Keep Walking: The difference that 10,000 steps per day makes

It is a well known medical fact that a sedentary lifestyle is detrimental to one’s health. In countless studies, a lack of activity has been associated with an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. Unfortunately, these studies usually focus on sedentary lifestyles among people who are obese, and thus have additional co-morbidities, rather than focusing solely on the effects of exercise, or lack thereof, on those who do not have any obvious underlying health risks.

A recent study that was published in the February 2012 issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, however, took a different approach. In this study, the researchers took healthy volunteers and asked them to exercise less, while measuring their after meal blood sugar. Endocrinologists have recognized that spikes in blood sugar are a predictor of future heart disease, even in the absence of diabetes. These spikes tend to occur shortly following a meal.

The volunteers initially were studied for three normal activity days, which consisted of taking more than 10,000 steps daily. These same individuals were then asked to reduce their daily activity to less than 5,000 steps daily, which is about the average in America. To accomplish this, the volunteers stopped exercising, had food delivered as opposed to walking to pick it up and took the elevator as opposed to the stairs. During this time they also kept a food diary to ensure that their diet did not change. Throughout this six day experiment, the volunteers were equipped with a machine to continuously measure their blood sugar levels.

The results of the study found that there was a significant increase in the amplitude of the blood sugar spikes during the days of activity restriction. This was despite the volunteers being previously healthy, and not changing their diets. It is clear from this study that the physiological effects of inactivity can be seen in only a few days.  While a few short days of elevated blood sugar spikes would not cause chronic disease, the researchers did hypothesize that “over time inactivity creates the physiological conditions that produce chronic disease.”

Every little bit counts. So stay active and stay healthy!