huge impact on health. No more soft drinks and reduce the sugary juices. Don’t sit idly watching TV eating worthless snack foods. Over a four year period, watching TV one hour a day put on nearly half a pound. Sleeping more than six hours at night also helped keep weight down.

Even people who exercised lightly or moderately were better at keeping the weight gain at bay than people who did nothing or exercised sporadically.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine, Reuters