Researchers drawing on the long-running CARDIA study fitted 2,110 middle-aged adults with accelerometers and tracked them for nearly 11 years, measuring how daily step count related to how long they lived.
Compared with adults who averaged fewer than 7,000 steps a day, those in the 7,000-to-9,999 range had a 72 percent lower risk of dying during the study, and those above 10,000 steps had a 55 percent lower risk, both sizable drops that did not keep improving much past 7,000.
Walking pace showed no link with mortality, only total steps did, and the study recorded just 72 deaths over 11 years, from any cause rather than any single disease. It could not prove that walking more caused people to live longer rather than healthier people simply walking more, a limit common to this kind of observational study.
Read the original study
Paluch et al., JAMA Network Open, 2021 · doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.24516
The payoff levels off well under 10,000.
Source
- Paluch, A. E., Gabriel, K. P., Fulton, J. E., Lewis, C. E., Schreiner, P. J., Sternfeld, B., Sidney, S., Siddique, J., Whitaker, K. M., & Carnethon, M. R. (2021). Steps per Day and All-Cause Mortality in Middle-aged Adults in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study. JAMA Network Open, 4(9), e2124516. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.24516