Laziness worse for heart than smoking

ONE in four couch potatoes enjoy the comfort of their sofa so much they don't even want to try to get fit, a major all-Ireland health conference heard yesterday.

Physical inactivity is now the most common risk factor for heart disease, even greater than that posed by smoking or obesity.

Chief executive of the Health Promotion Agency in Northern Ireland Dr Brian Gaffney said growing levels of inactivity were extremely worrying.

“Recent research shows that one in four sedentary people in Northern Ireland are not even interested in becoming regularly physically active,” he said.

The research also found that physical inactivity was responsible for a third of total deaths from heart disease each year.

Physical inactivity is also responsible for almost 45% of strokes and almost a third of all colon cancer deaths.

The two-day conference being held in Newry is part of an all-Ireland approach to get people moving.

Dr Chris Fitzgerald told the conference almost a quarter of people in the Republic took no exercise at all. Dr Fitzgerald is principal officer of the health promotion unit in the Department of Health and Children

Nearly six out of 10 people over 15 years of age were not active enough to benefit their health.

While steps had been taken to redress the situation, including the all-island physical activity health promotion campaign, called ‘Get a Life, Get Active’, more needed to be done to get the message across.

Dr Niall Moyna, a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at Dublin City University, said the Irish Government must face up to the huge human and economic cost of growing levels of physical inactivity among young people.

More children on high fat diets and leading sedentary lifestyles were developing ‘type two’ diabetes, a condition that puts them at risk of heart attacks and strokes in their 20s and 30s, rather than their 50s and 60s.

“Within the next 10 years we are going to have a serious diabetes epidemic,” Dr Moyna warned.

It was a tragedy that more Irish children were now at risk of developing a condition that would drastically reduce their quality of life over a long period of time.

He pointed out that once a person had developed diabetes they have a five-fold risk of getting a heart attack and a threefold risk of getting a stroke.

The doctor said the Government needed to act now because of the huge economic and social cost of putting young people on long-term medication.

“We need to take bold initiatives and develop primary preventive measures. Unfortunately, most Governments are in power for five years and don’t initiate any policies that will only pay dividends down the road.”

Dr Moyna said more people in the US were becoming obese and diabetes was still on the rise but government strategies were also being initiated, both at local and national level, to deal with the problem. We need to do something similar, she said.