This is a sweaty country. Summer lasts six months, and it’s an extreme summer. A person breaks a sweat moments after emerging from his or her air-conditioned cocoon.

But most of the sweat is environmental, and not exercise-related. Not for the UAE’s citizens, anyway.

This is a part of the world where running and lifting things is for workers. It is not what you do when you are well off.

A survey released last year by the medical journal Lancet, suggests Emiratis rank eighth in the world’s “least active country” rankings.

The attitude has led to the world’s second-highest rate of diabetes (generally pegged behind only the Pacific Island nation of Nauru) and a lot of out-of-shape kids.

According to this story in The National, 40 percent of Emiratis from 13 to 15 years old — when humans tend to be about as fit as they are going to get, without working hard at it — are overweight, and 14.4 percent are considered obese. This is the highest rate for any age group among UAE citizens.

So, what to do?

Working with experts from Unicef, the UAE is trying to attack the problem by encouraging exercise among its young teens, as well as healthier eating. The campaign is just now being rolled out.

If you look at the countries at the rankings (linked, above) by what percentage of citizens fail to meet weekly exercise standards, you will see mostly wealthy countries at the bottom — and newly wealthy countries, in particular.

The bottom eight (ignoring the imprecise “Micronesia”) includes three Gulf countries — Saudi Arabia (No. 3), Kuwait (6) and the UAE (8). These are societies changed massively by oil money, over the past 50 years.

Qatar and Bahrain are not listed, but you can be fairly confident those two Gulf states would also be somewhere at the bottom of the list.

The United Kingdom is 7, and the others in the top eight seem fairly random — Malta (No. 1), Swaziland (2), Argentina (4) and Serbia (5).

At the other end of the scale, where people get lots of exercise, are dirt-poor countries like Bangladesh, Mozambique, Comoros, Benin, etc.

Somewhere in the middle is most of the West, including the U.S., Canada and most of Europe.

So, no, it is not good to be inactive, and a bad diet and being overweight can lead to diabetes, among other things, and the UAE’s government realizes this and is trying to do something about it.

Avoiding fast food would be a good start. Getting exercise as often as possible would be another.