CHILDREN’S consumption of junk food is linked directly to their television viewing habits, a study suggests.

Watching television for an hour can increase a child’s calorie intake by 167, and add more than a stone (6.4kg) to their weight during a year.

An examination of the eating and viewing habits of more than 500 children aged 11 and 12 showed that consumption of sweets and fizzy drinks increases with each additional hour spent in front of a TV screen. In particular, the children ate significantly larger quantities of the fast foods and snacks that they had seen advertised most often.

The findings, by scientists from Harvard University, will give backing to plans unveiled last month by Ofcom, the media regulator, to ban junk food adverts during programmes for the under-5s and prevent celebrities from appearing in food and drink advertising aimed at children.

The Harvard team monitored calorie consumption in their young participants, 43 per cent of whom increased their television viewing over the course of the 20-month research project.

Their results, published in the Archives of Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine, show that, on average, each extra hour of viewing led to the consumption of 167 extra calories, the equivalent of about 9 per cent of a child’s recommended daily intake.

A further study, by a team at the University of Michigan, found that younger children who were regularly exposed to two or more hours of television a day were three times more likely to be overweight than those who watched less than two hours. Exposure to television was defined as “being awake in a room when the TV is on, whether or not the child was actively watching, and including broadcast and cable TV as well as videos”, and was determined based on a questionnaire completed by the children’s mothers.

It has been estimated that British children watch as much as 53 hours of television a week, an increase of 38 hours from a decade ago. The International Obesity Taskforce claims that almost two million British schoolchildren are overweight and 700,000 are obese.

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