Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com