Walking Reduces Heart Disease in People At Risk

“An extra walk each day wards off killer heart illnesses,” reports the Daily Express.

The traditional New Year’s Day stroll is good for “blowing the cobwebs away”, and pledging to walk more as a New Year’s Resolution is a great idea, but this headline needs to be taken with a degree of caution.

The news is actually based on the results of a large international study, but it focussed on adults with a high risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. For this reason, people at lower risk of these diseases may not get the same benefit.

The researchers found that for this specific group of people, every extra 2,000 steps per day at the start of the study was associated with a 10% lower risk of a “cardiovascular event”, such as a heart attack. A year later, each extra 2,000 steps per day a person took beyond their…