Is your country lazy or fit?

SAN FRANCISCO, July 13 (Xinhua) -- As more and more office workers nowadays have become aware of the importance of keeping fit, U.S. researchers have found out how active people really are based on the country-by-country statistics of the average steps people take every day.

The Stanford University research, "Large scale physical activity data reveal worldwide activity inequality," which was published in the journal Nature, gathered 68 million days' worth of data and found out that the average number of daily steps taken by people worldwide was 4,961.

The data was collected from 717,527 people of 111 countries and regions via the built-in accelerometers in their smartphones, which can record steps.

According to the results, citizens of Hong Kong topped the ranking with 6,880 steps per day, while people in Indonesia seemed the laziest, taking only 3,513 steps on average every day.

At the country level, Asian countries seemed to be doing well as China led the way with 6,189 steps, followed by Japan, which had 6,010. Other high-ranking countries were Spain, Britain, the United States, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil.

The research also boasts important insights for improving people's health. One of the key findings is that obesity is more related to what the research has defined as "activity inequality" than to the average steps.

The activity inequality, just like income inequality that calculates the gap between rich and poor, shows the difference between those who exercise the most and those who exercise the least.

"[T]his inequality is a better predictor of obesity prevalence in the population than the average activity volume," the authors said in the abstract of the research.

The research found that the bigger the activity inequality, the higher the obesity rate. "For instance, Sweden had one of the smallest gaps between activity rich and activity poor ... it also had one of the lowest rates of obesity," Tim Althoff, one of the authors, told the BBC.

It also demonstrated that gender difference is the main driving force behind activity inequality. That is to say in countries where activity inequalities are high, activity difference between men and women is significant, and it is women who are less active.

"[T]hus the negative connections to obesity can affect women more greatly," Jure Leskovsec, also a member of the research team, told the BBC.

Not surprisingly, though, the research showed people in "high walkability" cities like New York and San Francisco tended to walk more, a fact the researchers said could help urban planners come up with more physically friendly designs.