Extended Data Figure 8: Interventions focused on reducing activity inequality could result in reductions in obesity prevalence up to four times greater than for population-wide approaches.
From: Large-scale physical activity data reveal worldwide activity inequality
Given a fixed activity budget (100 daily steps per individual) to distribute across the population, we compare an inequality-centric strategy that distributes this budget equally to minimize activity inequality (100/X% daily steps increase for the activity-poorest X% where X minimizes the country’s resulting activity inequality; Methods) and a population-wide strategy which distributes the budget equally across the entire population (100 daily steps per individual; Methods). From our simulations, we find that the inequality-centric strategy would lead to predicted reductions in obesity prevalence of up to 8.3% (median 4.0%), whereas the population-wide approach would lead to predicted reductions of up to 2.3% (median 1.0%). Lines correspond to LOESS fits.
