Dr. Casey Means

So to sort of just give a sense of the picture of walking, if walking were a pill, it would be the most impactful pill we've ever had.

in all of modern medicine.

There was a paper in JAMA, 6,300 participants followed for 10 to 11 years.

And the people who simply walked 7,000 steps per day compared to less than that had

in up to 70% lower risk of all-cause mortality in the follow-up period.

So not causality, but it's pretty incredible.

They've done follow-up research with slightly different numbers showing, again, though, like many thousands of people in the study followed for about 10 years, 8,000 to 12,000 steps per day was associated with 50% to 65% lower all-cause mortality.

And this has been played out in many studies showing about a 50% reduction in Alzheimer's

dementia, obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression, cancer, gastric reflux, just all across the board.

And I think the key thing is that it's not about the steps.

It's about the fact that muscle contraction is medicine.

When we contract our muscles, even in a very like low-grade way, like walking or doing a couple air squats, you know, we're activating AMPK and we are

essentially causing that cell to have a stimulus to push glucose channels to the cell membrane.

Most of the time, the glucose channels are like in vesicles, in little bags inside the cells.

They're not on the cell membrane.

So of course, that's going to keep the glucose in your bloodstream not being processed by the mitochondria.

So when we think about steps, it's a proxy metric for just moving more throughout the day.

So let's take two people.

You have a person who's walking for one to two minutes every 30 minutes throughout the day.

Maybe they're exercising at the end of the day or the beginning of the day.