Transcriber: Noura . Reviewer: Méline Adr Did you know that the standard was first created by Pedometer Company? So do you really need to take 10,000 steps every day to be healthy?
I'd like to tell you about the latest research. So my story begins several years ago, when my employer initiated a workplace health promotion program to increase physical activity of employees. Because I do physical activity research, I was asked to form a team and to lead the team.
We're each given a fitness tracker and asked to keep tabs of our daily steps and upload them onto a database. Each week, the database would tally the cumulative totals of each team, and the team with the highest total would win for that week. Sadly, my team never won in any of the weeks.
Team members were people like me. Most of us were women. All of us were middle aged and older.
The fitness tracker that we were given had a default goal. You guessed it, 10,000 steps. A teammate once remarked to me, “This step goal is crazy.
At my age, it is impossible for me to reach it. ” So her remark got me thinking. What is the basis for this number?
Who came up with it and what data support this number? Well, it turns out that this number first originated in Japan in the mid 1960s. At that time, a company called the Yamasa Clock and Instrument Company began selling the world's first commercial pedometer, and they needed to come up with a catchy name for this pedometer.
They called it the Manpo meter. <i>Manpo</i> in Japanese means 10,000 steps. So this was the brilliant name, the 10,000 step meter.
You see an advertisement from that era where you could buy the device in white, black, beige or red. Now, at that time, the Tokyo Olympic Games had just taken place in 1964, so people were very interested in exercise. While Japanese researchers believed that this number of steps could lower your risk of developing heart disease.
There had been no studies conducted that compared healthy people who took 10,000 steps or more against the health of people taking fewer steps. So, following my employer workplace health promotion program and learning about the history of the Manpo meter, I became very interested in looking for data that could look at the health of people taking different numbers of steps a day. In particular, I was very interested in the number of 10,000 steps.
Was this the bright line of who are healthy from those who are not healthy? I serve as a co-director of a large nationwide study on women called the Women's Health Study. Okay, we're not really imaginative when it comes to study names, are we?
In any event, between 2011 and 2015, some 17,000 of these women had worn a fitness tracker, a research grade fitness tracker for a week. It occurred to me that I could look at that data, which of course included steps per day and related to their subsequent mortality rates. In 2019, 19, we published the findings from a landmark study that asked for the first time.
Specifically, do you need to take 10,000 steps to be healthy? Now, the women in these study was older. The mean age was 72 at the time that they wore the fitness tracker.
Bottom line, levels of stepping far below 10,000 steps was associated with meaningful health benefits. Now, the least active 5% of women in this study took 2000 steps a day. Those who took 3000 had lower death rates than those who took 2000.
If you did 4000, you're better off than those who did 3000. So very simply put, some stepping was good. More stepping was better.
Interestingly, once women reach 7500 steps, the benefits leveled. So women who got the 10,000 steps actually had no no lower death rates than the women who took 7500 steps. Our simple message could perhaps be refined to some, stepping is good.
More is better up to a certain point. Following the publication of our results, many investigators conducted the same study, and they expanded our knowledge because they looked at men in addition to our women. They looked at people of different age groups.
And all of these studies showed what our study did. Some stepping is good. More is better up to a certain point when benefits begin to level.
Men and women benefited in the same way. However, there appeared to be a difference by age, the difference occurred in where the point of leveling occurred among older individuals, those 60 and older, like the women in our study. The point of leveling occurred between 6 to 8000 steps a day among younger individuals, those younger than 60 years of age.
The point of leveling occurred between 8 to 10,000 steps a day, so it's clear that you do not need to take 10,000 steps in order to get health benefits. Now, logical next question would be does it matter if I step fast or I step slow? In our women's health study among these older women, we found that the rate of stepping did not matter.
It was a total number of steps that mattered. So if you took two groups of women with the same number of total steps. The group that stepped faster had no lower death rates than the group that stepped slower.
Subsequent investigations weren't always consistent in their findings. Some of them agreed with us. Others suggested that faster stepping was associated with somewhat additional benefit.
So we don't yet have a clear answer to this. But researchers are actively looking into this, and we should get a consensus in the near future. Now, health, of course, is more than just living and dying.
What do we know about stepping in relation to developing heart disease? Cancer? What about physical cognitive function, dementia, quality of life, and other health conditions?
The field of stepping research is relatively new, so most of what we know relates to death rates and risk of developing heart disease. Investigators, however, are actively looking into these many health outcomes, and over the next few years, we should be able to get answers to many different health conditions. So, for many individuals, you can get the 10,000 steps.
And if that’s your goal, more power to you. I mean, no way disrespecting this number But many individuals throughout the world, those who are older, those with chronic health conditions such as my teammate, remember, she didn’t say it’s hard for me to get to that level. She said it is impossible.
For these individuals, it is so encouraging to know that adding any number of steps to your daily routine say you add 2000 more steps, even if you don’t hit that 10,000 number, you will get additional health benefits. We need to be cognizant of many people throughout the world who cannot walk. For these individuals, we can make a parallel case with other forms of physical activity.
Adding any amount of physical activity to your daily routine will help your health. So for all of us, let's keep stepping. Let's keep moving so that we can add years to our life and life to our years.
Thank you so much.
