With Physical Activity, No Need to Be an Olympian

August 15, 2012

Uganda's Stephen Kiprotich celebrates after crossing the finish line to win gold in the men's marathon at the 2012 Summer Olympics

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Watching the Olympics probably made some people feel a little guilty about not exercising. The truth is, if physical inactivity were a sport, a lot of us could give a gold-medal performance. Or should we say non-performance?

To mark the London Olympics, the Lancet, a British medical journal, published a series of papers about this problem. Public health experts say physical inactivity is the world's fourth leading cause of death. They estimate that inactivity plays a major part in six to ten percent of deaths from non-communicable diseases. These include conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and colon and breast cancer.

I. Min Lee at the Harvard School of Public Health worked with a team that studied inactivity. She says the findings are conservative and may even underestimate the problem.

I. MIN LEE: "Physical inactivity is harmful to health, as harmful as far as deaths are concerned as smoking."

The researchers compared data on physical inactivity with disease rates in one hundred twenty-two countries.

I. MIN LEE: "So when we did our analysis, we looked at increased risk of disease after taking into account other health habits that might be associated with physical activity. For example, we know that if you are active, you probably smoke less. Additionally we factored out obesity, independent of the fact that active people also tend to weigh less."