In this article, you are going to find out what the laziest countries in Europe are.
To be honest, even the laziest person alive would not want to hear that they are lazy. Therefore, if you find your country on the list, please understand that we are doing this because we care. We are not here to point fingers, neither are we going to fuel stereotypical debates. We are doing this to raise awareness. Laziness is the silent killer of the modern society, and physical inactivity is the main cause of a number of fatal diseases, such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and breast and colon cancer. So what is laziness you ask? Well, we are not saying that laziness is utter and total lack of productivity because some of the countries that made it into the list are developed countries. By laziness, we mean that people in those countries are not getting enough physical exercise. In this article, we will only focus on Europe, although we have done a couple of similar articles recently. So, check out 13 Laziest Countries in The World if you want to learn about the laziest country in the world 2017, and 10 Laziest Countries in Africa to find out what is the laziest country in Africa.
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In stark contrast, to learn about hardest working countries, check out 15 Hardest Working Countries in the World Ranked by Average Working Hours. In this article, we will talk about the laziest countries in Europe, not from the perspective of productivity but rather from the perspective of physical inactivity. A person can be productive and lazy at the same time. A person can work hard on a computer whole day and make a lot of money, but in the end, that same person was physically inactive for a whole day, thus being subjected to its negative effects. So basically, the countries in the list do not have the laziest workers in the world, but rather a large portion of their population is physically inactive. Obesity is one of the major side effects of being physically inactive since it brings a lot of health-related complications and it is socially undesirable. Being physically inactive also affect the organs adversely and as mentioned above can cause fatal diseases.
While digging for information, we stumbled upon quite a few interesting studies. One of them is done by researchers at Stanford University, who calculated average steps taken by an individual during a single day with the help of smartphone application. You can read more about it on Stanford‘s website. Another interesting study we found was about a general threshold of physical exercise that everyone must exceed during the week in order to keep fit. It is based on a survey that showed the percentage of people (adults only) who do not cross this threshold (as The Guardian puts it, “walking briskly for 30 minutes or more, five times a week or taking more vigorous exercise for 20 minutes three times a week”) in different countries. You can read more about that on The Guardian‘s website. There you can check out rankings of top 50 laziest countries in the world, as well. We based our ranking on the findings of these studies. The more physically inactive the population of a certain country is, the higher we have placed it on the list.
Without further ado, let’s get the list of 11 laziest countries in Europe started.
11. Sweden
Inactive adults rate: 44.2%
We are starting off our list with the Scandinavian nation of Sweden. Sweden is definitely one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. However, as you can see from the stats more than 44.2% of adults do not get enough exercise during the week. If you happen to know someone from Sweden, do not forget to tell them to get more exercise.
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