At a time when public health communication campaigns that advocate regular physical activity (and better eating habits) are more and more numerous, what is really the routine of populations? This is what American scientists from the prestigious Stanford University have tried to show, who have thus collected data to establish which are the most active and “lazy” countries in the world. Through analysis of 700,000 smartphone owners (whose identities remained anonymous) using an activity tracking app called Argus, the researchers were able to determine that the average number of steps taken per day was 4,961. And the best student – the one that is the most above this average therefore – is Hong Kong, where the inhabitants cover approximately 6,880 steps per day. Conversely, Indonesians are at the bottom of the ranking, with 3,513 daily steps.
The technique used is for Scott Delp, one of the scientists, revolutionary:"The study is 1,000 times larger than any other already done on human movement [...] There are studies on remarkable health, but ours communicates data from more countries and people, and records the activity of populations on an ongoing basis. This paves the way for a new way to advance research, on a much larger scale than what we limited ourselves to “, he explains to the site of the BBC . Among the very good students, we find China, Japan, Russia and Spain. France, like the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy for example, is doing quite well with an average of between 5,000 and 5,500 steps per day. The populations that are in the red (strictly speaking since it is the color given to the lowest daily physical activity, the map can be viewed on the BBC page) are mainly located in the north of Africa, the Middle East and South America. North American countries have an average of between 4,500 and 5,000 steps. Come on, let's get started and catch up on the Chinese copies for next year!
