Study: Watching too much TV could make toddlers fat

MONTREAL, Canada - You may want to more closely monitor your child's TV time at an early age. Scientists are now finding a correlation between hours spent watching TV and waist size, even in toddlers.

A study by the University of Montreal found that every extra hour spent watching TV by a toddler puts on extra inches on a child's waist by age 10.

Kids who watched 18 hours a week were a quarter inch bigger than their peers by age 10, according to researchers.

Researchers at the University of Montreal found that the average amount of television watched by the children at the start of the study was 8.8 hours a week. The amount of TV time increased on average by six hours over the next two years. By the end of the study, 15 percent of the children in the study were watching more than 18 hours per week, according to their parents.

Experts say children should not watch more than two hours of TV a day.

To read the full study, go to http://www.ijbnpa.org/content/9/1/87/abstract .