Saturday, December 16, 2006

Media-saturated Americans are world's fattest people

The average American spends about 8 1/2 hours each day consuming media. That includes watching television, using a computer, listening to the radio, going to the movies and reading.

On average, Americans spend more than 64 days each year watching television. That's more than two months solid...with no sleep.

The next time you claim you don't have time, consider taking back some from your TV.

The media-consumption figures come from the Census Bureau's 2007 Statistical Abstract.

The figures show that we also remain the fattest people on the planet and have more than doubled our consumption of high-fructose corn syrup per person in the past 25 years.

Connecting the dots: Highly sugared foods are intensively advertised in the media. And sedentary media consumption burns few calories.

Broadcast television viewing and print reading dropped between 2000 and 2005, according to the census statistics. Internet use jumped in the last five years from 104 hours to 183 hours and is projected to continue to rise as more people get their information from the Web and make purchases on-line.

Last year 13 million Americans created blogs.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rick --
Good stuff, very important for people to actually see the "raw" data and wake up to the massive amounts of media we shovel into our brains on a daily basis. Here's something that should grab attention. "Miss USA" is the lead story around the country today (Dec. 19) and here in Kentucky (where she is from, and where I work) she will lead every news cast we have. Here's another story today that has received no attention at all from local or national media. A soldier at Fort Campbell KY, is in jail accused of killing his wife when he tried to electrocute her in their shower. One isn't news, the other is bad news. I'll be outside taking a walk around the lake, enjoying the natural world.

David Zimmerman

2:05 PM  

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