Is it true that … you need to take 10,000 steps a day to be healthy?

The fitness benchmark has surprisingly unscientific origins – yet it does contain more than a kernel of truth The idea that we need to walk 10,000 steps a day originated not in medical research but in a 1960s marketing campaign for a pedometer, says Jack McNamara, senior lecturer in clinical exercise physiology at the University of East London.

The round number was easy to remember and the idea caught on, despite there being no scientific evidence for 10,000 steps as a…