"In the past decade, as pedometers have proliferated in smartphone apps and wearable fitness trackers, another benchmark has entered the lexicon: Take at least 10,000 steps a day, which is about five miles of walking for most people...
I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead author of a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, began looking into the step rule because she was curious about where it came from. “It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy,” she explains. “In 1965, a Japanese company was selling pedometers, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’”Based on conversations she’s had with Japanese researchers, Lee believes that name was chosen for the product because the character for “10,000” looks sort of like a man walking. As far as she knows, the actual health merits of that number have never been validated by research."
More at The Atlantic.
that study says that 'More steps taken per day are associated with lower mortality rates until approximately 7500 steps/d.'.
ReplyDeletei wonder if the japanese '10000' steps really implies 'many' steps and not exactly 10000? some sort of cultural thing where '10000' is understood by them to mean 'many'?
I-)
It literally explains why 10,000 was chosen, right in the story ", Lee believes that name was chosen for the product because the character for “10,000” looks sort of like a man walking. " It seems a bit insensitive to suggest the number is vague, in a culture that has used large numbers and base 10 mathematics since something like 500AD.
DeleteIn Poland, where we sing "Sto Lat" (100 years), that means both that may you live one hundred years and that may you live many years, but not necessarily just 100.
DeleteTen Thousand is a number in East Asian countries that is in many cases clearly used non-literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_thousand_years
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