Maybe that epic eight-hour marathon of your favorite show isn't such a great idea after all.
The results of a new study published on Tuesday suggest that men who watch too much television and don't get enough exercise are significantly affecting their sperm count. And not for the better.
Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the study found that men who watch approximately 20 hours of television a week had almost half the sperm count of men who said they watched very little, or none whatsoever.
Meanwhile, men who exercised for 15 hours or more every week, had a sperm count that was 73 percent higher than men who only exercised for five hours or less.
U.S. researched surveyed 189 young men between the ages of 18 and 22, asking them about their exercise routine, diet, television watching schedule, and then requested a sperm sample for analysis.
Despite the results, scientists found that no sperm count was low enough to harm an individual's ability to produce children.
No one knows for sure why semen quality in men has degraded over the last few decades, but according to the CBC some scientists "suspect that sedentary lifestyles may warm the scrotum and affect semen concentrations. Physical inactivity has also been linked to increased levels of oxidative stress, in which rogue oxygen compounds degrade cells."
The researchers behind the study acknowledge that they only surveyed a small group of volunteers and reached their conclusions based off of one sperm sample per individual.
According to Dr. Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, the results shouldn't be discounted, even if definitive conclusions can't be drawn yet.
"I would agree that there is evidence to suggest that moderate exercise could change men's physiology sufficiently to improve testicular health," he said. "However, it remains to be seen if coaxing a TV watching couch potato into doing some regular exercise could actually improve his sperm count. Or whether there exists an unknown fundamental difference between men who like exercise and those who do not."
Pacey went on to say that there are also studies that found too much exercise to harm the production of sperm, noting that what kind of exercise was recorded in this particular study was not mentioned.
"My advice would be everything in moderation - and that includes time in the gym as well as watching TV (or perhaps both at the same time!)."
