Between war, debt, politics and the stinking economy, Americans have a lot to worry about.

Add one more thing — our TV sets are killing us.

People who do not get enough physical activity are more prone to a host of ailments, from heart disease to diabetes, which shorten their lives. And most people are not moving as they are tubing, they’re eating.

What’s unnerving about a new study is the way researchers have quantified the effects of heavy TV watching and concluded that excess TV can be as hard on your health as smoking and obesity.

An article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine claims that every hour of excess TV watching cuts an adult’s life expectancy by 22 minutes.

The researchers pointed out that each cigarette cuts about 11 minutes off a person’s lifespan, or about the same as a half hour of excess TV viewing.

A.C. Nielsen reports that the average American now watches four hours of television per day. This has steadily increased over the years, as the number of TV sets in homes has gone up. There are now more TV sets in the average household than there are people.

In case you’re wondering, 28 hours per week works out to two months of steady, around-the-clock, TV watching per year. That’s two months that could have been spent on a hobby, learning a language, volunteering or, yes, exercising.

So don’t say you don’t have the time.

Australian researchers have parsed the grim statistics a bit differently. They followed 8,800 people for six years while the test subjects recorded their TV viewing habits.

The conclusion: each hour per day spent watching TV was linked to an 18 percent increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 9 percent increased chance of dying of cancer.

People who watched TV more than four hours per day had an 80 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who watched fewer than two hours a day.

What’s really worrisome about the results is that more and more Americans spend their working lives, not just their leisure hours, sitting behind computer screens doing nothing more strenuous than tapping on keyboards and answering telephone calls.

Combine this with a taste for fast food and snacking, and we have a rapidly unfolding health crisis that we can’t blame on anyone but ourselves.

The solution, of course, is obvious.

A study published last week in the medical Journal “The Lancet” showed that it doesn’t take much activity to make a difference. Sedentary people who added just 15 minutes per day of exercise reduced their risk of death by 14 percent and increased their life expectancy by three years.

What’s more, each additional 15 minutes of exercise reduced the risk of death by an additional 4 percent.

Sun Journal Web Editor Pattie Reaves described in Sunday’s paper how she used a “Couch to 5K” program from coolrunning.com to become active and lose 50 pounds over the course of a year. The same program is also offered by the Auburn-Lewiston YMCA.

Reaves also explained how she used technology to set goals, monitor her progress and keep herself motivated. The important rules, she wrote, are to start slowly and build healthy habits into your everyday life.

The first step, of course, requires picking up the remote and turning off the TV.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.