The truth about “10,000 steps a day”: do you have to walk that much to be healthy ?

Activité physique : une étude valide les “10 000 pas par jour”

If to improve our health, the World Health Organization advises walking 10,000 steps per day, this recommendation struggled to find scientific support. This is done thanks to Australian researchers.

"The exact origin of the belief that people should aim for 10,000 steps per day is unclear", we can read in the columns of the magazine The New Scientist. "But it is probably linked to a marketing campaign promoting pedometers in Japan."

Which seems to have worked since since then, the "10,000 steps" has entered our unconscious in the same way as "5 fruits and vegetables a day".

But is this scientifically verified ? Researchers from the University of Sydney have just validated this idea. By sifting through data from more than 72,000 people, researchers observed that from 2,200 daily steps, the risk of mortality is reduced.

Compensate for a sedentary lifestyle

But above all they found that reaching 9,000 to 10,000 steps per day reduces the risk of premature death or cardiovascular accident by 39%. And that these benefits could counteract the health consequences of too much daily sedentary lifestyle.

For Dr Matthew Ahmadi, main author of this work, "this is in no way a get-out-of-jail-free card for people who are sedentary for excessive periods of time. However, it contains an important public health message that all movement counts and that people can and should try to offset the health consequences of unavoidable sedentary time by increasing their daily step count."