Tracking what your body needs

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, tracking what the body needs. And one of the most basic things our bodies need is movement. So if you kind of map out the trajectories of our sedentary time and, you know, how much time we spend watching TV, how much time we spend sitting in a car, how much time we spend sitting at work, it's kind of been, like, steadily increasing across decades. This is exercise scientist Keith Diaz. And society and our cultural and societal norms are telling us you're supposed to sit in your desk. If you're not in your desk, you're not learning. You're not being productive. Keith Diaz has spent the past fifteen years researching the impacts of a sedentary lifestyle on our health and how much movement we really need to stay healthy. It all started with a headline that he desperately wanted to debunk. I came across some news headline. It was, like, in Runners World magazine. It said something like, sitting is the new smoking even if you're a runner. And I was like, you know, as as a runner, I tend to see exercise as the cure all, prevent all for everything. And so for for this article to, you know, put it out there that, like, you know, what you do exercise wise, you're running, that's not enough. I didn't believe it. And so I set off in my career to to debunk that and and show that, you know, that's not true exercise can overcome. That sitting isn't the isn't the kryptonite to exercise. And here we are almost fifteen years later, and, man, I've come to see it in a very different light. We are living in the most sedentary error in modern history. Keith Diaz continues from the TED stage. In a single year, the average adult now spend a full hundred and eighty seven days, over half of the year sitting or physically idle. The bad news is that our bodies weren't designed for this. I know because I've spent my career as a scientist studying the harms of being highly sedentary. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately, early death. Worse, this is true even if you exercise regularly. Exercise only makes up a tiny fraction of your day. The toxicity comes from when …