On occasion, staying in bed or on the couch can feel excessively comfortable.
According to new research, however, achieving your daily step goal is effective in preventing serious illnesses.
Vanderbilt University Medical Centre researchers requested that over 6,000 volunteers use Fitbit activity monitors for at least 10 hours every day.
During the four-year duration of the trial, participants’ health data were also collected.
The equivalent of around four miles of walking per day, more than 8,200 steps per day were found to protect against obesity, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and major depressive illness.
Results also indicated that obese persons can minimize their chance of becoming obese by 64% by increasing their daily step count from 6,000 to 11,000.
As the number of steps grew, the risk for the majority of disorders decreased.
However, after participants attained between 8,000 and 9,000 steps per day, the risk of hypertension and diabetes did not decrease further.
According to the authors, persons who wear Fitbits are typically more active than the average adult.
However, “the fact that we were able to discover robust relationships between steps and…disease in this active sample suggests that even larger associations may exist in a less active population
According to scientists, these findings are a vital first step toward the creation of personalized activity prescriptions.
Using commercial activity trackers linked to an individual’s electronic health records, we studied the association between step count volume and intensity throughout the entire spectrum of human disease,” they wrote in Nature Medicine.
We found continuous and statistically significant correlations between exercise levels and the occurrence of diabetes, hypertension, gastroesophageal reflux disease, major depressive disorder, obesity, and sleep apnea.
‘More daily steps were associated with a reduced chance of getting these chronic illnesses.
Higher step counts were connected with protection against obesity in a population at high risk.
Polls indicate that more than one-third of UK adults currently own an exercise tracker of some form, with one-third of those individuals using their device daily.
In this study, the individuals walked an average of 7,731 steps each day.
In 2018, Public Health England and the Royal College of General Practitioners recommended that people improve their health by focusing on brisk walking rather than counting steps.
As part of an effort to encourage adults to engage in more moderate-intensity physical activity, they stated that 10 minutes of daily brisk walking could cut the risk of premature death by up to 15%.
