INTERACTIVE MODELFIELD NOTEPUBLIC HEALTH
The Step Count Bench
- Study
- Field note
- Review
- Peer-edited by the club review board
- Article
- 13 sectionsabout 17 min
- Files
- LaTeX source21 kB
The paper reports one comparison per outcome: 7,000 steps a day against 2,000. Everything between and beyond those two points, in the models below, is the club's own smooth interpolation — not digitized data. What is real is which of two shapes the paper assigns to each outcome, and the two anchor numbers each curve has to pass through. Drag the line and see where you land on both.
Model 1. Nine curves, two real anchors each
Every curve below is pinned to hazard ratio 1.0 at 2,000 steps a day (the paper's own reference point) and to the paper's actual reported hazard ratio at 7,000 steps. Rust curves bend hard near that second point, because the review classifies their dose-response as non-linear with an inflection around 5,000–7,000 steps, and we hold them flat beyond 7,000 rather than guess further. Blue curves are drawn log-linear through the same two points, because the review classifies those as linear associations with no reported plateau — so we let them keep extrapolating, fading past the range the included studies actually covered.
Anchor values (7,000 vs 2,000 steps/day): mortality HR 0.53, dementia 0.62, falls 0.72, CVD incidence 0.75 (non-linear); CVD mortality 0.53, cancer mortality 0.63, depressive symptoms 0.78, type 2 diabetes 0.86, cancer incidence 0.94 – not statistically significant (linear). Source: Ding et al. 2025, Lancet Public Health. Curve shapes between and beyond the two anchors are ours.
Model 2. Slogan versus evidence, in your own numbers
Set your own daily step count and see how it stacks up against both targets at once — the 1965 marketing number and the 2025 pooled-evidence one — converted to distance with the same average-stride approximation the field note uses (10,000 steps ≈ 8 km). This whole panel is the club's arithmetic; none of it is from the paper.
- Percent of the 10,000-slogan
- 60%
- Percent of the 7,000-evidence target
- 86%
- Distance walked (club estimate)
- 4.8 km (3.0 mi)
- Distance short of 10,000
- 3.2 km (2.0 mi)
Distance = steps × 0.0008 km, from the widely used approximation that 10,000 steps is roughly 8 km for an average adult stride. Percentages are exact division; the distance conversion is not.
What moving the sliders tends to show
On Model 1, drag past 7,000 and watch the rust curves go flat while the blue ones keep sliding down — that gap between “plateaus” and “keeps climbing” is the whole argument of the field note in one picture. On Model 2, notice how quickly the two percentages diverge below about 5,000 steps: the marketing target and the evidence-based one only agree with each other, roughly, in the narrow band between 7,000 and 10,000. Below that band they disagree by a widening margin about how far you have left to go.