10k Steps a Day Is a Myth. The Number to Stay Healthy Is Far Lower | Hacker News Reader

10k Steps a Day Is a Myth. The Number to Stay Healthy Is Far Lower

wsj.com

32 pointsbookofjoe51 comments

Did anyone believe that the number was exact and accurate for all people?

Are there people who think, "Oh, I've only gotten 9,500 steps a day this week; my health will begin to fail." ?

10k steps a day is not a myth, it's a goal. X glasses of water a day is a goal. Most health instructions are goals, and most people will fall short of the specific targets. How short you fall is likely to have some impact on your health, but each person is different.

While being active is undoubtedly very important for health, it's very clumsy to focus on one behavior and highlight the difference in mortality risk. It's very likely that more active people have other habits that contribute (significantly) to mortality risk reduction.

Exactly this, sometimes goal posts are directional and not absolute.

But the "X glasses of water a day" example you give is a total myth. There is literally no evidence that humans need any "goal" when it comes to drinking water, just drink when you're thirsty.

This is overbroad.

Many people are acclimated to low levels of dehydration and do not feel thirsty when they should.

Setting an imprecise, but safe, target number is helpful.

I've noticed that I drink a ton more water when I have my water bottle on my desk---I rarely get up to go get myself a drink (because I'm deep in whatever work I'm doing), so I would wait too long without the water bottle. The convenience factor certainly plays a role in determining what the "thirstiness threshold" is.

but is it doing you any good? are just drinking more often but smaller amounts? is it just nice to drink but not useful?

> are just drinking more often but smaller amounts?

Probably. I don't measure my water consumption, but I'm guessing that I drink smaller amounts. Even if my average hydration level is the same, it never goes too low this way, which means that I feel better.

I don't have any objective way to measure the health benefits of drinking a certain amount of water, but it definitely makes me feel better to be more hydrated, so I'm guessing it's good for my health.

When it comes to physical activity (sports, weight lifting), I have read that muscle performance can be greatly impacted by inadequate hydration. So while you may not feel thirsty, you could be forcing yourself to work harder than normal simply because your body is not operating efficiently.

people who are actually experts in kidneys and how the body manages water disagree with you. they say thirst is a fine way to go with exceptions being very rare and mostly among the elderly, but that even there 8 glasses of water a day is way more than is necessary. as well the idea that coffee/milk/juice don’t count is also untrue.

> There is literally no evidence that humans need any "goal" when it comes to drinking water, just drink when you're thirsty.

Actually... there is. You should stay below 1lt/hour on average because that's about the limit your kidneys can handle.

The trouble is so many people have no idea what it means to be thirsty or hungry. Or they don't think they could be bothered to drink plain water, and instead only drink sugar all day.

"Drink water" is a radical idea for a lot of people.

People love such broad generalisations. Just notice how prevalent "Eating after 18 will make you fat" is.

For non Europeans, this is referring to the time restricted fasting movement, where you don't eat after e.g. 6pm (aka 18 hours).

There are a lot of fads in weight loss, probably because there is so much variety amongst us. Some people can simply choose to eat less while at the opposite extreme some must have gastric restrictions surgically installed in order to lose weight. We must each discover what works for us.

I wonder if it would make a good business for a more holistically thinking company to develop an approach which helps test people for what would work best for them. I wonder how that testing would occur, or if it can be done at all.

Coming from a household where people took this step count goal religiously, it genuinely has no impact on your health. Obviously more steps is better but 10k is just an arbitrary number thats easy to market.

The point is that 10k steps and 8 glasses of water a day are goals completely made up with no evidence based in reality. they lead people to waste time.

> they lead people to waste time.

If drinking and moving are the worst forms of time wasting in someone's life, they're doing pretty damn well.

its a really low bar to celebrate wrong ideas that lead to time wasted in less bad ways.

I can't help but suspect worrying about all these goals probably undoes all the good of achieving them.

There's some evidence that gamification helps motivate people. That can be a double edged sword, because repeated failures to live up to some measurement can be so discouraging that a person gives up entirely and quits measuring (and acting).

Tbh for me I only feel like 12500 to 13000 makes a difference. In other words, 10,000 doesn’t require much effort (purposely going out for exercise), but to get 12,000 does require purposeful exercise.

Guess it depends on how inflated the 10k figure is. If very inflated then your argument is kind of irrelevant; also, citing a more realistic number could be valuable for people looking to motivate themselves.

In fairness, all general advice can be questioned.

Anectodal example: my grandfather used to be a farmer for most of his life and effectively stopped going to his farm when he was like 75 or 78.

He smoked about two packs of heavy cigarettes until about a week before passing away at 85, in the hospital, for unrelated issues.

Despite all the bad advices agains smoking.

>Did anyone believe that the number was exact and accurate for all people? Are there people who think, "Oh, I've only gotten 9,500 steps a day this week; my health will begin to fail." ? 10k steps a day is not a myth, it's a goal.

No, but that's not the point.

The point is that it's an arbitrary (and potentially discouraging) goal. If 5K steps are fine, then you shouldn't try to go to 10K just because somebody mentioned is a goal.

That's regardless of if you think 9.5K is just as good, or you think 10K is some hard magic number.

> Among the group, walking approximately 4,400 steps a day was associated with a 41% reduction in mortality compared with walking 2,700 steps a day. Walking around 7,500 steps was associated with a 65% reduction.

The headline does not match the content whatsoever. “The Number To Stay Healthy” implies a threshold beyond which there is no benefit. Yet the data suggests that more steps leads to better health outcomes, so 10k is certainly better than 4K or 7k.

If I were the author of this piece I’d be pissed to see it mischaracterized by this clickbait trash headline.

From what I understand editors have final call on the headline of a piece.

Unfortunately it’s sink or swim for news organizations these days so they have to resort to clickbait titles.

Yeah it’s true that clickbait might be a necessary evil in a 0.25 second attention span world but in this case “10k Steps a Day is a Myth” is the _opposite conclusion_ that the study the content was written around supports, since 10k is more beneficial than less than 10k. A headline should at least somewhat represent the content (and no, dang, I’m not suggesting it be changed in this thread ;)

This is a bit of a tangent but I think we can all agree that with the absolute glut of endless streams of information we are now relying more and more on heuristics to determine what information is relevant than we've ever done.

Yet people still go on about never judging books by their titles and all that jazz.

Is it finally acceptable to use appearances as a heuristic albeit an imprecise one and to expect people to put some effort into their appearance in aid of this?

I mean as valuable as every potential colleague, aquaintance, or other professional contact is I don't have the ability or the wherewithal to get to know everyone I meet on a fundamental level without any external manifestation of their inner nature.

Is there a balance between click bait and utterly banal that we can apply to articles, and people too?

I think, at least personally, it would be difficult to reduce my inner self to a clickbait headline. I am constantly on a journey of self discovery and exploration. The necessities of ego and projecting certain outward appearances in furtherance of my external goals only obscure my inner self, not just from the world, but my own awareness. I’ve been increasingly disturbed by how out of touch I am with myself. I would probably also be disturbed if someone else tried to judge and reduce me to a Buzzfeed headline.

Regardless I think your idea is interesting and, for personal use, would aid my introspective process.

I know the best art is created by embracing constraints.

You’re right and that’s part of why I love the web as a creative medium. Feel free to check out my site if you’re interested. I love your idea and am going to draw inspiration from it for a thought experiment I’m working on.

This all comes down to how you interpret the 10,000-step rule/suggestion. Your interpretation, as “more than 10,000 steps is better than fewer than 10,000 steps” is not, I believe, how most people would understand it. Because for any “normal” number of steps, more would always be better than fewer, according to our current and common understanding of the benefits of physical activity. This would lack any explanation of why 10,000 is being suggested, when the same is just as true for 1,000, or 5,000, or 12,765.

There is the interpretation of the 10,000-step idea where it’s the necessary minimum for benefits. Or, weaker, some sort of prominent inflection point on the cost/benefit curve. I believe this is closer to how it is generally understood. The study obviously disproves the minimum idea, and arguably also shows that most of the benefits are achieved long before reaching 10,000.

As an aside: This study doesn’t support, or at least it doesn’t prove that more than 10,000 is better than less than 10,000.

We do know that, beyond some point, physical activity stops being beneficial and becomes harmful. Olympic medalists, for example, tend to die earlier than both non-medaling competitors, and the general population they are from.

So is there "no benefit" to taking 20K steps a day versus 10K?

Well, either you gain immortality or the effect plateaus off.

But seriously, to my understanding, if you walk just because you want to stay healthy, statistically 10k is a good baseline.

10k steps is about 6km give or take.

Maybe the point at which diminishing marginal returns really kick in, and "benefit"... with respect to what metric are worthwhile factors to consider here. The graph shows mortality rate but perhaps other cardiovascular disease markers would be meaningful to look at here.

In general, it would be nice for one to know some correlation between how the number of steps taken reduces one's risk. From what the article suggests, presumably these would be non-linear relationships.

> “The Number To Stay Healthy” implies a threshold beyond which there is no benefit.

To me it doesn't it implies a number which would give you a good average health condition, or maybe a threshold beyond which the marginal benefit will start to outweigh the marginal effort for an average person (hard to establish that, though). A "threshold beyond which there is no benefit" sounds like a way too high target.

At 44% mortality reduction for 4,700 steps, and 65% at 7,500, I can’t help but draw a curve in my mind where 10,000 steps is awfully close to the asymptote it is approaching, or at least an inflection point where further benefits rapidly diminish.

So the original figure of 10,000 would be surprisingly close to the mark, considering its genesis.

10,000 is also a nice number. It's big enough to be impressive, but not so big that we cannot imagine reaching it.

It also takes 10,000 hours to master a skill...

There are probably other "10,000" goals in human behavior.

there is the 10,000 sentences method for aquiring a foreign language.

The law of diminishing returns applies here as well. The first 5000 steps are much more important than the next 5000 steps

Most of these "recommendations" turn out to be myths. They are generally "good ideas" that have some experimental backing (e.g. "walking is better than sitting"), but then someone puts out a number that people repeat ad infinitum because it sounds good. 10k steps, 8 glasses of water a day, 10k hours to "master" something, are all basically just catchy slogans.

Catchy numbered slogans are also more effective for getting a message across and setting a goal

The causation might also be the other way round. People who a really sick (and with a high chance of dying) might not walk around as much as healthy people.

A simple and easy number that is not too wrong is better than an exact number that requires more effort to understand.

Statistically, 10K is a pretty good baseline.

Of course, people have unique physiques, but then again, health advice targeting large populations cannot be individualistic.

Pick a number. If it's not too wrong, stick with it until more evidence surfaces.

As far as I know this magical number comes from Japan as in 1965 they released a pedometer labeled Manpo-kei which supposedly means "10,000 steps meter"...

From the last link: “It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy,” she explains. “In 1965, a Japanese company was selling pedometers, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedometer#History https://www.news-medical.net/health/Where-did-10000-steps-a-... https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/10000-ste...

Health and fitness research is amazingly vague and.. well shit. Or no wait, the term in underfunded. We should be sinking hundreds of billions into figuring out these things.

The stuff here talks about the amount of physical exercise to stay healthy! In what other field would such things be acceptable? You just cant say "Stay healthy", there is no such thing. (at least not today)

I want to see the entire chart derived from huge data sets but I believe the really interesting data to live around minimal activity. There is probably a sweet spot around 20-100 steps where fewer really starts killing you really fast. Then we can get to addressing the issue and possibly improve average/collective health dramatically.

I wouldn't mind showing up for bench marking 1 time per year. If the report puts me in a group slowly killing themselves I would be interested in solutions. It might sound absurd but I already pay 25 euro for some smokes. They say it is for my health but Nicotine addicts don't need to smoke.

Easy goals so people don't have to think. 5 a day. 10,000 steps. 2 metres.

Is anyone surprised?

this article is flagged. I'm seeing a lot of flagging lately, here on HN. Did anyone notice the same thing ?

Yes. My guess would be because the title is clickbait-y (though it is the actual title).

The title also doesn't seem to match the research results in the article.

pre-covid I easily did 10k steps every day and I really wasn't healthy.

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