Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Body Electric

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

For years, medical experts have raised the alarm about the effects of sedentary behavior on the human body. Sitting too much has been linked with numerous health concerns including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and early death. Days filled with sitting and screen time leave us feeling depleted. So what can we do about it? In a new series called Body Electric, TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi investigates: how we can change the relationship between our technology and our bodies?Let us know what you think of The Sunday Story by filling out a short, anonymous survey at npr.org/fallsurvey.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story. Just before we get into things, I have a favor to ask you. Every week, I feel so honored to bring you some of the best reporting from NPR and member stations around the country. Thank you for listening and being a part of this. Now we're doing a short and anonymous survey so you can share with us what you think, what you've liked, and what you think we could improve on. That survey is at npr.org slash fall survey. We would love to hear from you. Now on with the show. So I work from home most days and, you know, this entire desk I work at, it's just, it's a hot mess. I just couldn't find my phone. I sit at a chair

that has clothes on it. So I can't even sit back in the chair because it's also a hanger. I sit and look at the screen all day. And every day I want to take at least three naps because I'm tired. I think, do I need to go out? Should I get some sun? And I feel like I have a hard time focusing. So I'm saying all of this to say, I really need some sleep. Did I already say that? I need some sleep. But our colleagues at TED Radio Hour have been digging into this question about the relationship between technology and our bodies and how does it affect us in ways we don't even realize. You know, maybe it's the screens that are making me sleepy.

And how can we better understand and remake our relationship to tech in order to improve our lives? They have a new six-part series called Body Electric. And on today's episode of The Sunday Story, we're joined by Manoush Zomorodi, the host of TED Radio Hour. Manoush, welcome to the podcast. Oh, Aisha, thank you so much for having me. Do you hear a lot of people ranting the way I just did? You have no idea. Everyone I talk to, friends, family, listeners, we all contort our lives and our bodies around our screens.

They are the center of our universe. And what you described is exactly why I wanted to do this series. Because we all feel awful at the end of a long day sitting attached to our devices. But why? What exactly is happening to us physically when we use our technology? And what can we do about it? So in our first episode, we get into how economic eras have morphed the human body in the past to right now. So from hunter-gatherers all the way to the Anthropocene bodies we have today, hunched over our computer screens and devices for hours on end. We also get into the interactive project that we are doing with Columbia University Medical

Center researchers. Shall we listen? Absolutely. And we'll talk more about this after the episode. Hey there. Something happened just a few seconds ago that was extraordinary. You tapped or clicked a button to play this podcast. You ever think about what powered your brain and body to make your finger do that? Well, it's the same thing that's powering the device you're listening to right now. Electricity. They don't work exactly the same way, but our bodies and batteries have a lot in common, including a story that starts with a frog. No, not that kind of story. This frog was dead.

In the late 1780s, all kinds of animals, including frogs, were being dissected in the lab of an Italian doctor named Luigi Galvani to study their anatomy. One day, something wacky happened. When one of my assistants by chance lightly applied the point of a scalpel to the inner crural nerves of the frog, suddenly all the muscles of the limbs were seen so to contract that they appeared to have fallen into violent tonic convulsions. This is Smithsonian curator Lila Vekerdie reading Galvani's account of the dead frog kicking. Galvani believed he had made a major discovery. His hypothesis can be put in a two-word phrase, animal electricity.

He thought that the frog, that all animals, store electricity in their cells, like a battery. He wrote up a report with lots of beautiful diagrams, printed just 10 copies, and sent them off to scientist friends. So now we are looking at the title page of this publication from 1791, which was printed in Bologna. I went to see one of Galvani's precious copies at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It's almost like a magazine. I guess it's kind of like if we were to get like Nature magazine today with publications. That's what it was. Originally as an article. One of Galvani's pals, an Italian physicist named Alessandro Volta read his article. And Volta thought Galvani's ideas about animal electricity, eh, they weren't quite right.

Volta decided to test them. Volta was a more rigorous scientist than Galvani was. Roger Sherman is the physics curator at the National Museum of American History. And Volta experimented very carefully and determined that what was making the legs twitch was a circuit between the frog and the scalpel, which was made of steel, and a different metal like copper or brass. And when you have a circuit like that, it creates an electrical current. So Volta figures out that actually you don't need a dead frog or any other animal. You just need to put different metals together, stick them in a conduit like salt water,

and presto, you can generate electricity. Volta calls his invention the voltaic pile. Volta's pile. There's a pile there, yes. A stack of different disks of metal. This was basically the invention of the battery. Yes, and from that discovery comes our modern electric batteries and the whole idea of electricity as a current that continues to flow. Volta as in voltage. The electrical unit volt was named after him, yes. And Galvani as in galvanize?

Yes, that's right. It all comes back to the frog. Electricity in the body works differently than what we use to keep the lights on. But Galvani wasn't totally wrong. It is what makes us move, think, and feel. Electricity is the spark of life. As the poet Walt Whitman famously wrote, I sing the body electric.

To feel the pulse of the world in your veins is to feel alive. But let's be real. These days, that vitality is waning. Our laptops and phones keep going, but for many of us, spending hours attached to our devices, well, it's depleting us. We feel stuck in a vicious cycle of type, tap, collapse. I find myself sitting. I find myself staring at screens. I find myself trapped in that world. I'm not moving as much as I could or should. My shoulders sometimes hurt sitting at a computer hunched over. It doesn't seem like it's something that takes a lot of energy, but it absolutely does. I'm not sleeping

great. I'm so tense and tight. My back aches. I tend to just continuously lean further and further and further into the computer screen. Yeah, I think I feel it most in my eyes and it almost feels like you're drunk or something. It's like, it's such a dizzy, distractive, it's almost disassociative. I'm just tired. And I take breaks. You know, I'll be like, hey, you need a break. So stop looking at the big screen. And now it's time to look at the little screen.

That's not good. Oh, man, I hear you. We are in a silent battle with our devices. And they are slowly, stealthily draining us. But how can we maintain our energy when nearly 85% of jobs are mostly sedentary? And even when we're not working, so many of us spend the majority of our other time on screens, too. Well, I think it's time to find out, because I'm not sure we can keep going like this. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, host of the TED Radio Hour and a longtime tech journalist.

And welcome to NPR's Body Electric, a special six-part investigation into the relationship between our technology and our bodies and what we can do to make it better. Over the last decade, I've been on a sort of quest to get people, including myself, to observe our behavior so that we can understand and change how we live with technology. And I've found that the right combination of history, hardcore science, and some self-experimentation can help us make real change. Which is why this series has an interactive element. And we think it's actually a first for public radio and podcasts. We're partnering with Columbia University's Medical Center to do a massive study with you. Can we take their findings in the lab about getting off our butts and translate their recommendations into the real world? The only way we're going to know is if we try.

First, though, we need to understand how we got ourselves in this position. The big picture. When we come back, how our tools have shaped our anatomy through the ages. Stick with us. Now, Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today.

Before we get into what's going on with your health and your technology right now, let's get some context. Because since the beginning of humans, the work we did and the tools we used put stress on our bodies in bad and good ways. So we have approximately 49% of the bone density than that of hunter-gatherers. The density of the upper arm bone in female agriculturalists was greater than Olympic rowers. Wow. No amount of time at the gym is going to bring that back, right? This is Vybar Cregan-Reed. And I am professor of English and environmental humanities at the University of Kent in the UK. And my most recent book is Primate Change, How the World We Made is Remaking Us. Vibar's a little obsessed with how our health is impacted by how we spend our time.

Because as our work has morphed, our bodies have morphed in response. Yeah, we have the same DNA as we've always had. But the ecology of labor has changed a great deal. Now, what I mean by that is the variety of labor that a hunter-gatherer would do with their body meant their bodies were very, very different to ours. Yeah. So let's start with the Paleolithic body. So if we go back hundreds of thousands of years, maybe a million years, you'll find that humans were, on the whole, they were pretty tall, pretty skinny. And humans kind of had the body that they needed to climb and to be able to move, the African savannah became a kind of perfect place in which the human body could flourish. This was the longest period in human

history. We were foraging, hunting and fishing for hundreds of thousands of years. But then, about 12,000 years ago... The biggest change that the human body undergoes is when we decide to settle, and we'd call this the agricultural revolution. And that's really a point at which access to water became easier, access to food obviously became a lot easier because it was being farmed. And from that moment, what we can see is a pull towards

efficiency, removing friction from your everyday life. The fact that your fruit tree is now in your garden as opposed to two miles away saves you a great deal of time. It also saves you calories. It means you don't need to find as much food if you're using less food. Speeding things along, livestock, then horses, were domesticated. So a little less running around for us humans. And then, about 5,000 years ago, the chair was invented. But for a long time, mostly just rich and powerful people owned chairs. And the reason that people didn't have them is they had no use of them. You know, if you're working on the land, you haven't really got much time to be sitting around.

If we look at literature, there's little mention of chairs in the Iliad, the Odyssey, or even the Bible. In the early 1600s, when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, we see the word chair pop up just four times. But then, 150 years after that, the Industrial Age commenced. And so did the era of sitting. In the mid-1800s, Charles Dickens was, of course, writing up a storm. And chairs are mentioned all over the place in his manuscripts. If you look for the word chair in Bleak House, there are 187 of them. So something had obviously hugely changed. And what had changed wasn't just the fact that it was possible for us

to make more chairs, but it was the fact that there were just so many other ways for people to use them. And one of those ways is in their work. So in 1851, it's the first time in the history of our species that we start to find more people living in urban centers than are living in rural ones. And what it meant was their lives completely changed. And Vibar, I guess we should also point out that simultaneously, just as chairs and more sedentary lifestyles were becoming common, people were also working in factories with horrible conditions, long hours, surrounded by really dangerous machines and chemicals. chemicals and if you were injured at work it was on you there was no legal recourse so it's incredibly dangerous but also what it meant was people were exhausted they didn't have access to

the variety of food that they had access to in rural communities so people that worked in factories they worked extremely long hours but they were often working to buy the bread for the following day so children were never outside. So they would walk a few hundred meters to work, then they'd be inside a factory for 12 hours or 14 hours or longer. And then they'd go back home and then they'd sleep and then they'd come back to their shift. So it meant that children shrank, humans shrank quite substantially. The average 16-year-old was at least a foot shorter than today. As the industrial age progressed, we got electricity and gas, and life became more

efficient. But many of our daily chores still required a lot of time and hard work. Take cleaning a rug, for example. You would move the furniture from the rug. You'd then roll up the rug. You'd sling the rug over your shoulder. You'd sling the rug over the washing line. And then with a beater, you'd whack the bejesus out of the rug for a good 10 or 15 minutes. And then you'd then reverse the process. You roll back up the rug, you go back in the house, roll it back on the floor, straighten it up, then move the furniture back onto the rug. Now, to do that, you're talking about a calorie burn of about 200 to 300 calories. But then, cleaning a rug got way easier with motorized appliances.

You have the upright vacuum cleaner. Now, when I was a kid these were quite common and they weighed they weighed a ton so even with an upright electric vacuum cleaner you're still talking about a good sort of 100 calorie burn to do a rug now we have a robo vac you go beep beep beep on your phone and the robo vac leaves its home and it starts and it goes to work cleaning the rug. And that's just one aspect of efficiency in modern life. And if you think about basically everything that you do is now a more efficient version. And we're now at the point where we don't really know what to do with ourselves. In the 1840s, it was definitely less than 1% of the working population

was doing sedentary work. But if you fast forward through to today in the US, 85% of the population has a sedentary job. I mean, clearly there are wonderful things that we have now. Science, healthcare, medicine, we are living longer than ever. But it seems like you're pointing to a quiet problem that's not going away. Well, the quiet problem is things like I sound kind of croaky today, and it's because I have asthma and hay fever and the tree pollen has decided to dump its load all in one afternoon, it seems. hay fever doesn't exist until the 19th century it literally does not exist until the 19th century most of the diseases that you can think of is they are connected in one way or another with a diminution

of movement or in a move away from rural environments to urban ones and our bodies are always trying to be the best bodies that they can be for us and modern life is really really confusing them so it's not so much that we're changing through evolution but we're changing our bodies and what they're able to do through our habits we used to die because we couldn't find food and now we die because we eat too much and we can't move. So even when we think about sedentary work from the 19th century and compare it to now, we're still not talking about the same things because of technology. So 40% of workers in the UK walk briskly for less than 10 minutes a month. And it's technology that has taken all of that movement from us.

This era we're living in has been labeled the Anthropocene as human activity has had a bigger and bigger impact on the planet. And in your book, you say that we have Anthropocene bodies. Yeah. And the idea of an Anthropocene body is simply one which is being remade and reshaped by the Anthropocene environment. So the screens that we have in our hand, they're stopping us from going outside. And when we don't go outside, we're not around green spaces.

We're not getting vitamin D. And that's really the damage that's being done. That's Vibar Cregan-Reed. He's a professor of English and environmental humanities at the University of Kent. His latest book is Primate Change, How the World We Made is Remaking Us. In a minute, ideas for getting your Anthropocene body to use its tools better. We're back with the Sunday story with Manoush Zomorodi, host of TED Radio Hour. Okay, so we just had a speed history lesson about how our bodies have changed through the ages, which brings us to now.

So some of the latest data suggests that the average adult spends 11 hours per day engaging in some form of technology. And what are we typically doing when we're consuming technology? Most likely not moving. Keith Diaz is an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University's Medical Center. Unfortunately, we live in a world that the default position is sitting. And we see movement now as often an inconvenience.

Like, oh no, I left my charger upstairs for my phone. Oh, I gotta go upstairs. Okay, maybe you're thinking, well yeah, I sit around scrolling on my phone a lot, but at least I run or I go to the gym in the morning. Keith says it's still a problem. It's not enough to just check off that exercise box for your day and think that you're done and you don't have to move the rest of the day. And there's been studies done in the Netherlands where they had people sit for three days straight

and then they had them come back and sit another three days, but exercise for one hour in the morning. And what they found was that that one hour of exercise in the morning before they sat for the rest of the day was not enough to offset the health harms of sitting. I know it feels so unfair that even if you're working out, it's not enough. But I bet some of you are also thinking, whew, good thing I got that standing desk. I'm not so sure. And unfortunately, my opinion is that the standing desk manufacturers have capitalized on the news headlines that sitting is the new smoking and helped convince many consumers that standing is a healthier alternative to sitting. But if you look at the scientific evidence, it is not convincing. The evidence is convincing that long periods of sitting increase your risk for a lot of chronic diseases.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually you may get diabetes, many forms of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and sitting can also affect your mental health and your mood and ultimately decreases your longevity. But so many of us do work that requires sitting at a computer a lot. We don't have a choice. So what do we do about it? How do we prevent those chronic health conditions? Or at the very least, how can we avoid feeling just gross like I do at the end of a long day of typing, zooming, and tapping? Well, this is where Keith's findings come in.

If people are going to change their behaviors and tackle this sitting problem that we have, they need targets to shoot for. They need guidance on what do I do? And so really the goal of my lab is to try to figure out what's the least amount of movement that you can do to offset the harms of sitting. And so that's really what we're trying to do is try to figure out how little we can get away with to offset the harms. So one of the studies that you've done went kind of sitting, you should move every half hour for five minutes. The main take-home message was that folks who moved every half hour for five minutes lowered their blood sugar spikes after eating by 60%. Wow. And then it also lowered their blood pressure by four to five points. Can I ask, those five-minute movement breaks, are people getting up and, like, doing jumping jacks?

What are they doing? This was light walking, 2.0 miles per hour on a treadmill. Oh, not fast at all. No. It's a stroll. We wanted something relatively light that everybody could do. And actually, those folks who moved every half hour, they had lower fatigue levels, they felt more energized, and in general had a better mood. And why I think this is so important is, you know, we spend our time trying to convince

the workforce and employers that you should allow your employees to take breaks to move. And it seems counterintuitive to them, like, no, I need them working. I need them productive. That actually a employee who's in a better mood, who's feeling less fatigued and feeling more energized is a more productive employee. So I was reading about your work and I love that there's a prescription, like do this and you're not gonna kill yourself from sitting on your butt all day. So I reached out to you and I was like, what if we could invite our listeners

to try out your findings in the wild, so to speak? And I was pleased that you were intrigued. What intrigued you, Keith? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing with these lab-based studies. They're not real world. I can give you a scientific answer of what you should do about it, but can anybody actually do it? If not, then it's pointless.

Okay, so we, NPR, are partnering with you and Columbia to do a study with listeners should they choose to join. Let's lay out the plan. Yeah, so the plan is that we're going to ask you to sign up and commit to doing movement breaks. For three weeks. Yes. And we're going to try a couple different doses. We want to see which ones work and which ones don't. We're going to send you some text messages over the course of the month and just check in and see if you're taking the breaks.

If you are, we want to know when are you taking them, what's making you successful in taking the breaks. And if you're not, we just want to understand why not and understand what are your barriers. But we're also interested in seeing, does this change how you feel? Does this change your mood? Can we be more specific about what counts as an exercise snack? Yes. So first off, standing doesn't count. So we want you moving. And so our ask here is that you walk either in place, if that's all you can do.

You can get a stepper and walk on a stepper. Or just walk, you know, throughout your workplace, throughout your home. Okay, so shuffling side to side is perfectly acceptable. I'm picturing what might be not acceptable is like you're on this Zoom call with your colleagues and you're the one bopping up and down on the screen. But like, that's what we're talking about here, right, Keith? We're talking about a mindset shift. Yeah. Well,

I mean, ultimately, what you're getting at is we have to, it's a culture change. There is this peer social element that we have to break if we're going to actually get this ingrained in everybody's lifestyles. Okay, last question. What if it works? Like, what's your biggest fantasy about our experiment? Yeah, if this works with our experiment, this is just fuel for us to then go and say, look, people can do this. And that's going to help us to start paving the way towards system level change. And that's for me where I want to take this. So, Manoush, tell me more about this big study. I mean, it sounds like a really cool collaboration.

Oh, Aisha, I'm losing my mind. I'm so excited about this because I have done interactive public radio projects before. I've gotten people to consider how they use their attention span and the attention economy, as it's called. I've gotten them to think about digital privacy online. But this is the first time I think that anyone has partnered with an academic institution to produce a real study to ask listeners to help us figure out what next steps are for a real change. So how many people have signed up so far? Okay, so like I said, this is a rigorous academic study, so we don't see the data. But what we do know is that over 20,000 people have signed up. My goodness. So, I mean, we've struck a nerve clearly, right?

So it'll be interesting to hear what the data shows. Are there ways people can follow along and find out what's being discovered? Yes, absolutely. Even if you are not signed up for the study, you know, try out the movement breaks. You just heard what Keith Diaz said is the gold standard that's moving, gently moving for five minutes every 30 minutes. Give it a try in your own life. See what it's technology. And we give some takeaways. So for example, we talked to an ophthalmologist who has done deep research into why kids are going nearsighted earlier and earlier at soaring rates. This double whammy of not going outside and looking at screens, it's literally changing the shape of our eyeballs. And she has some easy tips, parents especially, but also all of us who are staring at a screen all day. You're going to want to hear that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got three kids, so I'm very interested in that topic. Like, in your reporting, though, I do wonder, like, have you been converted? Are you spreading the gospel of changing your relationship to tech in your everyday life now? Well, I'm definitely sharing the gospel, that's for sure, with this series. But I have to say, I think for me, there was one factoid that just kind of smacked me sideways. It's that our legs are like a kinked garden hose when we sit for too long. You know, you stop the flow of water or your vacuum cleaner gets stuck. When we stop blood flow, our body struggles to process fats and sugar.

And that can contribute to early diabetes and hypertension. So every time I look at my seated legs right now, all I see is like a garden hose. And this is the case even if you work out in the morning. I hate to say it. Oh, no. Okay, so that's why we got to do our movement breaks. I do my movement breaks. I'll swing my legs. What do you think? Are you sure you're in? Look, yeah, I'm in for movement breaks and trying to do some stuff to stop these screens from overtaking my life. Or so I say, I'm saying that right now. I do need accountability. That's the only thing that works for me. I'm here for you. And so people who want to hear more episodes, they can listen to it on

TED Radio Hour. Yes, you can find the series in the TED Radio Hour feed, wherever you like listening to podcasts, or you can just go to npr.org slash body electric. Well, I'm really excited to follow along and to see how things go. I think it's really important. We got thousands of people waking up in the morning and trying to move a little bit over the next few weeks. I'm excited. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Manoush. Thank you. That was Manoush Zamarodi, host of the TED Radio Hour. You've been listening to The Sunday Story. Another reminder to please send us your feedback at npr.org slash fallsurvey. It really helps a lot. Body Electric was produced by Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanas Meshkampour,

with production support from Rachel Faulkner-White. Original music by David Herman. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom and our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.