Italian people of sedentary, overweight, with wrinkles and depressed. It is the pitiless photo taken by the twentieth Osservasalute Report 2022, edited by the National Observatory on Health in the Italian Regions which operates within the framework of Vihtali, a spin off of the Catholic University, Rome campus. The data in the report are clear: Italians are increasingly overweight (12% of the population, almost 6 million adults, are obese and, overall, 46.2% of ‘over 18’ subjects are overweight) and not very active, with more than a third of people (33.7%) declaring that they do not practice sport or physical activity in their free time (30.3% of men and 36.9% of women).
Not only that, a sedentary lifestyle is also rampant among the youngest. In fact, between 2020 and 2021 there was a sharp decrease in sports practice among children and adolescents aged 3-17. In these age groups between 2020 and 2021 there was a real collapse in sports practice, especially of a continuous type, which decreased by about 15% (from 51.3% to 36.2%) and was compensated only in it starts from the practice of some physical activity (from 18.6% to 26.9%), carried out in an unstructured way and, therefore, outside the gyms and sports centers affected by the closures. Physical inactivity has, in fact, increased from 22.3% to 27.2%. Diabetes is becoming more and more popular among the obese (15.5% of them suffer from it) and the sedentary (almost 12%).
As if that weren’t enough, Italians are increasingly depressed: starting from the years 2011-2012 – the report details – at a national level the prescribing volume of antidepressant drugs initially recorded a slight increase, equal to +1.8% from 2013 to 2016, while subsequently the increase was decidedly more significant, with the values that between 2017 and 2021 recorded a +10.4%. In 2021, the consumption of antidepressant drugs was 44.6 average daily doses per 1,000 inhabitants, an increase of 2.4% compared to 2020.
Population is aging and shrinking, the median age will reach 50.6 years in 2050
In our country the average age of the population, which is 46.2 years in 2022, is estimated to reach 50.6 years in 2050. Furthermore, the decline in the resident population is expected to continue in the coming decades due to the continuation of the regime of low fertility and the gradual decrease in migratory flows from abroad. In fact, it is expected that the resident population will increase from the current 59.2 million inhabitants to 54.2 million resident inhabitants in 2050. Finally, Italy – emerges from the report – also has another sad record, the result of a welfare that does not help families: it is the country in Europe with the highest percentage of mothers aged 35-40, 35.4%, or more than one new mother out of three. Few children and many elderly people. Not only.
The centenarians are rapidly increasing. In 2013 almost three residents out of 10,000 are 100 years old and over, women are much more numerous. The population aged 65 and over represents 23.9% of the resident population, i.e. more than one person in five is 65 years of age and over.
Finally, the bad environment also makes Italians ill. With regard to environmental risk factors, the Report highlights that, in 2020, pesticides were found in surface waters in 55.1% of the monitoring points (in 2018 the percentage was 77.3% and in 2017 it was 72, 4%). The greatest presence of pesticides is found in Umbria (94.1%), Puglia (86.4%), Sicily (81.6%), while Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto exceed 70%.
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