This is officially the laziest country on Earth

Hong Kong has found to be the most 'active' place on earth. Guess where the least active is.

In a paper published in Nature, scientists from Stanford University used 68 million days worth minute by minute of data to measure where in the world people took the most steps each day.

At the top were the people of Hong Kong, who took and average of 6,880 steps per day.

Indonesians came last, travelling only 3,513 a day.

The data came from over 700,000 people using the Argus activity monitoring app on their smart phones.

Brits took an average of 5,444 steps per day.

Scott Delp, a professor of bioengineering involved in the story, told the BBC:

The study is 1,000 times larger than any previous study on human movement.

There have been wonderful health surveys done, but our new study provides data from more countries, many more subjects, and tracks people's activity on an ongoing basis.

This opens the door to new ways of doing science at a much larger scale than we have been able to do before.

'Activity inequality'

The researchers found that the biggest signifier of obesity wasn't how lazy a country was as a whole, but how much of a gap there was between 'fittest' and 'laziest'.

Essentially the bigger the gap, the fatter the country.

Delp explained by drawing a comparison to income inequality.

If you think about some people in a country as ‘activity rich’ and others as ‘activity poor,’ the size of the gap between them is a strong indicator of obesity levels in that society.

Another scientist on the project Jure Leskovec commented on the 'activity inequality' which disproportionately affected women.

When activity inequality is greatest, women’s activity is reduced much more dramatically than men’s activity, and thus the negative connections to obesity can affect women more greatly

HT BBC, Stanford

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