If ever you needed a shock to the system to make you get off
your backside and into a pair of trainers, this is it: Lack of
physical activity kills roughly as many people as smoking. That
is the shocking message from a series of papers published this
week on the health impact of inactivity. The papers, published
in The Lancet suggest that more than 5.3 million deaths would be
avoided each year if all inactive people exercised, about the
same toll as the 5 million deaths annually from smoking. The
deaths could have been avoided if people reached a weekly target
of 150 minutes or more of moderate exercise, such as brisk
walking. "We tried to estimate how many deaths would be avoided
if all the inactive people in the world became active," says
I-Min Lee at Harvard Medical School, head of the team that
published one of the papers. Lee analysed data from 2008 on
deaths from four major illnesses that are already linked with
lack of exercise – coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes,
bowel cancer and breast cancer.