Over 1.4 Billion Adults Don’t Exercise Enough

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 6:25PM EST · Published Sep 4, 8:31PM EDT

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Over 1.4 Billion Adults Don’t Exercise Enough — © John Moore / Getty Images

New data from the WHO show that over 1.4 billion adults worldwide are at risk for disease because they do not exercise enough. The study was posted in The Lancet Global Health and was based on data collected for 2016. The numbers show no improvement from data collected in 2001

A breakdown in the numbers shows that one in three women and one in four men do not get adequate exercise to maintain their health. The numbers are more alarming in developed countries according to the study:

Levels of insufficient physical activity are more than twice as high in high-income countries compared o low-income countries and increased by 5% in high-income countries between 2001 and 2016

The U.S. fares badly, the WHO data show:

The highest rates of insufficient activity in 2016 were found in adults in Kuwait, American Samoa, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq where more than half of all adults were insufficiently active. Comparatively, around 40% of adults in the USA, 36% in the UK, and 14% in China were insufficiently active.

Methodology

The new study is based on self-reported activity levels, including activity at work and at home, for transport, and during leisure time, in adults aged 18 years and older from 358 population-based surveys in 168 countries, including 1.9 million participants.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.