Remember when you were a kid and your parents would always nag at you to stop watching TV, get off the couch and go outside to play? How many of us actually listened to them instead of telling them the natural line of, “In a minute,” or my personal favourite, “The show’s almost done, I’ll go outside afterwards!” Well, a startling report showed that males should have listened to their parents as excessive TV watching could slash a man’s sperm count by as much as 44%!
Couch Potato (clusterchallenge via Flickr Creative
The study that this news report was based off of was done by the Harvard School of Public Health . In their study, experimenters wanted to know if there was a relationship between physical activity and TV watching with semen quality in young men as there had been a decline in the sperm quality of Western men in the past decade. The 189 men in the study were based in Rochester NY, aged between 18 and 22 years old, were given a questionnaire to assess their physical activity (h/week of moderate and vigorous exercise) and TV watching (h/week of TV, video or DVD watching) over the past 3 months. Their semen quality was also assessed on 4 different levels: concentration, motility, morphology, and total count. The researchers found that the men with moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and less TV watching were associated with a higher total sperm count and concentration than those men who watched 20 or more hours of TV a week. Men with more than 15 hours of moderate-to-vigorous had a 73% higher sperm concentration than those who worked out less than 5 hours a week while those who watched greater than 20 hours of TV a week had a 44% lower sperm concentration than those who watched no TV a week. However, sperm motility and morphology were both found to not be affected by physical activity or TV watching.
Now, before all the guys reading this start to panic, they should know that only an association was found between the two. Researchers conducting the study couldn’t prove that less TV and more exercise would actually improve sperm quality or vice versa. Also, how moderate-to-vigorous physical activity could lead to an increased quality of sperm, and why watching more TV led to a decreased sperm count was also unknown as of now but there were speculations as to why they occurred. One such speculation was that regular exercise caused serum testosterone, which was involved in sperm production, to increase causing a modest increase in semen quality. Scientists also believed that regular physical activity could also prevent against oxidative stress damage, protecting sperm. On the flip side, it’s believed that being scrunched up while sitting on the couch could lead to a higher scrotal temperature causing sperm count to decrease
YouTube video for those who don’t want to read my post by SourceFed
Even with this association, the authors of the study are quick to point out that further research was required. This was due to the fact that their experiment had a small sample size, a risk that other factors may have affected their results as well as the fact subjects self-reported both exercise levels and TV watching. However, that doesn’t mean the results from this study should be totally forgotten. Men should be getting out for regular exercise instead of being stuck in a sitting position all day. So get up, got outside for a walk, or if all else fails, you could always just watch TV while standing up.
– Ho-Hin Leung
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