SOME LIKE IT SLOTH

‘Laziest’ nations

Step on it, Indonesia! The Southeast Asian nation is the laziest country on the planet, while China is the most active, a stepcounting study has found.

Using data from smartphones’ fitness-tracking functions, Stanford University researchers tallied the steps of more than 700,000 people across the globe.

Indonesians, they found, walked the least, averaging just 3,513 steps per day, or roughly a mile and a half.

By contrast, China topped the study’s ranking of 45 countries, with residents trekking 6,189 steps a day, or nearly three miles, on average.

Americans, meanwhile, had trouble getting off the couch, placing 30th with just 4,774 steps per day — well below the worldwide average of 4,961, according to the study, published this week in the journal Nature.

The US fared worse when the researchers looked at what they called “activity inequality,” or the gap between a country’s highest and lowest steppers.

The larger the gap, they found, the higher the country’s rate of obesity.

“If you think about some people in a country as ‘activity rich’ and others as ‘activity poor,’ the size of the gap between them is a strong indicator of obesity levels in that society,” said Scott Delp, who co-led the study.

The US had the fifthworst activity inequality, behind Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada and Egypt.

In the overall step-count ranking, the most active nations trailing China were Ukraine (with 6,107 steps), Japan (6,010), Russia (5,969) and Spain (5,936).

And rounding out the five laziest countries were Saudi Arabia (with 3,807 steps), Malaysia (3,963), the Philippines (4,008) and South Africa (4,105).

“The study is 1,000 times larger than any previous study on human movement,” said Delp, who is a professor of bioengineering and the director of the Mobilize Center at Stanford University.