IF you pluck someone off the street, whether in Los Angeles or Shenzhen, and ask them how many steps people should aim for per day in order to get enough physical activity, they’ll probably tell you 10,000. In an age in which pedometers are cheaper, more accurate and more feature-rich than ever, this number has taken on almost mythical proportions — a lofty-sounding goal. In reality, it’s approximately five miles, and a reasonably active person can pull it off fairly easily.

    But is there any medical reason to embrace this number? Not really.

    This recommendation basically started around the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, said Catrine Tudor-Locke, a professor who studies walking behavior at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Center.

    Ten thousand, it turns out, is a very auspicious number in Japanese culture. It’s likely that the 10,000 steps goal was subsidiary to having a good-sounding name for marketing purposes.

    By all accounts, life in Japan in the 1960s was less calorie rich, less animal fat, and much less bound up in cars than what we live like today.

    More broadly, 10,000 steps is just a bit too simplistic a figure, say nutrition researchers.

    When people eat really poorly, there’s also a chance that fixating on the 10,000-step milestone will lead people to neglect other potentially important factors like their diet.

    In other words: 10,000 steps is great, but if you follow up those 10,000 steps by buying a 500-calorie hamburger — and, more generally, spend the rest of your day eating junk — you can still gain weight and face all sorts of unpleasant negative health outcomes.

    Finally, 10,000 steps might be too low for children, said Jean Philippe-Walhin, an exercise researcher at the University of Bath. So while 10,000 steps is fun and easy to remember and a catchy marketing tool, maybe it’s time, given just how unhealthy so many people are and how much they’d benefit from moving around just a little more, to embrace an incremental-improvement approach to exercise.

    “Stand rather than sit, walk rather than stand, jog rather than walk, and run rather than jog,” wrote Ulf Ekelund, lead author of the European mortality study. (SD-Agencies)