GIRLS NEED MORE EXERCISE

Only 15pc of adolescent girls worldwide get prescribed amount of physical activity compared with 22pc for boys

FOUR in five adolescents worldwide do not get enough physical activity, to the detriment of their health, the World Health Organisation said yesterday, warning that girls especially need more exercise.

In its first-ever report on global trends for adolescent physical activity, the United Nations health agency stressed that urgent action was needed to get teens off their screens and moving more.

“We absolutely need to do more or we will be looking at a very bleak health picture for these adolescents,” said study co-author Leanne Riley.

The report, which was published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal, is based on surveys conducted between 2001 and 2016 of some 1.6 million students aged between 11 and 17 across 146 countries.

It found that 81 per cent did not meet the WHO recommendation of at least an hour a day of physical activity, such as walking, playing, riding a bike or taking part in organised sports.

This is worrying, since regular physical activity provides a host of health benefits, from improved heart and respiratory fitness to better cognitive function.

Exercise is also seen as an important tool to stem the obesity epidemic. But despite ambitious global targets for increasing physical activity, the study found virtually no change over the 15year-period it covered.

While the report does not specifically study the reasons for adolescent physical inactivity, she suggested that the “electronic revolution... seems to have changed adolescents’ movement patterns and encourages them to sit more, to be less active”.

The authors pointed to poor infrastructure and insecurity that made it difficult for adolescents to walk or cycle to school.

The study found that physical inactivity among adolescents were persistently high across all regions and all countries, ranging from 66 per cent in Bangladesh to 94 per cent in South Korea.

“We find a high prevalence pretty much everywhere,” said lead author Regina Guthold, noting that in “many countries, between 80 and 90 per cent of adolescents (are) not meeting recommendations for physical activity”.

And the situation was particularly concerning for adolescent girls, with only 15 per cent worldwide getting the prescribed amount of physical activity, compared with 22 per cent for boys.

In fact, girls were less active in all but four countries — Afghanistan, Samoa, Tonga and Zambia.

And while the situation for boys improved between 2001 and 2016, with inactivity levels dropping from 80 to 78 per cent, girls remained at 85 per cent.

In a number of countries, the gender gap appeared to be linked to cultural pressure on girls to stay home and shun sports, as well as concerns over safety.

But Guthold said “a lot of physical activity promotion is more tailored towards boys”.

This, she said, seems to explain the fact that the biggest gender gap could be found in the United States and Ireland, where the difference in activity levels between boys and girls was more than 15 percentage points.

“In the US, we see that since 2001, levels of insufficient activity have decreased in boys by seven per cent, while there has been no change in girls,” she said.

In a bid to encourage healthier living, countries have set a target of reducing physical inactivity among adults and youth by 15 per cent between 2018 and 2030.

But Riley noted that meeting that target would be a challenge after driving down adolescent inactivity by a mere percentage point over the past 15 years.

“We need to do more if we want to halt the rise in obesity in this age group and promote better physical activity,” she said.