Book. Red alert on the health of the French. There is an emergency, warns Régis Juanico, to defuse “the health time bomb” represented by a sedentary lifestyle and physical inactivity in our modern societies. In Let’s move ! Manifesto for more active lifestyles (L’Aube-Fondation Jean Jaurès, 146 pages, 16 euros), the former deputy (Génération.s) for the Loire describes in detail the health risks posed by the ever-increasing consumption of screens.
Every year, sedentary lifestyle and “scourge” of physical inactivity kill between 40,000 and 50,000 people in France, warns the author, supporting figures and scientific studies. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 30% of adults and 80% of adolescents do not get enough physical activity. The obesity rate has doubled in twenty-five years in France. Particularly among the youngest, who have lost 25% of their physical capacities in forty years, Régis Juanico is alarmed.
And this is just the beginning, he warns. If nothing is done, chronic pathologies (cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers, etc.) will explode. “Should we conclude that some 15-year-old college students today are preparing to have a heart attack at 30? »asks, provocatively, the former deputy.
“Reverse the curves”
Régis Juanico is not his first attempt. Author of several parliamentary information reports on the health benefits of sport, he has campaigned for several years for the development of sports practice. Today an expert in public sports policy, he calls on governments and the French to general mobilization: if we do not move more, as the title of the book enjoins, the country is heading towards a “health tsunami”.
The former co-chair of the working group on the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the National Assembly therefore details around ten avenues to explore “to get the French moving again”, from birth until the end of life.
Régis Juanico thus proposes the establishment of an hour of daily physical activity at school, the strengthening of PE in secondary schools – measures taken up by the President of the Republic during his visit to a college of Orthez (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) for the start of the school year – or the promotion of active mobility (walking, cycling) and sport in the workplace, the development of active design in street furniture, the prescription of adapted physical activities, etc.
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