June 3, 2011 
First off, whoever framed this idea of 10,000 steps per day was a genius. It’s a much simpler metric to tell people. Since I run (on my good days) a few miles, I had to translate that to miles to understand what I needed to do. 10,000 steps is 5 miles. If companies were going around telling everyone they had to walk (or run) 5 miles a day, they would lose people quickly. [One likely question here is whether running and walking burn the same calories.]
It seems like everyone is pushing 10,000 steps per day right now – Here’s Kaiser’s Program.
Of course, on the flipside, this can be confusing since you have this program. You have the government’s recommendation of 30 minutes of exercise a day (which isn’t 5 miles for most people). You have advertisements for supplements. You have workout commercials. You have diet information. What works?
(In searching for 10,000 steps information, I found this Dr. Oz video which I’ll share on weight loss tips.)
As an interesting side note, I was wearing my pedometer the other day talking with a physician. He asked what it was. When I told him it was a pedometer, he asked why I wore it. I talked to him about measuring my steps to get to 10,000 a day. He’d never heard of the concept.
Enabling Healthy Decisions 