Health risks
A quarter of the world’s adults are not active enough
The World Health Organisation wants governments to put in place infrastructure that promotes walking and cycling for transport, and for sports and recreation.
More than a quarter of the world’s adults — about 1.4 billion people — take too little exercise, putting them at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancers, according to a study led by the World Health Organisation (WHO). In 2016, about one in three women and one in four men worldwide were not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity to stay healthy. This requires at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week. There has been no improvement in global levels of physical activity since 2001, according to the study, which was conducted by the WHO researchers and published on Tuesday in The Lancet Global Health journal. The highest rates of lack of exercise in 2016 were in adults in Kuwait, American Samoa, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, where more than half of all adults were not active enough to protect their health. By comparison, about 40% of adults in the US, 36% in Britain and 14% in China did too little exercise to ...
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