Walking 7,000 steps a day could dramatically improve your health.
According to a new study review, people who took at least 7,000 steps a day almost halved their risk of all-cause mortality (their chance of dying of any cause within a certain time period).
Even walking 4,000 steps a day showed marked reductions in the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, depression and falls.
Though the benefits did continue with higher daily step counts, the size of improvements slowed down after 7,000 steps, meaning this could be a more realistic and achievable target than the often-quoted 10,000 steps for people looking to improve their health.
It’s no secret that being more physically active can have huge health benefits, but our increasingly sedentary modern lifestyles mean one-third of the world’s population is thought to be insufficiently active.
One common way for people to gauge their activity is by counting how many steps they take in a day. While 10,000 steps is often shared as the golden number we should all be striving for every day, the value doesn’t actually have any basis in scientific evidence.
To gain a better understanding of what target people should be aiming for, a review recently published in The Lancet Public Health combed through 57 previous studies to see how daily step count impacted health outcomes.
Starting from a baseline of 2,000 steps a day, the review found that every 1,000-step increase led to a rise in health benefits.
After 7,000 steps, however, the size of these improvements began to slow down.
At 7,000 steps, however, the results were dramatic: all-cause mortality went down by 47 per cent, the risk of dementia fell 38 per cent, falls by 28 per cent and cardiovascular disease by 25 per cent. There were also reductions in the risk of depression, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Even a modest increase in step count to 4,000 reduced all-cause mortality by 36 per cent.
Though there has been an increasing interest in using step count as an easy-to-measure way of tracking activity levels, public health authorities have, until now, lacked the evidence to set a target that was scientifically backed.
The unofficial target of 10,000 steps originates from a marketing campaign for pedometers, which were advertised in the run-up to the 1968 Tokyo Olympics. The number wasn’t based on any health guidance, but because in Japanese characters, the number 10,000 (万) looks like a person walking.
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