The Irish are apparently the world's fittest people

In spite of the growth in obesity rates in Ireland (most worryingly among Irish children), this latest survey shows that there’s hope yet.

Fitbit users in Ireland came out on top when the fitness-tracking company surveyed aggregated and anonymous data from more than 23 million Fitbit users around the world.

Researchers ranked average rates for duration of sleep, daily steps, daily active minutes, resting heart rate and ‘Reminders to Move’ goals met to determine the fittest countries in the world.

Irish Fitbit users performed well across all metrics, aside from their daily average step count of 8,517 steps (compared to Spain’s 9,023 daily steps, representing the country with the highest number of steps per day). 10,000 steps is the recommendation.

On average, Irish Fitbit users are clocking up 24 active minutes daily. We also sleep well, getting an average duration of 7 hours, 11 minutes and 7 seconds, ranking fourth on the list of highest quality of sleep.

While Ireland was not the country with the most steps, active minutes, or sleeping time, it was consistently in the top ten of these metrics and averaged out to become the world’s fittest country.

Just in case you were wondering, the top 10 fittest countries were as follows: 1) Ireland, 2) the United Kingdom, 3) Sweden, 4) Netherlands, 5) Switzerland, 6) Denmark, 7) Spain, 8) Finland, 9) Germany and 10) New Zealand.