October 13, 2016.
Running children and recording their oxygen consumption is a good test to assess their health, as well as that of their country. A study has just revealed that in this exercise, France is fairly well ranked.
Running children to exhaustion to assess their health
Evaluate countries’ public health policies by analyzing children’s sports performance. This is the goal set by a team of American, Canadian and Australian researchers, whose results have been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. They collected data from 177 studies examining the respiratory capacities of children of 50 different nationalities.
To assess these abilities, more than a million children and adolescents aged 9 to 17 took part in the exercise of the “shuttle test”, a race whose objective is to run until exhaustion. , accelerating every 20 meters. This test, developed in the early 80s, allows to determine the maximum oxygen consumption of children and therefore their general state of health..
France far exceeds Germany and the United States
In the exercise of the “shuttle test”, Tanzania tops the standings. The small country in southern Africa is ahead of Iceland and Estonia, which completed the podium. France obtains the honorable place of 11th out of 50, well ahead of Germany (24th). North and Central America is at the back of the pack, the United States is 42th while Mexico arrives in 45th and last place in the ranking.
If these figures are, to a certain extent, indicative of the health of children, they are not, however, of the life expectancy of the countries, a sign that other criteria are taken into account to measure the health status of a child. State. Proof, life expectancy in Tanzania is barely 60 years, while Mexicans live an average of 77.14 years.
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