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

Article excerpt

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. Rea