One thing I DO know is that since the 70s (the time N M brings up), outdoor recreation for young people has all but disappeared.

There are a lot of factors.

Number one is a probably general distrust in people at large. Kids (and parents) are taught to fear everyone and everything, and that the only safe places are in their own homes or their locked down, fenced off schools.

Even when kids and parents are willing to put a bit of trust in the rest of the world, often there isn’t much in the way of available play resources. Urban sprawl means you need a car to go anywhere in many places in the US, which means the parents have to make the time (and find the gas money) to drive the kids anywhere. Even then, you need somewhere to go that doesn’t cost money.  Public parks, pools, libraries, beaches, and the like are often neglected for the sake of local budget balancing. Even when they aren’t, they’re often underutilized – and nothing is less appealing than an empty park or beach to wander around by yourself.

And neighborhoods have changed from communities of people living next to each other into neatly ordered isolation unit groupings. You might be the most trusting person in the world but if you live in on a street which is always empty, where windows are always shuttered and no one answers their doors, you don’t have a neighborhood. It’s even worse in gated “communities” – the isolation is not just expected, it’s often institutionalized and enforced. I’ve had the rent-a-cops called on me by an overzealous third party for entering my next door neighbor’s open garage to return a borrowed hex wrench WHILE HE WAS IN THE GARAGE WITH ME.

This is more than just “kids are greedy hogs and parents are lazy bastards”. It’s a cultural shift which has indelibly changed the very infrastructure of outdoor play. The cost-benefit ratio has been changed. It’s much easier and cheaper to buy a computer or a video game console and play at home than it is to find an enjoyable way to play outside. Video game worlds are often very empowering, challenging, and compelling – dead neighborhoods and distrustful people are far less so.

Research reporting is really a funnel that removes accuracy. It starts with the scientists themselves who are often incapable of explaining their findings to an audience who do not share their academic backgrounds–even PhDs from other fields often don’t understand the jargon that has become invisibly pervasive in a researcher’s mental lexicon. 

Then the PR person comes in to interview and, in the process of sending drafts back and forth for the scientist to approve, has to have arguments about whether an article for a general audience can say, “plantain,” or must instead say, “plantago major” in every reference (example based on a true story). By the time the PR person and scientist have hammered out the findings into something that the PR person would be capable of understanding and wanting to read, already some the scientist is likely not completely comfortable with, but is at least truthful if not as precise as they would like. 

Then the journalist gets the approved release, and starts over, usually re-interviewing the researcher, but without the benefit of a long term relationship or a soft deadline. Having little to no advanced science education themselves, what the journalist thinks they hear is often not what the scientist is saying, and more inaccuracy is introduced into the story.

I could go on, but my point is, PR and journalists need to learn science better, yes. Also, scientists need to learn communication so they are capable of discussing their findings with people outside their field. 

But these studies asked the exact same question that you did – “Does it matter what you’re doing when you’re sitting down?” We might speculate (hypothesize) that television, computer use and video games might have different effects on heart rate, types of mental processes, and other outcomes the could affect our metabolism. If there were a huge difference between television and video games (there isn’t), the scientists would probably want to know 1) why? and 2) if we get kids to exercise and cut out television but not video games, does it make kids lose more weight?

Some very common sense recommendations can come out of these kinds of research when 1) we don’t dismiss the research without better understanding it and 2) don’t go all crazy calling it a GROUNDBREAKING FINDING.

It’s important to have an intimate understanding of sedentary behavior in order to design interventions that will be truly effective in minimizing the negative correlates of such behavior. See, for instance, Biddle et al.’s recent meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Forgive the obvious, but they’re all SEDENTARY BEHAVIOR.  If you eat too much, eat bad food, and don’t exercise — and instead opt to sit around on your ass for hours on end, you’re going to get fat.  Does it matter what you’re doing when you’re sitting down?

This sounds like the half-baked sort of study that one of the less-achieving students in school would do, simply to fulfill a course requirement.

I once spent hours trying to track down the basis for a news report saying that a particular disease could be treated with a particular nutrient.  I found the original paper, and it was about cellular mechanisms – it never mentioned the disease.  The actual source was a news conference called by the university’s PR department where one of the authors mentioned two or three diseases to put the mechanism in context.  The university’s press release slapped one of those diseases on the headline of the release – and the rest is misinformation history!

With all the fear mongering telling parents that their 14 year olds will be abducted off a bus by terrorists if they travel without parents or that if you don’t school-bus or drive your kid to school you are putting them in grave danger from strangers/friends/meteorites etc you end up looking like a bad parent if you let your kid play on the street – so *inside* the kids go in order to keep them *safe*.

But as any parent knows, put enough bored kids inside a house for long enough and you will be driven crazy – so some parents get movies, video games and computers as a substitute for the outdoor play they should be getting.

What the article should be about is how the media and other adults shame parents into keeping their kids indoors for fear of looking like bad parents, which results in endangering them with inactivity.