At 3,967 steps or more, the effect of reducing the risk of premature death from all causes begins to take effect. For every additional 500 steps, the risk of death from cardiovascular disease decreases by another 7%. For every additional 1,000 steps, the risk of death from all causes decreases by another 15%. This is considered the world's largest project to evaluate the detailed impact of walking on life expectancy.
Walking in any form has beneficial effects on health and longevity. Photo: REUTERS
According to the team of authors led by Professor Maciej Banach from the Medical University of Lodz (Poland) and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (USA), even when people walked as much as 20,000 steps, the benefits continued to increase. In older people, walking 6,000-10,000 steps a day reduced the risk of premature death by up to 42%, while young people achieved a 49% reduction with 7,000-13,000 steps a day. This result shows that the more you walk, the greater the effect on reducing premature death, and emphasizes that even if you only walk a limited number of steps under 4,000, keep doing it because it is still effective.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), insufficient physical activity is the fourth leading cause of death in the world, causing about 3.2 million deaths each year.
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