Half of Spanish adolescents do not do any physical activity

Spanish pediatricians have issued a serious warning to public powers and families. Spain, they say, today has possibly the most sedentary adolescence and youth in its history. A very pernicious vital habit that, remember, is a clear risk factor for almost all kinds of serious diseases, especially cardiovascular injuries and mental disorders.

It is not a saying. The most recent data compiled by the Ministry of Health reveal that 45% of Spaniards between the ages of 15 and 25, practically half, recognize that it is not that they have little physical activity but that they do not have any. They do not do anything. They spend their lives, they confess, sitting or lying down. In childhood the problem is somewhat minor, but it already points out ways of how it can end in a few years. 12% of boys between the ages of 4 and 15 are radically sedentary, with a special presence of absolute inactivity in girls, among whom it reaches 16%.

But the Spanish Association of Pediatrics warns that the worst has not yet been seen. Their consultations detect that sedentary lifestyle skyrocketed among young people during confinement and that it has continued at very high levels throughout the pandemic, even now, when a certain normalization of life and social relations is perceived.

Experts consider that the scandalous percentage of sedentary youth is explained, in addition to an accelerated process of urbanization of customs, by a completely static leisure, linked to television, computer or mobile screens. They have detected “a gradual and consistent weight gain due to excess energy gain.” They eat too much and badly and do not burn anything.

Save the Children has an identical perception. Last fall it surveyed 2,000 parents with underage children. 28.1% admitted that their children were overweight. It is half a point more than before the covid, but, in addition, the general director of the NGO, Andrés Conde, predicted that things will get worse because the increase in the body mass index, which reveals overweight and obesity, requires months to manifest the changes.

The worsening of overweight is something serious, because Spain was already the European country, along with Italy and Cyprus, that led the ranking of childhood obesity. This pathological overweight affects 18% of children, a rate 50% higher than the EU average, which has obesity among schoolchildren of 12%.

Rich boy, poor boy

The prevalence of a sedentary lifestyle has an obvious socioeconomic bias, says Conde. While seven out of ten high-income households practice sports or regular physical activity, only four out of ten low-income families have a similar dynamism. In other words, the majority of poor households either do not do any physical wear or it is very occasional.

A second piece of information also provided by Save the Children illustrates the other side of the same coin. 46.3% of minors who spend more than five hours a day abducted by screens belong to modest or directly poor families. By contrast, 79.6% of the boys who do not lose an hour a day in front of a screen belong to a high-income household.

The pediatricians’ alert coincides with the publication of an ISGlobal study that concludes that a sedentary lifestyle is even more harmful to health than air and noise pollution. They calculate that if the inactivity that Spain experienced during the 2020 confinement, which was close to 100%, had been extended for a year, heart attack and stroke diagnoses would have risen by 10% and those of depression by 8%.

Pediatricians point out that children and adolescents should do at least one hour of physical exercise a day and that it is essential that they internalize it as one more habit of their life so that later it becomes essential and it is difficult for them to abandon it. They believe that, to help in this purpose, the areas of games and outdoor activities and sports facilities in schools and institutes be increased.