The other day, the Economist published a chart in one of its blogs showing a map of inactivity rates by countries. The data is based on a study published in the Lancet, where inactivity is defined as less than 30 minutes of moderate-intense activity five times a week, or 20 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity three times a week, or a combination of both.
Argue all you want with the definition, but I was really curious to see how that correlated to obesity rates by countries. So I looked at it.
I, ahem, borrowed the inactivity data from the Lancet, and got the latest obesity data from the WHO (it's not all super current), where obesity is defined as having a BMI greater than 30. And then I plotted it here:
Of course, that graph isn't very useful, because all of the names collide, and what you really want is something interactive, but I couldn't do that in R very well, so I did it in Highcharts here:
If you click on that you'll be taken to a magical place where you can hover over dots and see countries and relevant statistics. Some countries are missing either due to poor merging on my part or absence in one source or the other.
I also ran a quick and dirty linear model and plotted the line on both graphs (which you can toggle on at the bottom for the Highcharts version). The slope of that line is .2681 and is significant (p value = .01); for every percentage point increase in activity, you'd expect the obesity rate to rise by .2681 percentage points.1 Of course, r-squared on that line is only .096, so inactivity rates only explain 9.6% of the variance in obesity rates; I bet that if we included caloric intakes we'd see a much fuller picture.2
And while this doesn't actually mean anything, the y-intercept of the line is at 6.4; even if inactivity rates were 0, we'd still see a population obesity rate of 6.4. Assuming, of course, that extrapolation of naively-simplistic models based on methodologically questionable data can be trusted. And why not? It worked at LTCM and Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns.
Anyways, the point of this post, like the majority of my complaints, centers around the truthism that Americans are fat. The end. Now off to the gym.3
1. Not percent, percentage points, don't even get me started on that terminology here.
2. Get it? Fuller? Filled out? Because we're talking about obesity?! Because fuller is what you say when someone is fa...okay, I get it, this is not funny.
3. I'd like to thank Highcharts and R for their awesomeness, the Economist for being the best news publication in the history of the universe, and the WHO and the Lancet for not suing me for borrowing data.