Clitheroekid wrote:It therefore seems to me that these other measures are just as likely to be the explanation for a longer life as accumulating lots of steps.
Thee days this kind of study doesn't get published in a half-decent journal unless it looks at those kinds of confounding factors. This study was based on people in the UK Biobank so they're very well characterised, and the authors looked at factors such as age, sex, ethnicity, education, smoking status, alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable consumption (servings per day), parental history of CVD and cancer, medication use (cholesterol, insulin and hypertension) and sleep time (hours/day), waist circumference, glycated haemoglobin A1C, high-density and low-density lipoprotein, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, and triglycerides.
In general they were all within 1-2% the same between the two main study groups. What the newspaper article doesn't make particularly clear is that this study was mainly aimed at comparing between people doing the same number of steps (low or high) who spent low or high amounts of time sedentary - so for instance someone who walks a few miles to work and then sits at a computer all day versus someone who is just constantly doing small amounts of walking all through the day. Long periods of inactivity are known to be associated with ill health, the question was whether that was true even when someone was doing a lot of steps.
And the short version is that what matters is how many steps you take, not how long you're sedentary for. So it's OK to sit at a computer all day, as long as you get your steps in on the way to work, or by doing sport in the evening.
And FWIW, I think you'd be surprised at how number of steps in the day *doesn't* correlate with the extent to which you seek out healthy behaviour. I've managed over 25k steps on a pub crawl, and 10+k at work without really thinking about it. I know people who walk many miles at work without being any kind of health freak, that's just what the job demands. But in any case, this study was trying to correct for the obvious things (and for instance the people with less sedentary time were eg drinking a bit more than those with more sedentary time).
The paper is here :
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024 ... 023-107221OTOH, the tendency now is a bit away from step counts and more about "exercise time", with a target of 150 minutes/week of moderate exercise for adults under 65, with vigorous exercise counting double :
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/p ... -19-to-64/https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/ba ... /index.htm
