Number of daily steps to good health
In the latest study to explore this territory, a team led by physical activity epidemiologist Amanda Paluch from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst tracked a cohort of over 2,000 middle-aged Black and White men and women, sourced from four different US cities.
The group, with an average age of just over 45, wore accelerometers that tracked their daily step count and step intensity during waking hours, as they went about their lives.
The experiment began back in 2005, and participants were followed up at regular intervals in the years up until 2018, by which point 72 of the original group had died.
While the observational nature of the study means we can’t draw any firm conclusions about how walking did (or didn’t) boost the health of the people in the experiment, it can identify links between levels of activity and health outcomes in the cohort overall.
Most importantly, the researchers found here that individuals taking at least 7,000 steps per day had an approximately 50 to 70 percent lower risk of early death when compared to those who averaged fewer than 7,000 daily steps in the experiment.
By itself, step intensity (measuring the quickness of steps taken) had no effect on mortality. [Continue reading…]