AFP – You’ve already heard it and the recommendations are clear: taking 10,000 steps a day will help preserve your health.
In fact, that’s the threshold you need to reach to receive a message from the fitness monitor on smartphones, congratulating you on having covered the distance necessary to stay in shape.
But a new international study of over 200,000 people reveals that there are also health benefits from reaching a lower threshold.
This certainly doesn’t mean that you should walk less, but that getting walking is important and that the risk of death is significantly reduced as the number of steps you take increases – starting from 4,000 steps if all causes of death are taken into account.
Published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, this analysis involved 226,889 people from 17 different studies around the world, followed for an average of seven years.
At the end of their research, the scientists estimated that 2,337 daily steps were necessary to reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular (heart) disease.
This number rises to 3,967 daily steps to reduce the risk of death from all causes.
The study also confirms that the more you walk, the greater the health benefits – up to (at least) 20,000 steps a day.
“Our study confirms that the more you walk, the better. We found that this applied to both men and women, irrespective of age, and irrespective of whether you live in a temperate, sub-tropical or sub-polar region of the world, or a region with a mixture of climates,” said study lead author Professor Dr Maciej Banach in a press release.
This work shows that the risk of death drops significantly as soon as an individual takes 500 to 1,000 extra steps every day.
An increase of 1,000 steps per day is associated with a 15 per cent reduction in the risk of death from all causes, and an increase of 500 steps with a seven per cent reduction in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
The researchers were able to observe that health benefits continued to increase up to 20,000 steps per day – the maximum number of steps analysed for the purposes of this study.
They point out, however, that data remains limited for participants who took 20,000 steps a day, and that further research needs to be carried out with a larger group of people to confirm these results.
In any case, they believe that walking, whatever the number of steps, is essential, if only to combat a sedentary lifestyle, which is considered to be one of the main afflictions of modern society.
“In a world where we have more and more advanced drugs to target specific conditions such as cardiovascular disease, I believe we should always emphasise that lifestyle changes, including diet and exercise, which was a main hero of our analysis, might be at least as, or even more, effective in reducing cardiovascular risk and prolonging lives,” said Prof Banach.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a sedentary lifestyle is responsible for 3.2 to five million deaths worldwide every year.
The global health authority points out that 70 per cent of the world’s population does not meet the recommended level of physical activity, ie at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity endurance activity per week for an adult aged 18 to 64.
