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Opinion: How I used public radio to recruit 20,000 participants for a peer-reviewed study on walking breaks

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“With the right structure, Americans will roll up their sleeves, do the science, and trust the result,” Manoush Zomorodi writes.

Journalists don’t usually appear in the byline of peer-reviewed scientific papers. But recently, I received an email I’d been waiting on for nearly three years: A prestigious journal had accepted the findings from a study I helped lead with more than 20,000 participants across all 50 states. It was

published Tuesday evening

in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

My team at NPR had joined forces with physiologist Keith Diaz’s at Columbia University Medical Center to test his lab findings. Specifically, we invited people to try taking movement breaks every 30 minutes, every hour, or every two hours. Our goal was to test whether short walking breaks, which have been

shown

to offset some of the damage of our sedentary, screen-bound lives, were actually feasible out in the real world.

Read the rest…

— Source: STAT News (https://www.statnews.com/2026/06/24/short-walking-breaks-sitting-health-research/)

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