Dyk the average Australian spends 2.5 hours on their Smart Phone
It'll get worse.
Just look at the sedantary behaviour figures. the majority are watching 6 hours of TV a day and that has been associated with living for 5 years less. We give children homework that is technology driven so they spend hours on the internet from a very young age. It's contributing to lower levels of fitness and when you look at the risk factors of mortality - low cardio-respiratory fitness has the highest attributable fraction. It's going to be a real eye-opener because we already have an issue - only 21% of our population over 65 are reaching the Australian physical activity guidelines. Our adults (63% are overweight or obese - 56% in 1995) and children are getting fatter. Half of Australians have at least one chronic disease and 1/4 have two or more.
Technology is improving and a big part of that is making life easier. It's going to be harder and harder to buck this trend. Simple things like getting up to answer the phone or turning off the light switch are a thing of the past. Now we can shout "alexa turn off the lounge room light" or switch it off via a mobile app.
Then we have diet - 2016 report card. 93% of the adult population and 97% aren't consuming enough vegetables (adults were 87% a few years earlier so we are getting worse). 50% aren't having enough fruit.
But it's all okay because our life expectancy is increasing...but is our quality of life? We desperately need to invest more in primary preventative interventions as well as secondary. The toughest part is changing behaviours because the lay population knows they need to exercise and eat 5 veg and 2 fruit but they don't. Instead they jump on things like "but BMI doesn't factor in muscle mass or individual differences" which is correct but how many of those whining have even weighed themselves in the past 3 years? And it's not like we have the capacity to give the entire population a dexa scan to assess their body composition. Then you can highlight issues to Australians but they'd rather get some cholesterol pills from their GP instead of changing their lifestyle - reinforcing their own thought process that it's okay to eat like shit and sit on the couch because a tablet with water will solve my problems - not factoring in that the government subsidises some of the cost increasing our taxes and drawing money from other areas thus burdening the entire population all because they are fat lazy sods.
The moral of the story is we are circling the drain health wise but that's okay as long as the person next to me is overweight too. My neighbours are shit out of luck because i will always be a biological specimen carved from granite and a direct descendant from Zeus himself.