Shahar Madjar

How many daily steps should you take to live a longer, healthier life? A new review, published in The Lancet in August 2025, explores this question in depth–and on a scale never seen before. The authors–from Australia, Spain, Norway, and the UK analyzed a total of 57 previously published articles. They examined not only the link between daily step counts and all-cause mortality but also a wide range of health outcomes: cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, cognitive and physical functions, mental health, and falls. Can walking help in preventing these medical conditions? Can it even delay death? And what is the inflection point at which more steps won’t result in better outcomes?

As a side note, I would like to briefly clarify the term “all-cause mortality.” The term refers to death from any cause, be it heart disease, stroke, cancer, infections, or car accidents. Can effective exercise, diet, or lifestyle changes prevent death altogether? Of course not. As living beings, death is inevitable. But almost any significant change in these factors can either hasten or delay our death. And so, when researchers and doctors talk about the association of any particular factor — say smoking, diet, and exercise — with all – cause mortality, they refer to the chance of dying during a period after the intervention was made. In the case of this study, for example, the researchers looked at the effect the average number of daily steps has on the participants’ chance of dying during the studies. These studies typically took several years.

Now that you understand the term, you may be wondering: Does the number of steps I take daily affect my risk of dying? The answer is yes!

The researchers found a clear inverse relationship between step counts and all-cause mortality: the more steps taken per day, the lower the risk of death. Similar patterns emerged for a variety of medical conditions.

For some medical conditions–the chance to develop cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease and strokes), dementia, and falls, for example — the reverse relationship wasn’t linear, which means that at a certain point, the effect of any additional number of steps was less pronounced. That inflection point was at around 5,000-7,000 daily steps. Walking more than that still provided additional benefit, but the returns diminished, and beyond a certain point, more steps didn’t translate into further gains.

For other medical conditions — the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, the risk of having cancer or dying from cancer, type 2 diabetes, and the risk of suffering from symptoms of depression — the effect of taking more steps kept growing with no specific inflection point. The more daily steps taken, the better the outcomes.

The researchers then compared the risks of different medical conditions in participants who took 2,000 vs 7,000 daily steps. The higher-step group had:

–47% lower risk of all-cause mortality

–25% lower risk of cardiovascular disease incidence

–47% lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality

–37% lower risk of cancer mortality

–14% lower risk of type 2 diabetes

–38% lower risk of dementia

–22% lower risk of depressive symptoms, and

–28% lower risk of falls.

As for step intensity — whether walking slowly or briskly, on flat ground or uphill–the study didn’t offer a clear conclusion. The total number of steps seemed to matter more than how or where they were taken.

Moving is medicine. While the traditional goal of 10,000 steps a day may be beyond the reach of many people, a goal of 7,000 steps a day may be more attainable. If you are already physically active, keep it up. If you are sedentary, start small. Increase your steps gradually, with 7,000 steps as a sustainable goal. Taking more steps each day — especially if you’re also eating well — can help you lose weight and keep it off once you’ve reached your goal.