Whether you skip breakfasts or refuse to sign up for a membership at your local gym, fully committing to a healthy lifestyle can be difficult and time-challenging.
While some bad habits won’t instantly spell bad news for your health, others could be detrimental.
Lifestyles that include more alcoholic drinks and cigarettes than healthy fruits and vegetables pose this very risk.
Interestingly, poor lifestyle choices don’t seem to only define individuals but also countries.
Medical Aid has analysed the rates of unhealthy habits across the world and found the top 10 countries with the unhealthiest lifestyles.
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Looking at factors, including alcohol consumption, tobacco smoking, obesity levels, and sexually transmitted diseases (STD), they found that Bulgaria came top of the list.
The findings revealed the top 10 countries with the unhealthiest habits were:
- Bulgaria
- Latvia
- Argentina
- United States
- Lithuania
- Croatia
- Hungary
- Estonia
- Germany
- South Africa
Located in South-East Europe, the Balkan country had the highest smoking rate, with as much as 35.5 percent of the population consuming tobacco products.
This score made Bulgaria the only country where this rate is higher than one-third.
The Balkan country also had the seventh highest average annual alcohol consumption marked at 11.2 litres per capita.
Combining these scores with high rankings for most other factors, Bulgaria landed a total Unhealthy Lifestyle Score of 7.94
Medical Aid arrived at these findings by using data sets from various sources including the World Health Organization and CIA Factbook.
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The team then compressed the data into a single Unhealthy Lifestyle Score which was used to rank the countries from those with the unhealthiest habits to those with the fewest.
The second country with the unhealthiest habits was Latvia with an Unhealthy Lifestyle Score marked at 7.16.
This Baltic country recorded the highest annual alcohol consumption at 12.9 litres per capita, as well as the fourth highest rate of smoking.
Furthermore, Latvia also scored ninth for STD prevalence, indicating that unprotected sex is a greater problem in the country than elsewhere in the world, Medical Aid explained.
While Medical Aid crunched the numbers, they didn’t explain why some countries were unhealthier than others.
A country’s health can be dictated by a number of different factors, including economy, pollution levels, and access to healthcare.
Furthermore, things like education and health care coverage can also play a role.
“Human behaviour around health is a result of many different factors, from your individual preferences to the environment you grew up in and the culture to which you belong,” Medical Aid added.
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