Most of us have heard we should be logging 10,000 steps a day to stay healthy and fit.
That guidance originated decades ago with a marketing campaign in Japan designed to promote a pedometer.
The 10,000 number has since caught on around the world and is often the default daily goal setting in smartphone apps and fitness trackers.
But the original basis for the number was not scientifically determined.
Now more recent research has given us a better understanding of the relationship between daily steps and overall health. New findings on this topic were just published in March 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Aging, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that the number of steps a person takes each day does indeed have a strong association with mortality.
For the study, the researchers tracked nearly 5,000 U.S. adults aged 40 and over who wore accelerometers between 2003 and 2006, and then followed their mortality status through 2015 via the National Death Index.
The investigators were able to isolate the association between mortality and step number by adjusting for demographic and behavioral risk factors, body…
