In Louisiana where the humidity is substantial as the gumbo, people have a preference to take it slow. Hunting, fishing, and outdoor sporting activities may have earned Louisiana the nickname Sportsman’s Paradise, but new data point to that the more popular pastimes are sleeping, goofing off, and watching television. A new ranking in Businessweek.com, Louisiana claims the top spot as the country’s laziest state. Here to be clear by “lazy” we do not mean lacking work ethic or engagement. Rather, it is a compute of leisure time spent doing inactive activities compared with activities that need more physical effort, such as exercising and even working. Mississippi and Arkansas came in second and third, and whereas states in the south and southeast are represented greatly in the list, such East Coast states as Delaware and New York placed in the top 20.

Some cite the climate, lifestyle, infrastructure, or health education in the area. Peter Katzmarzyk, associate executive director in the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., comments that Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas are in the Lower Mississippi Delta region, which is very poor, has meager medical service, and also is hot, humid, and has little opportunity for physical activity,” he says. Obesity, physical activity, and nutrition some of the state’s major issues are the center’s priority research areas. Sleep, Chat, Watch, Sit.

The Businessweek.com ranking is based on five years data from 2004-08 the BLS American Time Use Survey, which averages the time spent doing a variety of activities each day across the whole population age 15 and older, including individuals who did not do the any activity at all. Using state level data, we assess the average leisure time take on in sedentary activities: sleeping & resting, watching television, surfing the Internet, playing board games, relaxing, thinking, and socializing. These things were measured against other metrics, such as average time spent exercising and playing sports and time spent working, and the state’s median age. The survey started only in 2003, so no data live to show how patterns might have changed over time.

While residents in urbanized areas such as New Orleans, a packed in city with sidewalks, gyms, and outdoor events, have opportunities to be lively, Louisianans in the rest of the state spend more time at inactive activities than the average American. According to BLS data, they sleep an average 8 hours and 44 minutes per day, watch an average 3 hours and 5 minutes of television, socialize for 54 minutes, and relax for 29 minutes. The average time spent working between all Louisianans 2 hours, 41 minutes is smaller than in all other states, according to the BLS data.

On the average U.S. population: 8 hours, 35 minutes sleeping; 2 hours, 38 minutes they watching the television; 44 minutes they are socializing; 18 minutes they are relaxing; and 3 hours, 23 minutes they are working. If you look in the other way, Louisianans over the course of a year spend on average 3,285 more minutes sleeping and 9,855 more minutes watching television than the national average.

The North Dakota the least inactive state, they sleep 8 hours, 4 minutes; they watch 2 hours 19 minutes of television; they are socializing for 40 minutes; and they are relaxing for 22 minutes. North Dakotans the average time spend in working is just over 5 hours.

Averaged across Louisiana’s population time spend in exercising and playing sports is about 17 minutes per day, therefore, data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention show nearly 30 percent of Louisianans did not get any exercise.

Sedentary leisure time was to some extent higher in Mississippi than Louisiana, but when age, exercise, and time spent working were monitored in, Louisiana came out on peak. It is imperative to note down that the data were compiled prior to the recent BP oil spill, which has had an unpleasant impact on the Louisiana job market.

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