Britain has the third highest percentage of inactive adults in Europe, after just Malta and Serbia, preceeding by a large number even the US, the country infamous for high obesity rates, showed a paper published online in The Lancet.

The trend is worsening, as the young “internet generation” is always sitting in front of television and computer screens, and is therefore spending most of their time without any body movement. 30% of adults and 80% of 13 to 15 year-olds are failing totally to follow the recommended amounts of physical activity, found the researchers.

A different study shows that the lack of exercise and physical activities can be as fatal for health as smoking or obesity is. Even heart disease, type two diabetes and breast and bowel cancer are all possible outcomes if one fails to take up at least some physical activity like taking a 30 minutes walk for five days.

However, health professionals are failing to motivate people to pursue physical activities understanding the serious concern. “Health professionals have been unable to mobilise governments and populations to take physical inactivity sufficiently seriously as a public health issue,” said the study leader, Dr Pedro Hallal, of the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil.

The study adds, inactivity is turning so fatal that it is causing 5.3 million deaths, as many as smoking causes, every year. “We are essentially killing ourselves because we’ve improved our lives to the point where we don’t have to be physically active every day,” warned Dr Harold Kohl, who wrote The Pandemic Of Physical Inactivity – A Call For Global Action, in the Lancelot.