Forget 10,000 steps and: eight health rules you can ignore
New research suggests walking just 2337 steps a day will help to prevent cardiovascular disease. There are plenty of other health diktats that don’t quite add up. Here are eight of them.
Your fitness tracker might be urging you to hit the 10,000 daily steps target widely regarded as a barometer for health, but the latest science suggests you will see improvements by covering considerably less ground.
In a study involving more than 200,000 people published this week in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, researchers from the Medical University of Lodz, Poland, and the Ciccarone Centre for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine suggested that walking as few as 2,337 steps a day is enough to cut the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
Pick it up to 3,967 steps and your risk of dying from any disease or complication might be reduced. For every additional 1,000 daily steps there were benefits gained, but even walking an extra 500 a day resulted in a 7 per cent reduction in dying from heart disease for some previously sedentary people.
The default 10,000-step goal of activity trackers is an arbitrary figure conjured up by a Japanese company marketing a pedometer in the 1960s. “How many daily steps you need depends on what you are hoping to gain from walking,” says Dalton Wong, the founder of Twenty Two Training. “If you are currently sedentary then any amount of walking will boost your health, but if you are active then the more the better and improving your walking pace to around 100 steps a minute will bring greater health gains.”
But if 10,000-step target is being called into question, how arbitrary are other popular heath targets that are often touted as being essential for our wellbeing?
1. You don’t need eight glasses of water a day
Put your water bottle down because you probably need to rely on it less than you think to stay hydrated. In 2011 the GP Margaret McCartney wrote a report in the BMJ denouncing the advice to drink eight glasses a day as “not only nonsense, but thoroughly debunked nonsense”, and in a more recent study at Duke University, Herman Pontzer, professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health, said that when it comes to this age-old target: “The reality is that people have been kind of making it up.”
Pontzer’s research shows that our individual requirement for water depends on factors such as age, build and physical activity levels and that the eight glasses a day goal doesn’t account for fluid in food such as fruit, veg, soups and sauces, or other drinks including coffee or tea.
“About 20 per cent of our fluid requirement comes from the food we eat,” says the nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert, author of The Science of Nutrition. “A simple test is to check the colour of your urine during the day, as if it is quite clear you are well hydrated, and the darker yellow it is, the more you need to drink to rehydrate.”
2. Don’t stress if you don’t get eight hours sleep a night
Neither too little nor too much sleep is good for our health and yet there is no one size fits all when it comes to how much shut-eye we need each night.
Dr Neil Stanley, an independent sleep researcher, says that our sleep requirements are highly individual and depend on how we are biologically hardwired. “Given the ubiquity of it as fact, it is a surprise to many people that eight hours is not the recommended duration of sleep and never has been. It is an average, not an ideal amount.”
For most people the sweet spot falls somewhere between six and eight hours. Researchers reporting findings from a study of 116,632 people in 21 countries in the European Heart Journal showed that six to eight hours’ sleep was optimal and that sleeping for even an hour more than that raised the risk of cardiovascular disease by 5 per cent. People who regularly got more than ten hours of sleep a night were at a 41 per cent higher risk of heart disease.
3. Holding a plank for three minutes can backfire
Margot Robbie is the latest celebrity to boast about how long she can hold a plank – four minutes and ten seconds, compared with her Barbie co-star Ryan Gosling’s three minutes and two seconds – although Miranda Kerr once claimed she maintains her figure by holding the stationary push-up pose for ten minutes at a time.
Before you try emulating their core-defining achievements, it’s wise to set your sights considerably lower. In any plank position you should feel the abdominal muscles working, and it’s a warning sign to stop or drop to your knees if you begin to feel strain in your lower back.
“A plank on the knees is acceptable for beginners, who should hold for as long as is comfortable,” Wong says. “When you can manage a full plank, then 40 to 60 seconds is a good starting point, and it is better to perform a variety of side and rotational planks for this duration than to maintain one position for too long.”
As you get stronger it’s fine to build up the length of time you hold a plank for. “Try 2-3 planks of 90 seconds with a break,” Wong says. “But form is the crucial thing and if your hips sag or your back hurts you need to stop.”
4. You don’t need to stand on one leg for 60 seconds for better balance
Our ability to balance nosedives as we age, raising the risk of falls. Practising one-legged stands while you brush your teeth, with eyes closed if you can, is an effective habit for maintaining good balance, but don’t lose heart if you wobble over in less than 60 seconds.
Brazilian researchers reporting in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that being able to perform a one-legged stand for even ten seconds meant people were at half the risk of dying prematurely over the next decade than those who managed less. Slowly build up as you get better at balancing. Holding a one-leg balance for at least 20 seconds was linked to better cognitive function in otherwise healthy people in their sixties.
“Add movement as well as time,” Wong says. “Bending to touch the floor on one leg or lowering into a single-leg squat are all good for balance.”
5. A daily intake of 2,500 calories may be too much
The general advice from the NHS is that men need a daily average of 2,500 calories and women 2,000 to maintain a healthy weight and no more than 1,900 a day for men and 1,400 for women looking to lose weight.
However, the government estimates that most of us consume 200 to 300 calories more than we should every day, and in a study published in the American Journal of Human Biology last year, Gavin Sandercock, a professor of sport and exercise sciences at the University of Essex, found Britons misreport how many calories they consume by an average of 900 a day.
“In reality our individual calorie requirement varies hugely according to factors including body size, muscle mass and activity levels, and weight loss is influenced by what and when we eat, not just the number of calories in a food,” Lambert says. “Counting calories can help to make you aware of your energy consumption, but there is no one size fits all.”
6. Think you need five a day? Try doubling it
It’s two decades since the government launched its five-a-day campaign and we are still struggling to meet it, managing an average daily 3.7 80g servings of fruit and veg. Yet experts say that even if we do hit the target, it’s probably not enough. A meta-analysis of 95 studies on fruit and vegetable intake by two million people by scientists at Imperial College London found the greatest health benefits came from eating the equivalent of ten daily portions. If that’s unfeasible, then seven – the amount recommended in Australia – is a reasonable target.
“Plenty of studies have suggested that we should be aiming for an intake over five-a-day to obtain the nutrients that may be protective against disease,” says Eli Brecher, a nutritionist. “I try to get clients to eat at least seven portions a day, five of veg and two of fruit, which was shown in one study to provide a 33 per cent reduced risk of premature death from any cause compared to one daily serving.”
7. You do need to stand up more than once an hour
The longer you sit each day, the worse the effect on your health, even if you find an hour out of your day to hit the gym. But while your fitness tracker or smartwatch may prompt you to stand up every hour, it is probably not often enough. Research at Glasgow Caledonian University found that setting an alarm to remind yourself to stand up every 30 minutes could reduce sitting time by 40 minutes a day, thereby cutting your risk of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Better still, get up and walk for five minutes every half an hour, a practice shown to reduce blood sugar spikes by 58 per cent compared with sitting all day in a recent study from Columbia University. “Prolonged sitting is bad news, and the more often you can break it up with activity, the better,” Wong says.
8. You don’t need to perform 50 press-ups to be healthy
Press-ups are widely regarded as the king of all exercises given their effect on improving muscle strength and endurance and working the core, back, shoulders, arms, glutes and legs. The more of them you can do, the better, Wong says, but press-up challenges that set a target of reaching 50 in one go after a month might be too much for some people. Guidelines from the American College ofSports Medicine suggest that 19-30 for women or 21-36 for men aged 20-40 are good targets and 10-21 are goals for men and women in their fifties and sixties.
“You will definitely gain a lot from doing push-ups and studies have shown that men in their thirties and forties who managed ten press-ups or less were at a significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease in the next decade than those who could do more,” Wong says. “But starting small, even on your knees if you find them tough, and building up to as many as you can manage is better than nothing.”
The Times
