Younger male Swedes more sedentary than U.S. peers

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - U.S. women are more sedentary than their Swedish peers, but young Swedish males are actually bigger couch potatoes than young U.S. men, new research shows.

While it's no news that Americans can be lazy when it comes to exercise, the new findings prove that inactivity isn't just a U.S. problem.

"Indeed, this has been a great concern for many years in all the countries in the Western world, and now also in the developing world," Drs. Maria Hagstromer and Michael Sjostrom of the Karolinska Institutet in Huddinge, Sweden, two of the study's authors, noted in an email to Reuters Health.

The researchers had expected Swedish men and women to be uniformly more active than Americans, given past studies in which people reported their own activity. But such self-reports are prone to inaccuracy, both due to faulty recall and to people's feelings about the "social desirability" of being active, they note in their report.

To address this problem, Hagstromer and colleagues looked at data from Sweden and the U.S. gathered with accelerometers, which are devices -- typically worn on an elasticized belt around the waist -- that accurately gauge physical activity. Their analysis included 1,172 Swedish adults and 2,925 US adults, all of whom had worn an accelerometer for at least four days, for at least 10 hours a day.

The Swedish men averaged 36 minutes daily of brisk walking, jogging or other moderate or higher intensity exercise, compared to 33 minutes for U.S. men, 32 minutes for Swedish women, and 19 minutes for U.S. women. The difference between Swedish and U.S. women was seen for all age groups and education levels, and didn't vary with a person's weight.

Swedish men between 18 and 60 years of age spent more time being sedentary than their U.S. peers, but older Swedish men were more active than older American males.

"We were surprised when we found that females, and elderly, were systematically more active in Sweden, while the males, especially the younger males were more active in the U.S.," Hagstromer and Sjostrom noted.

"Health policy makers in the U.S. should discuss carefully how to stimulate women and the elderly to become more active in their daily life, in addition to exercise activities at higher intensity. This may have enormous health implications at the societal level," they wrote.

SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, online April 20, 2010.