Youths turn into layabouts – study
Four in five adolescents worldwide do not get enough physical activity, to the detriment of their health, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday, warning that girls especially need more exercise.
In its first ever report on global trends for adolescent physical activity, the UN 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,” study co-author Leanne Riley said.
The report, which was published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent
Health journal, is based on data from surveys conducted between 2001 and 2016 of 1.6 million students between the ages of 11 and 17 across 146 countries. It found 81% did not meet the WHO recommendation of at least an hour a day of physical activity. This is worrying, since regular physical activity provides a host of benefits, from improved heart and respiratory fitness to better cognitive function.
But despite ambitious global targets for increasing physical activity, the study found virtually no change over the 15-year-period it covered. Riley suggested that the “electronic revolution ... seems to have changed adolescents’ movement patterns and encourages them to sit more, to be less active”.
The study found that levels of physical inactivity among adolescents were persistently high across all countries, ranging from 66% in Bangladesh to 94% in South Korea. Lead author Regina Guthold noted that in “many, many countries, between 80 and 90% of adolescents (are) not meeting the recommendations for physical activity”.
And for adolescent girls, only 15% worldwide get the prescribed amount of physical activity, compared to 22% for boys. – AFP
Digital revolution has changed movement patterns