A new study suggests that not enough exercise is causing as many deaths as smoking across the world. This is especially chilling news for smokers who do not excercise; they are expected to drop dead at any moment.

The report – published in the Lancet, a leading medical journal – timed to tie in with the build-up to the Olympics, estimates that about a third of adults are not doing enough physical activity, causing 5,3 million deaths a year. This works out to about one in 10 deaths from diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and breast and colon cancer. The lack of excercise is so bad that the researchers said it should be treated as a pandemic.

The researchers reccomend that adults do 150 minutes of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, cycling or gardening, each week. Which is hardly any at all. 21 minutes a day of gardening? I did not realise that the world was chock full of lazy bastards. It is worrying to think that there is a pandemic, due to the amount of people unable to do the equivalent of 21 minutes of gardening a day.

The Lancet study found people in higher income countries were the least active with those in the UK among the worst as nearly two thirds of adults were judged not to be doing enough.

And as shocking as the headline may be, while it is technically accurate, it is more PR for the study than anything else. Smoking is still worse for you than sitting and doing nothing. While smoking and inactivity may kill a similar number of people, smoking rates are much lower than the number of inactive people, making smoking more risky to the individual.

[Source: BBC]