Ten thousand steps and more. Could bicycle dealers compete with pharmacists? A new French study proves that the little queen is a very effective medicine for preventing chronic diseases and reducing premature mortality, with substantial savings for Health Insurance and the community.
And, in our country where the cycling culture is still relatively weak, it would be enough for a modal shift of 25% of short journeys of less than five kilometers from the car to the bicycle to approximately double the benefits, according to work coordinated by Kévin Jean, lecturer in epidemiology at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, and the economist Philippe Quirion, research director at the CNRS. The article, in press in the journal Lancet Regional Health Europeis already accessible in preprint.
A few months ago, these researchers showed that a modest development of the two active means of transport, cycling and walking, could prevent 10,000 premature deaths per year in France and generate 34 billion euros in savings, at from 2045.
This time, they set out to estimate the extent to which cycling can contribute to the promotion of health in a country where its practice is limited (proportion of journeys made by bicycle less than 3%, when it is greater than 15% in Denmark and the Netherlands). To do this, they started from the 2019 “Mobility of people” survey, the latest edition of this ten-year INSEE study, conducted among 14,000 people.
That year, before the Covid-19 epidemic, the average distance traveled daily by bike was 0.32 kilometers among adults aged 20 to 89, i.e. an average time spent on the machine of 1 minute and 17 seconds, with big differences depending on age groups and gender. Important details: at all ages, the proportion of cyclists was much lower among women. Furthermore, in 2019, electric bikes represented only 6% of kilometers traveled.
Health benefits
Based on these modest practices, the team calculated that nearly 2,000 premature deaths were avoided that year, and close to 6,000 chronic diseases. In total, five pathologies (breast and colon cancers, dementia, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases), for which there is a very strong link with physical activity, were taken into account.
The chronic disease with the greatest number of cases avoided was type 2 diabetes (3,743 cases), followed by cardiovascular pathologies (1,578 cases). “These health benefits could be underestimated, because we were not able to include pathologies such as depression, where the benefits of physical activity are also proven”underlines Kévin Jean.
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