The fact that smoking has direct negative effects on health is well documented.  Smoking could also adversely impact the health of others in a family through substitution effects within a household’s expenditures.

In the United States, about 19% of children and adolescents are obese. Without any change in eating and lifestyle patterns, overweight children are more likely to grow up overweight, which contributes to the odds of their becoming diabetic later in life.

Televisions entered U.S. households in large numbers after World War II, and personal computers became widespread in business in the 1980s. With these technological innovations, leisure and then work time in the United States began to increasingly center on screen-based systems. Millions of people now spend workdays in front of computers and then retire to their houses to watch TV, play videogames or surf the web.

In the 2010 election cycle, some 54% of adults used the Internet for political purposes, far exceeding the 2006 midterm digital usage rate of 31%.