A new study published online in the Journal of Transport and Health reveals walking to work makes it a much healthier choice as it makes people walk faster. It found that walking for different reasons yielded different levels of self-rated health. People who walked specifically to places like work and the grocery store from their homes for example, reported better health than those who worked for leisure.
The study used data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, a US data set collected from April 2016 to May 2017. Researchers analysed self-reported health assessments from 125,885 adults between the ages of 18 and 64. The adults reported the number of minutes they spent walking for different purposes – from home to work, from home to shopping, from home to recreation activities and walking trips that did not start at their homes.
Respondents ranked how healthy they were on a scale of 1 to 5. The Akar and Ohio State doctoral student Gilsu Pae found that walking for any duration, for any purpose, increased how healthy a person felt. They also found that an additional 10 minutes of walking per trip from home for work-based trips increased that person's odds of having a higher health score by six per cent compared with people who walk for other reasons. People who walked from home for reasons not connected to work, shopping or recreation were three per cent more likely to have a higher health score.
The researchers also found that walking trips that begin at home are generally longer than walking trips that begin somewhere else. Akar was quoted in a report as saying, “I was thinking the differences would not be that significant, that walking is walking, and all forms of walking are helpful. And that is true, but walking for some purposes has a significantly greater effect on our health than others.”
