One in three children in the worldhappensthree or more hours a day watching TV or playing the game console, a rate of“laziness”that does not vary according to the economic level of the country where they reside, according to the results of a study published inThe Journal of Pediatricswhich analyzed the habits of more than 70,000 kids from 34 different countries.
From Argentina to Zambia, the team led by Regina Guthold, a specialist in chronic diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO), found thatthe percentage of children who do not do “any type of physical exercise” is increasing.and dedicates his leisure hours to sedentary activities, regardless of whether he lives in a developed country or an impoverished one. The study’s conclusions are based on the four-year follow-up of 72,845 children aged 13-15 years from the six world geographic regions established by WHO.
In this sense, the researchers defined as “physically active” those children who practiced exercise for at least one hour a day, five days a week, in addition to physical education classes at school. Similarly, those children who spent three or more hours a day watching television, playing the console, or “chatting” on the computer were classified as “sedentary”, regardless of the time they spent at school. or doing homework. Under these scales, the study found that only 20 percent of the boys and 15 percent of the girls got “enough daily exercise.”
For its part,20 percent of the boys and 30 percent of the girls were classified as “sedentary”, while the rest remained in intermediate values. In this sense, the researchers observed that in all the countries analyzed, exceptonZambia, girls were “less active” than boys.
A) Yes,Uruguay it had the highest percentage of “active” boys, at 42 percent, while Zambia had the lowest, at just 8 percent. Girls in India were the most “fit”, with 37 percent of girls meeting recommended exercise hours. Girls in Egypt, by contrast, had the lowest number, with only 4 percent “active” girls.
On the “sedentary” side, at the top of the list were Saint Lucia and the Cayman Islands, with 58 percent of boys and 64 percent of girls spending more than three hours a day in front of the television.
