每天走10000步有益健康竟是商家营销骗局？

不管是用手环、手表还是手机上的计步软件，你可能都有听过这样的说法，每天至少行走一万步有益身体健康。

那么，10000步这个数字究竟是从哪里来的？有没有科学依据？

据BBC介绍，这个数字实际上来源于1964年东京奥运会前夕的一场营销活动，一家日本公司将一款名为万步计（Manpo-Kei）的产品同健康的概念结合起来，实际上它就是一款普通的计步仪器。随后，一万步这个说法便流传开来。

Do we need to walk 10,000 steps a day?

Most of us have heard that we should be hitting 10,000 steps a day to keep healthy and fit. But the research behind this target might surprise you.

BBC

Many of us track our steps with smart watches, pedometers or phone apps and are of course thrilled when we reach that all-important daily goal of 10,000 steps. With the app I use, green confetti tumbles down the screen in congratulation. The app logs “strikes”, too, challenging me to see how often I can manage a week-long stretch above 10,000 steps a day. Answer: rarely.

表示“达到、实现（某一水平或数量）”，英文解释为“to reach a particular level or number”举个🌰：

Sales have hit the 1 million mark.

销售额达到100万大关。

Earnings hit a peak in the early 1980s.

20世纪80年代初利润达到最高水平。

表示“计步器，步程计”，英文解释为“an instrument that measures how far you walk”。

表示“极其重要的，至关重要的；首要的”，英文解释为“extremely important”举个🌰：

It was Tom who scored the all-important goal shortly before half-time.

正是汤姆在上半场结束前不久踢进了极其关键的一球。

表示“（尤指结婚等庆典时抛撒的）五彩纸屑”，英文解释为“Confetti is small pieces of coloured paper that people throw at a festive occasion such as a wedding.”

There are debates over the accuracy of some step-counters and it’s obvious that they’re a blunt instrument in terms of measuring exercise. If you sprint, your score is no higher than if you dawdle, yet there’s a real difference in terms of benefits to fitness. Still, they do provide a rough guide to how active you’ve been.

表示“（距离）快速奔跑，冲刺”，英文解释为“to run very fast for a short distance”举个🌰：

Bill sprinted up the steps.

比尔飞奔着跑上台阶。

表示“磨蹭”，英文解释为“If you dawdle, you spend more time than is necessary going somewhere.”举个🌰：

Tom will be back any moment, if he doesn't dawdle.

如果汤姆不磨蹭，他马上就会回来了。

If you are going to count steps, the magnitude of your goal matters. Most tracking devices are set to a default goal of 10,000 steps – the famous number that we all know we should reach. You might assume that this number has emerged after years of research to ascertain whether 8,000, 10,000 or maybe 12,000 might be ideal for long-term health. In fact, no such large body of research exists.  

The magic number “10,000” dates back to a marketing campaign conducted shortly before the start of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. A company began selling a pedometer called the Manpo-kei: “man” meaning 10,000, “po” meaning steps and “kei” meaning meter. It was hugely successful and the number seems to have stuck.

表示“（名字）继续使用的，保持不变的，被叫开”，英文解释为“If a name sticks, it continues to be used.”举个🌰：

Although her name is Clare, her little sister called her Lali, and somehow the name stuck.

虽然她的名字是克莱尔，她的妹妹却叫她拉莉，不知怎么的，这个名字就叫开了。

Since then, studies have compared the health benefits of 5,000 versus 10,000 steps and, not surprisingly, the higher number is better. But until recently, all the numbers in between hadn’t been studied. Even now they haven’t been comprehensively tested on the general adult population. New research from I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and her team focused on a group of more than 16,000 women in their seventies, comparing the numbers of steps taken each day with the likelihood of dying from any cause – known as all-cause mortality. Each woman spent a week wearing a device to measure movement during waking hours. Then the researchers waited.

全因死亡率是指一定时期内各种原因导致的总死亡人数与该人群同期平均人口数之比。，英文解释为“All of the deaths that occur in a population, regardless of the cause. It is measured in clinical trials and used as an indicator of the safety or hazard of an intervention.”

When they followed the women up an average of four years and three months later, 504 had died. How many steps do you think the survivors had been doing? Was it the magic 10,000 steps a day?

In fact, the average number for survivors was only 5,500 – and incremental gains in steps mattered. Women who took more than 4,000 steps a day were significantly more likely to still be alive than those who did only 2,700 steps. It’s surprising that such a small difference could have consequences for something as critical as longevity. 

By that logic, you might assume the more steps they took, the better. For a range of steps that was true – but only up to 7,500 steps a day, after which the benefits then plateaued. Any more than that made no difference to life expectancy.

plateau /ˈplætəʊ/ 表示“稳定；停滞”，英文解释为“to reach a particular level and then stay the same”举个🌰：

I'd been losing about a pound a week on my diet, but recently I've plateaued and haven't lost an ounce.

我通过节食体重每周减轻1磅左右，但最近体重稳定了下来，1磅也没少。

Of course, one drawback of this study is that we can’t be certain that the steps preceded the illness that killed them. The researchers only included women who were fit enough to walk outside their home and they did ask people to rate their own health, but perhaps there were some participants who were well enough to walk, but already not well enough to walk very far. In other words, they walked less steps because they were already unwell, and the steps themselves made no difference.

Then there’s the question of the optimum step count in psychological terms. The 10,000 target can seem like a high goal to achieve every single day, which might tempt you not to bother. Consistently failing to achieve your goal day after day is dispiriting. In a study of British teenagers, at first the 13 and 14-year-olds enjoyed the novelty of being given the target, but they soon realised how difficult it was to maintain and complained that it wasn’t fair.

表示“引诱，诱惑”，英文解释为“to make someone want to have or do something, especially something that is unnecessary or wrong”举个🌰：

The offer of free credit tempted her into buying a new car.

可享受免费贷款让她禁不住诱惑买了一辆新车。

I’ve done my own psychological experiment on myself by changing the default goal on my app to 9,000 steps. I kid myself that I do the other thousand walking around at home when I’m not carrying my phone, but in truth I just want to encourage myself by succeeding more often.

表示“欺骗（自己）”，英文解释为“If people kid themselves, they allow themselves to believe something that is not true because they wish that it was true.”举个🌰：

We're kidding ourselves, Bill. We're not winning, we're not even doing well.

我们是在欺骗自己，比尔。我们不会赢的。我们做得甚至都不好。

To raise the step count of the most sedentary, a lower goal might be better psychologically.

But even then, counting steps at all risks robbing us of the intrinsic pleasure of walking. Jordan Etkin, a psychologist at Duke University in the US, found that people who tracked their steps did walk further, but they enjoyed it less, saying it felt like work. When they were assessed at the end of the day, their happiness levels were lower than in those who had walked without their steps being tracked.

Counting steps might be counterproductive for the fittest too – signalling that they should stop once they’ve reached the magic 10,000 instead of getting fitter by, say, doing more.

表示“产生相反效果的，适得其反的”，英文解释为“achieving the opposite result to the one that you want”举个🌰：

Sending young offenders to prison can be counterproductive.

把少年犯送进监狱会产生适得其反的效果。

the+形容词表示一类人，如the poor穷人；文中的the most sedentary，the fittest都可以理解为这种用法，其中：

sedentary表示“久坐不动的”，英文解释为“spending a lot of time sitting down, and not moving or exercising very much”，如：health problems caused by our sedentary lifestyles 由于我们久坐不动的生活方式引起的健康问题。

What can we conclude from all of this? Count if you find it motivates you, but remember there’s nothing special about 10,000 steps. Set the goal that is right for you. It might be more, it might be less – or it might be throwing out your tracker entirely.

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