Diseases tied to inactivity claim 5.3 mn lives a year

Last month, researchers affiliated with the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reported that, worldwide, people's waistlines are expanding, with the total combined weight of human beings on Earth now exceeding 287 million tons. About 3.5 million tons of that global human biomass is due to obesity, a third of which exists in North America.

The study, however, did not address possible underlying causes of the ever-growing weight of nations.

But a group of groundbreaking new reports, being published online as a series today in The Lancet, suggest that voluntary physical inactivity, a practice once confined mostly to North America and parts of Europe, is spreading rapidly to the rest of the world and likely contributing materially to global gains in tonnage and declines in health.

Consider the findings of perhaps the most sobering of the new studies, which looked at the extent to which sedentary lifestyles are colonising the world.

Led by Pedro C Hallal, a professor at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, researchers turned to a large body of data about activity that the WHO has been collecting in recent years. To gather data, the WHO provides questionnaires to people in various nations that ask, in effect, how much they exercise and otherwise move in their daily lives, an admittedly inexact way to measure activity (people misremember or, for cultural or other reasons, prevaricate). But it's the best global information currently available.

The latest figures suggest that the world's population has become disturbingly inactive. According to researchers' calculations, 31.1 per cent of the world's adults, or about 1.5 billion people, are almost completely sedentary, meaning that they do not meet the minimum recommendation of 150 minutes of walking or other moderate activity per week, or about 20 minutes a day.

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