Study: Using Your Smartphone For More Than 5 Hours a Day Can Make You Obese

Sitting around to play with our smartphones is the norm for many of us but you might want to reconsider that after reading this. You’ve heard that using our smartphones too much is bad for our mental health, but now, a new study has shown that we can get fat if we use it for more than five hours a day.

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The study was released on 24th July at ACC’s 2019 Latin America Conference, based on research the scientists conducted at the Simón Bolívar University. According to the study, 1,060 students of the Health Sciences Faculty at the Simón Bolívar University from June to December 2018 were analysed.

Of the group, 700 of them are women and 360 of them are men, aged between 19 and 20 years old. The study found that if one uses their smartphones for more than five hours a day, then the risk of obesity increases by 43%. They also discovered that playing too much on your smartphone encourages people to develop other lifestyle habits that can increase the risk of heart disease.

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The reason is actually quite simple, if you are glued to your phone the whole day then naturally, you would be more sedentary. The researchers also found that participating students were twice as likely to drink more sugary drinks as well as eat fast food, sweets, snacks and have decreased physical activity if they used their smartphones a lot. All of these combine together to increase your weight, and it is already common knowledge that being overweight isn’t doing your body any favours.

From the participating group, the men were 36.1% likely to be overweight and 42.6% likely to be obese. Meanwhile, the women were 63.9% likely to be overweight and 57.4% likely to be obese. The scientists discovered that 26% of the subjects who were overweight and 4.6% who were obese spent more than five hours using their device.

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Mirary Mantilla-Morrón, a cardiac pulmonary and vascular rehabilitation specialist at the Health Sciences Faculty at the Simón Bolívar University in Barranquilla, Colombia, and the lead author of the study said, “Spending too much time in front of the smartphone facilitates sedentary behaviors, reduces the time of physical activity, which increases the risk of premature death, diabetes, heart disease, different types of cancer, osteoarticular discomfort and musculoskeletal symptoms.”