Henna Brown Jr

BIOL 4500

Diabetes and Nintendo

Diabetes is growing each year and continues to grow at an unpredictable rate. By the year 2050, it is predicted that 1 in 3 individuals in the United States will be diabetic (Intermountain 2009). Food we eat is usually broken down into glucose and taken into our cells by insulin for energy use. With diabetes, the body still breaks food down into glucose, but now either the body has trouble getting glucose out of the bloodstream into the cells, or body’s cells do not respond to the insulin in the bloodstream. This leaves glucose in the bloodstream which can cause many other health issues such as neuropathy, hypertension, and heart disease just to name a few (Living Well 2009). Type 2 is the diabetes that is growing dramatically in the United States, and is also the one that can be prevented.

There are several factors that have been shown that increase your risk of becoming a type 2 diabetic. One of which is being overweight. Being overweight is not a direct cause to diabetes, but it definitely can trigger it in some people. Too much body fat causes the cells in the body to be resistant to insulin, especially for those with the excess fat around the waistline. Once diagnosed with diabetes, what you eat becomes very important, so is how much you eat. Eating too much food makes it very difficult to manage your glucose levels in the blood. It also makes it harder to manage a healthy weight. Maintaining a healthy weight is very important, especially for a type 2 diabetic. Excess body fat has a negative effect on the body’s ability to make and use its own insulin (Living Well  2009). Unfortunately, people with diabetes usually are obese and have excess body fat.

Studies show that the incidence of obesity in adolescents increases each year (Carroll  2010). With the increase number of those cases also comes an increased number of diagnoses of type 2 diabetes. Children are eating a lot more and becoming less active. One study shows that every hour children watch TV or are playing video games, their risk for obesity increases (Stettler 2004). As video games becomes more and more popular and continue to grow, so do the incidence of childhood obesity in the United States.

 Video gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry. What started as a technological experiment at a science fair has now become one of the biggest entertainment industries in the whole world. Video games have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment for young adolescents. Even so much that old ways of entertaining such as playing outside have become obsolete. Young people that play video games have even shown some characteristics of addiction. Video game addiction may seem unusual, but it is a reality to some. In fact studies show that 30% of adolescents that play video games show addiction-like symptoms such as social impairments and major health issues such as obesity and increased cholesterol (Morrison et al. 2016).  Video game addiction produces similar symptoms to those with substance and behavioral addictions. Like those cases, video game addicts have difficulty controlling their craving to play and time they spend playing. Not that a withdrawal from video games is the same as that of a substance abuser, but video game players also feel a sense of withdrawal and  avoid that feeling by playing more and longer.  By doing so, the time spent being active decreases to fulfill their need to play more.

  Adolescents that are considered addicted to video games usually stay up late and lose sleep, and eat unhealthy snacks well past midnight to stay up. This snacking to stay awake includes any food that contains a lot of sugar or caffeine such as soda or candy. A combination of eating late at night and eating unhealthy will lead to obesity and potentially diabetes (Farajian et al. 2014). In addition to eating junk food late at night is the loss of sleep and its effects on the human body (Morrison et al. 2016). The hunger hormones in our body, leptin and ghrelin, are affected negatively when sleep is lost. Leptin comes from fat cells and it suppresses appetite, while ghrelin comes from the stomach and it stimulates the appetite. Studies show that when an individual frequently stays up past the normal time of sleep according to their natural circadian rhythm, leptin levels decrease while ghrelin increases, thus increasing their desire to eat late while playing games (Jok et al. 2007).

Now I can admit, I absolutely love playing video games, Call of Duty to be specific. Call of Duty is a first-person shooter game where the TV screen is basically what you would see if you were the character in the game. You experience the gun fight through the eyes of the character, almost taking on the identity of that character as if you were actually there. As a child, I loved playing cops and robbers with my brothers and neighborhood friends and any other game that involved guns and bad guys. That love for imagining I was shooting bad guys faded as I grew into my teen years, but was rekindled when I was introduced to first-person shooter video games. Now, I don’t have to imagine shooting bad guys, I can actually see it. In a way it brought out the “kid” in me, and being a kid was fun, and having fun is addicting. But I am by far not a couch potato that plays video games all day in my parent’s basement. I played organized sports year round my whole life even into college, so I guess you can say I am fairly active. I don’t play football or basketball video games because I play pick-up ball regularly, which is a healthier alternative. As for Call of Duty, it is a little more difficult to find a better alternative. I tried air-soft tournaments and paint balling and it was so fun. The only problem was it quickly became expensive to do it regularly versus playing pick-up basketball at a church down the street for free. Finding alternatives for video games that promote exercise and activity may be difficult to some, as it is for me. Especially with the advances in technology and the availability of such games, it will be extremely difficult to stray from the convenience of video games in the comfort of our homes, even in the palm of our hands with cell phones. As technology continues to find innovative ways to make lives easier, people will only become more and more inactive and at risk for obesity and eventually diabetes.

One thing about the video game industry is that they seem to have caught on to the decline in health trends seen in young people. They realize the negative effects they have on people, especially young adolescents who spend countless hours glued to the television screen killing zombies and racing sports cars. Sony and Microsoft continue to make and develop their consoles to improve the game play experience by enhancing the graphics and resolution capabilities. What once looked like a couple dozen pixels in a square inch has now become a hundred, and only continues to get better. But Sony and Microsoft have also developed features to add to the console that offer players a more interactive virtual reality experience. With games ranging from sports to dancing, these new virtual reality features promote fitness and cardiovascular health. It changes the game playing experience from a sedentary one to an interactive physical experience. By playing different games such as snowboarding, boxing, and obstacle courses, players can use and build muscles they don't usually use, increase blood circulation, and have fun too while breaking a sweat at the same time (Graf et al. 2009). The future of gaming is even brighter. Virtual reality (VR) will become more of a reality as companies are now releasing VR headsets where you can essentially “live” in an interactive 3D world. This will allow players to stand up and physically interact with their virtual world, instead of sitting on the couch for hours staring at a TV screen. These interactive games may even be able to prevent diseases like hyperlipidemia, hypertension, and of course, diabetes. Engaging in activity up to 5 days a week for 30 minutes each help prevent these life threatening conditions. The hope is that this will be a solution to obesity in young kids, thus decreasing the incidence of diabetes diagnoses in young people.

Obesity in young children continues to grow each year, and directly correlated is the increase of type 2 diabetes in young people as well. As we think of the root cause of this growth, we can attribute it to a combination of possible factors, one of which is the advancements in video games. With the mild addicting properties of video games come bad eating habits and less desire to be active, putting young people at risk for life threatening diseases like diabetes. Video games are not going away any time soon, but alternative forms of video games such as VR are making their way into the growing video game industry in hopes of not only improving the gaming experience but also promoting activity and decreasing obesity, and hopefully diabetes as well.

Works Cited

Caroll, M.D., Curtin, L.R., Flegal, K.M., Lamb, M.M., Ogden, C.L. (2010).  Prevalence of High Body Mass Index in US Children and Adolescents.  The Journal of the American Medical Association.  242-249

Farajian, P., Malisova, O., Panagiotakos, D.B., Risvas, G., Zampelas, A. (2014).  Hierarchical Analysis of Dietary, Lifestyle and Family Environment Risk Factors for Childhood Obesity: the GRECO Study.  European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.  1107-1112

Graf, D. L., Hester, C.N., Pratt, L.V., Short, K.R., (2009). Playing Active Video Games Increases Energy Expenditure in Children.  American Academy of Pediatrics, 124

Jok, M.D., Jokobsdottir, S., Drent, M.L., (2007).  The Role of Leptin and Ghrelin in the Regulation of Food Intake and Body Weight in Humans.  International Association of the Study of Obesity, 1-14.

Living Well: A Diabetes Care Handbook  (2009).  Intermountain Healthcare.  

Morrison, K.M., Romashkin, A., Turel, O., (2016).  Health Outcomes of Information System Use Lifestyles among Adolescents: Videogame Addiction, Sleep Curtailment and Cardio-Metabolic Deficiencies.  Public Library of Science. 1-14.

Stettler, N. , (2004). Video Games, TV Double Childhood Obesity Risk. Obesity Research, 896-903.