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I bought my first pedometer in 2016, and a few years later, I upgraded to a smartwatch.
I had often heard that you should walk 10,000 steps a day to stay healthy, so I decided to keep track of my step count.
For a while, it worked. During parental leave in 2016 (and parts of 2017), I easily hit 10K steps on most days by taking long walks with my baby daughter.
But then life went back to “normal”. I returned to my office job, and that means a lot of sitting. On top of that, there was parenting and a full schedule.
Suddenly, these 10,000 steps became a daily source of frustration because they were hard to achieve given my circumstances. Even though I knew the 10K target had no scientific basis, it was still in my head as a daily goal because I didn’t have a better number to replace it with.
But thanks to recent research, there's a new number that looks way more achievable: 7K.
Today’s edition is about:
Where the 10K steps rule came from
What the science says about the benefits of walking
And why 7K is enough (and more doable) for most people
Where did the 10K steps rule come from?
The 10K steps myth is a classic health myth with no scientific basis. It originated from a marketing campaign in Japan that promoted a pedometer called "manpo-kei", which means "10,000 steps meter."
The 10K mark was chosen because it's a catchy number, and the Japanese character for 10,000 (万) looks like a person walking.
10K daily steps is certainly a great and healthy goal, but let's face it: depending on your pace, it means roughly 100 minutes of walking. Not everybody can or wants to walk that much every day.
The benefits of walking start way below 10,000 daily steps
A recent systematic review and meta-analytic study tested the relationship between daily step count and various health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes, integrating and analyzing numerous scientific studies on the topic.
The authors concluded that, based on the accumulated scientific evidence, 7K steps per day are already associated with significant health benefits. In other words, 7K is the new 10K, and this goal is also more feasible for many people.
And walking benefits not only physical health but also your brain and mood: The study authors analyzed the relationship between daily step count and cognitive (dementia risk) and mental health outcomes (depression scores).
These aspects are often overlooked in discussions of how daily step count affects health, so let's dive into them in more detail.
How daily step count relates to dementia risk
Due to the strict inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis, only two studies measuring the relationship between daily step count and dementia risk were included.
The main result: The lowest dementia risk appeared at 8,829 steps, but the benefits started much earlier.
Here's the graphic of this result:
Relation between daily step count and dementia risk. Modified from this source.
Two other studies were reviewed but not included in the meta-analysis:
One study showed that more daily steps were associated with better cognitive abilities.
The other study showed that a higher daily step count was associated with lower self-estimated cognitive decline.
The results indicate that daily walks can be a powerful tool for preventing dementia, and that achieving cognitive benefits from walking requires fewer than 10K steps per day.
How daily step count relates to depressive symptoms
Three studies met the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis. The results show a linear relationship between daily step count and depressive symptoms: More steps are associated with a lower probability of depressive symptoms.
Here's the graphic of this result:
Relation between daily step count and depression risk. Modified from this source.
Another three studies were discussed in the review but not included in the meta-analysis:
Two studies showed that more daily steps were associated with reduced depressive symptoms.
One study didn't find a significant relationship between step count and depression scores, but this study worked with a particular group: veterans with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder (so the scores were already high).
Wrapping up
The results indicate that walking is beneficial for mental and physical health.
The study has some limitations, for example, it cannot establish a clear causal relationship between step count and health outcomes, and only a low number of studies were included in the meta-analysis, which limits the robustness of the evidence.
Still, it provides a solid basis for a new daily step count recommendation.
In their conclusion, the authors wrote:
Daily step volume is consistently associated with lower risks of major health outcomes. Although risk reductions occur even at lower step counts, they continue with increasing steps per day. Approximately 7000 steps per day was associated with risk reductions for all outcomes examined and might serve as a practical quantitative public health target.
Even though the study has some limitations (as any study), it's clear that daily walks are associated with significant benefits for physical health, cognitive function, and mental health.
And the new recommendation of 7K steps per day is a more feasible and realistic goal for many people than the good old 10K steps.
If you could excuse me now, please…I'm going for a walk. 😉
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Best wishes,
Patricia (Dr. Schmidt) from creatorschmidt.com
