How many steps do you really need to take in a day to stay healthy?
Walking is a form of exercise that has been shown to reduce our risk of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease, while a sedentary lifestyle has been associated with higher levels of cardiovascular disease.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four Americans live a physically inactive lifestyle. But whether the negative impacts of a sedentary lifestyle can be offset by physical activity has so far been understudied.
In a new paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers from the University of Sydney analyzed a cohort of 72,174 individuals with an average age of 61 to investigate the relationship between daily step counts, time spent sedentary and overall health.
The data was extracted from the UK Biobank, a biomedical database investigating the respective contributions of genetics and environment to the development of various diseases.
The median daily step count among participants during the study period was 6,222 steps, while the median time spent sedentary was 10.6 hours.
Over an average 6.9-year follow-up, 1633 deaths and 6190 cardiovascular disease events occurred among the participants. After adjusting for any other potentially compounding factors, the authors concluded that the optimal number of steps per day to counteract the negative effects of high sedentary time (anything over 10.5 hours) was between 9,000 and 10,000 steps per day, lowering mortality risk by 39 percent and cardiovascular risk by 21 percent.
In both cases, 50 percent of these benefits were seen after just 4,000 steps per day.
Of course, this study is purely observational and cannot establish cause and effect. Despite the large sample size, the authors also acknowledge that unmeasured factors may have affected their results.
Nevertheless, these results do support previous findings that significant reductions in mortality can be achieved after just 4,400 steps and that maximum health benefits can be seen at around 8,500 steps daily.
"Accruing between 9000 and 10,000 steps/day optimally lowered the risk of mortality and incident cardiovascular disease among highly sedentary participants," the authors wrote. "The minimal threshold associated with substantially lower mortality and CVD risk was between 4000 and 4500 steps/day."
In a separate statement, lead author Matthew Ahmadi added, "This is by no means a get out of jail card for people who are sedentary for excessive periods of time, however, it does hold an important public health message that all movement matters and that people can and should try to offset the health consequences of unavoidable sedentary time by upping their daily step count."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.
