Search for the research behind "walk for ten minutes after you eat" and you'll find two numbers repeated everywhere, 12% and 22%, and the odd site that has them the wrong way round. The study is simple enough to describe in a few sentences, so here it is.
What was done
A team at the University of Otago in New Zealand (Reynolds, Mann, Williams and Venn) published it in Diabetologia in 2016. They recruited 41 people with type 2 diabetes and had each of them follow two walking routines, two weeks apiece, with about a month in between. In one block the advice was to walk for 30 minutes a day whenever they liked, which meets the standard guideline for people with type 2 diabetes. In the other it was to walk for 10 minutes after each main meal. Continuous glucose monitors recorded blood sugar every five minutes, and accelerometers recorded what people actually did.
Ten minutes after each of three meals comes to the same 30 minutes. The design held total walking constant and changed only the timing.
What came out
Blood sugar after meals, measured as the area under the glucose curve, was lower in the after-meal weeks. The ratio between the two conditions was 0.88, which is 12% lower on average. Most of that came from the evening meal, where the drop was 22%. The authors' explanation was that dinner was the most carbohydrate-heavy meal of the day and was followed by the longest stretch of sitting.
That 0.88 had a 95% confidence interval of 0.78 to 0.99. In plain terms, the true effect could plausibly be anywhere from about 22% lower to about 1% lower. It cleared the usual significance bar, just. For a trial this size that isn't a criticism, but it is worth knowing before anyone quotes 12% as if it were exact.
Which number is which
The 12% is all meals combined, and it is the study's main result. The 22% is the evening meal alone. Some summaries online have the two reversed, or fold them into vaguer claims like "cuts spikes by up to 50%," which this trial doesn't support.
What it didn't test
It didn't compare durations. Nobody was asked to walk five minutes or twenty, so there is no evidence here that ten is the right number rather than a convenient one.
It wasn't done in people without diabetes. Other studies have looked at healthy adults, with their own results, but this one can't speak for them.
It lasted two weeks per condition and measured blood sugar, not HbA1c, weight, or anything that happens to you years later. And participants were given advice to follow rather than being supervised, which is closer to real life but means adherence was part of the result. The accelerometers were there to check it.
Is it just one study?
No, though it's the one everyone cites. A 2020 review in Nutrients looked at the timing of exercise around meals and included it alongside other trials. The introduction to a 2020 PLOS ONE trial of post-meal walking in people on basal insulin sums up the field in much the same way: studies of 10 to 20 minute walks after meals tend to find lower post-meal glucose than walking before them. That trial used walks of 15 to 20 minutes starting 15 to 30 minutes after eating, a useful reminder that the exact protocol varies from study to study.
How we'd read it
If you have type 2 diabetes, a short walk after your biggest meal is a reasonable thing to try, and worth mentioning to whoever manages your care. Walking can lower glucose enough to matter if you take insulin or certain tablets, so it isn't something to change in the dark.
If you don't have diabetes, the trial can't tell you your numbers will move the same way. But a ten-minute walk after dinner costs nothing and fits the one pattern the study points to, so we'd call it a good bet rather than a proven protocol. The authors themselves concluded that guidelines for people with diabetes should specify post-meal activity, particularly after meals heavy in carbohydrate.
The practical details (how soon to start, how hard to walk, what to do on busy days) are in walking after meals, and the broader picture is in walking and blood sugar. If you're weighing this against walking at other times of day, best time to walk for fat loss covers that. To check the walks are really happening, the hourly view in a step counter shows them as small bumps after mealtimes. StepMax, our own free app, has one: Android, iPhone.
Sources
- Reynolds AN, Mann JI, Williams S, Venn BJ. Advice to walk after meals is more effective for lowering postprandial glycaemia in type 2 diabetes mellitus than advice that does not specify timing: a randomised crossover study. Diabetologia. 2016;59(12):2572-2578. PubMed (doi:10.1007/s00125-016-4085-2)
- University of Otago. Short walks after meals may prove important tool in managing diabetes. News release, 18 October 2016. otago.ac.nz
- The effect of timing of exercise and eating on postprandial response in adults: a systematic review. Nutrients. 2020;12(1):221. mdpi.com
- Glycemic effect of post-meal walking compared to one prandial insulin injection in type 2 diabetic patients treated with basal insulin: a randomized controlled cross-over study. PLOS ONE. 2020. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0230554)
We checked the figures above against the published abstract and the University of Otago's news release on October 2, 2026. We did not have access to the full paper, so details beyond those, such as the exact length of the glucose measurement window, are left out. This is general information, not medical advice.