Major gym chain to stop showing cable news channels over health concerns
Say goodbye to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and others
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The reality television star turned President — and the cable news coverage of him — isn’t good for your health.
That’s at least what Minnesota-based gym chain Life Time Fitness intimated when announcing that it would no longer play America’s major cable news networks on the television screens in its 128 fitness centres across the US and Canada.
Combining cardio workouts and cable news, the chain said, doesn’t align with a “healthy way of life”, the chain said.
The gym chain said that it would no longer play CNN, Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, according to the St Paul Pioneer Press. Instead, they’ll jump to more family-oriented programming that can be found on networks like USA, A&E, Discovery, HGTV, local stations, and ESPN, a spokesperson told that newspaper.
“It is always our goal to meet the majority of members’ expressed requests and we believe this change is consistent with the desires of overall membership as well as our healthy way of life philosophy,” the company said in a statement posted on Twitter last week.
The decision comes from our “commitment to provide family oriented environments free of consistently negative or politically charged content,” the statement said.
It’s not the first time that news and politics — which has been described as increasingly polarising in recent years — has been described as unhealthy. It’s been just over a year since Donald Trump was elected president, and in that time people have reported an increased level of anxiety and symptoms related to that news.
Since the start of Mr Trump’s rise to power, people have been reporting a rise in anxiety-related illnesses — and some medical professionals are reporting relapses on psychological disorders. Those symptoms have included, according to anecdotal evidence from a Washington Post columnist, things like teeth grinding, shortness of breath, stomach ulcers, indigestion, and depression, among many others.
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