16 episodes
Body Electric NPR
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- Health & Fitness
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4.8 • 81 Ratings
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Our bodies are adapting and changing to meet the demands of the Information Age. What is happening? And what can we do about it? This six-part series is an interactive investigation into the relationship between our technology and our bodies...and how we can fix it.
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5 minute walk & talk: Writer Kelly Corrigan on making movement breaks productive
To kick off Season 2 of Body Electric, host Manoush Zomorodi takes a five minute walk with writer Kelly Corrigan. Kelly shares her tips for fitting movement into her busy work schedule—while also making time for rest.
Interested in taking a walk with Manoush and being featured on a future episode? Tell us about your strategies, struggles, and successes when breaking up your day with movement. Send us a voice memo at BodyElectric@npr.org.
New episodes every Tuesday. Binge the entire series here.
Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge here.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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5 minute walk & talk: Physiologist Keith Diaz hates timers and doesn't count steps
It's time for another 5 minute movement break! This time, Columbia researcher Keith Diaz joins Manoush to chat about how he uses his treadmill desk to stay active—without getting bogged down by timers, step counters and strict rules. Spoiler alert: Keith doesn't follow his own recommendation of taking a five minute movement break every half hour! Listen to find out what he does instead.
Interested in taking a walk with Manoush and being featured on a future episode? Tell us about your strategies, struggles, and successes when breaking up your day with movement. Send us a voice memo at BodyElectric@npr.org.
New episodes every Tuesday. Binge the entire series here.
Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge here.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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5 minute walk & talk: Why this listener failed at taking breaks—and her new approach
Remembering to get up and move can feel impossible, especially when you love your work and you're "in the zone." That was the case for listener Margot Cox when she signed up for our study with Columbia University last fall. As she put it, she "failed miserably." Today, Margot is ready to recommit to movement breaks. She takes a 5 minute walk with Manoush to talk through a new strategy.
Interested in walking with Manoush and being featured on a future episode? Tell us about your strategies, struggles, and successes when breaking up your day with movement. Send us a voice memo at BodyElectric@npr.org.
New episodes every Tuesday. Binge the entire series here.
Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge here.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Your earbuds and you: What all that listening is doing to us
Many of us wear earbuds for hours at a time, sometimes all day long, and all that listening is taking a toll on our hearing. This episode, host Manoush Zomorodi investigates our headphone habits. She speaks with exposure scientist Rick Neitzel, who has partnered with Apple to create a first-of-its-kind study into how our daily sound exposure and listening patterns are affecting our hearing. Neitzel offers advice on safe listening habits that can help protect our ears in the long term.
Later, Manoush takes us into the future of "consumer hearables" and how tech companies want us to never — ever— take our earbuds out.
Interested in joining the Apple Hearing Study? Sign up here.
Binge the whole Body Electric series here.
Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge and our newsletter here.
Talk to us on Instagram @ManoushZ, or record a voice memo and email it to us at BodyElectric@npr.org.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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5 minute walk & talk: Uché Blackstock on how your neighborhood impacts your health
Even if we want to put our health first, it's not always within our control. Our genetics, environment, home life, work conditions, and systemic factors all impact our wellbeing. Today, Manoush takes a 5 minute walk with Dr. Uché Blackstock, who has dedicated her career to building a more equitable healthcare system. Uché shares what it means to take care of ourselves while acknowledging the limitations we all face.
Interested in walking with Manoush and being featured on a future episode? Tell us about your strategies, struggles, and successes when breaking up your day with movement. Send us a voice memo at BodyElectric@npr.org.
New episodes every Tuesday. Binge the entire series here.
Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge here.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy -
Part 1: The Body Through The Ages
In this special series, host Manoush Zomorodi investigates the relationship between our technology and our bodies and asks: How are we physically adapting to meet the demands of the Information Age? Why do so many of us feel utterly drained after a day spent attached to our devices?
Part one kicks off with an exploration into how economic eras have shaped the human body in the past with author Vybarr Cregan-Reid. Then, Columbia University researcher and exercise physiologist Keith Diaz and Manoush discuss his findings and propose a challenge to listeners: Let's see if we can end this cycle of type, tap, collapse together.
Click here to find out more about the project: npr.org/bodyelectric
Talk to us on Instagram @ManoushZ, or record a voice memo and email it to us at BodyElectric@npr.org.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Customer Reviews
Love
I just love this podcast. I have been weaving the advice into my sedentary life and it is making a difference!
Disappointing
I wanted to like this podcast - but the science seems like total junk. Charitably, I think they were trying to “humanize” an idea that I hope was backed up by real science. However the “study” that the whole series build up to is binning people into self assigned groups -I’ve every 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours. People in the 30 minute group recorded feeling 30% less “fatigued”. Ok that’s not a scientifically metric and almost tuned to tease out a placebo effect on a 2 week experiment. “I was 10 fatigued, but after sticking to the superior awesome group I feel 7 fatigued. Hooray!”
This is further complicated by the revelation that the 30 minute group reported actually only taking 8 breaks a day (1/hr during the work day). I feel like that confirms that it’s all placebo.
Further gems include 40% of participants dropping out, but then a comment on how all the study participants said they loved the routine. Yes because if they didn’t, they dropped out: It’s peppered with tantalizing anecdotes about people who had serious benefits in their personal story - a lady whose blood pressure dropped like 40 points or something. She had blood work done so it’s data but it might be idiosyncratic.
This is actually very important because the difference between taking a five minute walk every 30- 60- or 120- minutes is substantial in terms of how it pathologizes your life, so understanding the relative benefits is important.
This is all watered down with seemingly random episode themes about how using TikTok can give you twitches and how ironically sitting perfectly still for a full hour is also important. I really liked the host but please science it up a little. I wish Wendy Zuckerman would take a look at this podcast.
I am really thinking about getting one of those Saatva beds though, that actually seems cool
Fantastic
This is the best podcast I’ve listened to in a long time. Excellent production quality. Super interesting. Manoush Zomorodi is a fabulous reporter and host!