How harmful is it to health while watching TV while eating?

According to experts, if you do not want your child to be obese and have digestive problems, you must immediately correct the child's habit of eating and watching TV.

Many parents have a habit of comforting their children by showing them cartoons, entertainment programs on TV, or tablets. In fact, this habit is not only unhealthy, but also causes many major harms to the child's health. Let's join aFamilyToday Health to follow the below sharing to understand why you should stop feeding your child while watching TV.

Why should I stop feeding my child while watching TV?

According to research by British scientists, on average, children spend about 2 hours a day watching TV. Watching TV is not a bad habit, but if a child eats while watching TV, it is not a good habit because it can cause harm such as:  

1. Weight gain is difficult to control

According to American scientists, eating while watching TV makes children not realize when they feel full. This is because all of the child's attention has been drawn to television programs. When the "full switch" in the brain is disabled, the child will tend to consume more food than the actual needs, leading to uncontrolled weight gain, causing obesity .

2. Gastrointestinal disturbances

Medically, letting your child watch TV while eating can affect the body's ability to digest food. This habit will distract the child's thoughts, thereby reducing the taste and appetite of food.

In addition, eating while watching TV also causes signals from the brain to the stomach to be blurred by television programs. Since then, the stomach does not secrete enough gastric juice, making the food not digested well and the body is also harder to absorb nutrients. Over time, the digestive system will be disordered, easily causing many other health problems.

3. Reduce metabolic rate

Eating while watching TV can reduce the speed of metabolism in the body, causing food to be digested more slowly, leading to a accumulation of fat in the abdomen.

4. Stomach ulcers and pain

Eating while watching TV will cause a large amount of blood to be sent to the brain, so it cannot help the stomach digest food. Undigested foods will accumulate and become good prey for bacteria to multiply, causing stomach problems .

5. Lack of interaction between family members

If both parents and children have a habit of eating while watching TV, the whole family will have less conversation and less time to bond with each other in this busy time.

How to change the habit of eating and watching TV for children?

Young children may eat more while watching a show. When a child is distracted, it is easier for parents to feed the child. If this happens regularly, it will easily form bad habits, children will not eat without watching TV or playing on the tablet.

You can change this habit for your child. At first,  children will be fussy and angry but gradually they will get used to and learn how to eat without watching TV or phone. Here are some tips to fix the habit of eating while watching TV for your child that you can try:

Make sure your baby is feeling hungry so he can focus on eating. This means that you should not offer a lot of junk food near the time of the main meal. If your child is hungry, he won't care if he has a television or phone in front of him.

At the beginning of adjusting this routine, give your child 5 minutes of food and watch TV, then move away. If your child is fussy, not eating enough, you can feed him again, but do not let him watch TV. This will make your child gradually forget the habit of eating while watching TV.

You can also make a rule that when eating, don't watch TV. If your child still wants to watch the show they like, you can give in by recording the show, when the child finishes eating, they will open to watch.

The whole family must eat together and not watch TV. Otherwise, the child will not be able to correct this habit.

If you've applied all of the above and still don't work, you should consult your doctor for help. Turning off the television while eating is not a simple thing. Therefore, it is best not to form this habit in the first place.

Tips to keep children away from TV, phone while eating

When it comes time to feed your baby, you should patiently seduce your baby, not using the TV or tablet.

When feeding your baby, you should not use the phone to let your baby understand that this is the time to eat, not to do other things.

Each meal should only last about 15-30 minutes.

Let your child cook with his mother in the kitchen so that he or she will feel more excited when eating the dishes she cooks.

Let children sit and eat with the whole family to gradually form healthy eating habits.

Life is getting more and more busy, sometimes meals are the only time of the day when the whole family can gather together and gather together to share their day. So, don't let bad habits while eating while watching TV affect this.