Kids all over the world tend to be couch potatoes, a new study says, whether they live in developed countries or not.
More than 70,000 young teens from 34 countries were looked at in a study led by researcher Regina Guthold of the World Health Organization in Geneva. She and her team found that most kids are not getting enough exercise, while nearly a third are sedentary.
While thoughts of the Third World may bring to mind long walks to school and heavy physical labour for children, this is not what the researchers found.
'With regard to physical activity levels, we did not find much of a difference between poor and rich countries," Ms Guthold told Reuters Health.
'Growing up in a poor country does not necessarily mean that kids get more physical activity."
In their study, published in The Journal Of Pediatrics, the researchers looked at 72,845 13- to 15-year-old schoolchildren from North and South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The children were surveyed between 2003 and 2007.
The researchers defined adequate physical activity as at least an hour of exercise (outside of physical education class) at least five days a week. Children who spent three or more hours watching TV, playing computer games or chatting with friends (aside from time in school or time spent doing homework) were classified as sedentary.
Just one-quarter of the boys and 15 per cent of the girls were getting enough exercise by their definition, the researchers found. And a quarter of boys and nearly 30per cent of girls were sedentary and did not get enough exercise.
In every country, aside from Zambia, girls were less active than boys. In more than half of the countries in the study, less than a quarter of the boys were getting enough exercise.
While the study did not look at the reasons behind the lack of physical activity in various nations, MsGuthold speculated that urbanisation, as well as the near-universal availability of cars and TVs could account for it.
This article was first published in Mind Your Body, The Straits Times.
