Updated: Wed Jun. 06 2012 21:26:40

The Canadian Press

TORONTO The more Canadians settle into a life of physical inactivity, the more they exact a toll on the country's health care system, a new study from Queen's University suggested.

The report, published Wednesday in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, estimated the total cost of a life of lassitude had reached approximately $6.8 billion in 2009, or 3.7 per cent of all health care costs.

Study author Ian Janssen mined a variety of data sources to arrive at the figures, which account for both the direct and indirect cost of physical inactivity.

Janssen said his estimates of physical activity levels throughout the country were based on Statistics Canada's Health Measure Survey, which tracked the movements of some 5,000 participants using an accelerometer.

This data was combined with scientific literature on the risks physically inactive people run of contracting seven common chronic diseases, as well as figures from Health Canada estimating the cost of treating those conditions.

Running those results through a series of mathematical models, Janssen said the direct cost of treating conditions associated with a sedentary lifestyle amounted to more than $2.4 billion. The indirect costs -- which he described as the loss of personal and financial productivity due to poor health -- added up to slightly above $4.3 billion, he said.

"It's important for people to understand that this is a very costly behaviour," Janssen said in a telephone interview from Kingston, Ont.

"We often think of medical care as the diseases themselves. We don't realize that those diseases are caused, in large measure, by our lifestyle behaviours and choices."

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Physical inactivity costs health care system billions: study