Obesity is a huge health issue, and if you'll pardon the bad pun, getting bigger all the time with a large percentage of people miles away from normal body fat levels.
What's more, recent figures have the prevalence of obesity growing for adults (33.
3% for men; 35.
3% for women), kids and adolescents (16.
3% are obese), though the activity levels in those groups are hardly keeping pace.
TV, computers and video games have made us all more sedentary than any other generation in history.
Exercise, as we all well know, is one of the absolute best habits you can develop.
Staying physically active throughout your life is good for both body and mind and can help you decrease your risk of many serious diseases and conditions.
The first study to examine the link between activity and body composition came in 2001 as an effort by a team of researchers from the University of South Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania and the Centers for Disease Control.
It looked at the relationship between the number of steps you take each day, your BMI and percentage of body fat.
Pedometers are affordable little devices (motion sensors really) that measure how many steps you take literally each day, and they're a very objective way of assessing activity levels for research.
Pedometers work particularly well as a way to measure walking, which is what we do most often as part of our daily routine.
The devices make no distinction between the walk to the refrigerator or out in the fresh air - steps are steps and are simply recorded.
The subjects in this study were 109 healthy adult volunteers, men and women ranging in age from 17 to 79 who filled out questionnaires on how active they were, were tested for physical fitness and had their height (with shoes) and weight (with a digital scale) taken, as well as percentage of body fat measured so the team had two body composition variables to use in the work.
Subjects wore the pedometer for anywhere from 14 to 19 days, following their normal daily routine, to get a good measure of how active they were.
They got calls from the staff each week to check and be sure the instructions were being followed.
At the end of the day subjects in the study recorded how many steps they'd taken in a log that was returned with the pedometer, at the end of the study.
What the team found was that there was a consistent inverse (one goes up, the other goes down) relationship between the number of steps taken per day and both the BMI and body fat of the subjects.
Those who took more than 9,000 steps per day were more often classified as normal weight in terms of their height.
Those who walked less than 5,000 steps a day fell more often into the obese category.
These are exactly the people who public health officials believe might benefit from an intervention that would get them up and walking more.
In Japan, an activity level of around 10,000 steps a day is often recommended, and this seems reasonable considering the findings of this 2001 research and other literature.
Estimates put this number of steps as equal to burning 300 to 400 calories a day, a lot higher than evidence had suggested (and the Surgeon General had recommended in 1996) was needed to see the health benefits of activity.
These findings appeared in the International Journal of Obesity.
The team is hoping that by identifying at risk groups who are obese and sedentary, we can target public health approaches to this audience, speak their language and help them understand the value of being more active.
In the meantime, buying a pedometer and taking the advice to walk more than 10,000 steps could be a simple and cost effective solution to achieving normal body fat levels and sustained weight loss.