New Research: These are the benefits of listening to your watch and taking daily steps
The number to “chase” has been revealed
As is well known, limiting your sedentary life has many health benefits. However, for the first time a scientific study is coming to use the data recorded by smart watches, fitness trackers, bands and other wearables to show how much the most steps ultimately help to reduce the chances of various diseases.
Going into details, the All of Us research program of the US National Institutes of Health used the data from the smart devices of 6,042 people. An average of four years of activity was recorded for each participant, with the sample based only on people who wore their Fitbit for 10 or more hours a day, for at least six months. Daily step count and intensity (ie, steps per minute) were then correlated with disease incidence within the group and compared with disease rates in the general population.
The results of the survey:
Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression and sleep apnea are some of the health problems that can be prevented by increasing the number and intensity of daily steps one takes.
The results clearly showed that as steps increased , the risk of most diseases decreased . The exceptions were hypertension and diabetes, since in those two conditions, when people were getting to about 8,000 to 9,000 steps a day, the benefits of logging even more steps were limited.
How many steps should we take per day?
8,200 steps (or more) a day appears to be adequate to seriously reduce the risk of conditions such as obesity, sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and major depressive disorder. In fact, the researchers also found that overweight people who increased their daily steps from 6,000 to 11,000 were 64% less likely to become obese than those who kept exactly the same daily number of steps.
The association of steps (in thousands) with disease risk:
It should be mentioned at this point that previous studies had shown similar results. However, earlier studies tracked participants’ physical activity for short periods of time, using research-grade devices and looking at health outcomes years or even decades later. On the other hand, this new research was able to analyze several years of activity data collected daily from the participants’ own mobile devices and linked to current diagnostic records.
The research has the official title ‘Association of step counts over time with the risk of chronic disease in the All of Us Research Program’ and was published in the well-known scientific journal Nature Medicine on October 10, 2022.
You can find it by clicking here.
