Good News about How Many Steps You Need to Live Longer!
We know that being active is an important part of a healthy lifestyle and a lot of folks try to hit a goal of 10-thousand steps a day to make sure they’re moving enough. But new research suggests 10-thousand isn’t the magic number, it’s actually 15-thousand, and it doesn’t have to be all in one day, but over a whole week.
A new study by the London School of Economics and health and wellness site Vitality Global finds that walking 5-thousand steps three times a week for two years can help us live longer. Those 15-thousand steps can add up to two and a half extra years to life expectancy for men and three years for women.
- For the study, researchers analyzed the habits of a million people in the U.K. and South Africa over 10 years.
- They found that walking even more steps has a big impact on the longevity of those over age 65. People in that age group who regularly walked 75-hundred steps three or more times a week have a 52% lower risk of mortality.
- For those between the ages of 45 and 65, the risk drops by 38%.
- Getting in those 15-thousand steps also lowers rates of type 2 diabetes and lowers the mortality risk for those with diabetes by 40%.
“The findings of this study are a clear call to action for policy makers to promote prevention in public health and build on the power of healthy habits to improve individual and collective health outcomes,” said researcher Joan Costa-Font with the London School of Economics. “Successful habit-based interventions can lengthen life expectancy, entail considerable savings for public health services, improve productivity, and help address the significant long-term challenges posed by mental health, social isolation, and non-communicable diseases.”
