Built to Move: Redefining Everyday Health

When Keith Diaz talks about physical activity, he rarely mentions exercise. The Columbia University behavioral scientist prefers to talk about movement - the kind that happens not in gyms or training plans, but in the quiet, unremarkable minutes that fill our days. As a Florence Irving Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine and Irving Scholar at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Diaz studies how sedentary behavior affects the body’s metabolic, cardiovascular, and psychological systems. 

“We’ve built a world that rewards stillness,” Diaz says. “Our workplaces, our commutes, even our homes - everything is designed around sitting. The question isn’t how to get people to exercise more. It’s how to rebuild the systems that keep us sitting still.” 

His research helped identify prolonged sitting as a quantifiable risk factor for chronic disease and then was cited within the  2018 Physical Activity Guidelines  Report to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Unlike most exercise research, his work focuses on what happens between workouts: the long, motionless hours that quietly shape our physiology. Supported by the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Columbia’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hub, Diaz’s work reflects the Institute’s mission to accelerate discoveries into improved health outcomes. The Irving Institute provides Columbia investigators with the mentorship, infrastructure, and specialized research cores needed to translate basic science into clinical and community outcomes - exactly the kind of environment that helped Diaz move his “movement break” concept from the lab to national-level research, health policy, and implementation of new workplace and lifestyle practices. 

Redefining the Science of Sitting 

Receiving the Irving Scholar Award in 2021 marked a turning point in Diaz’s career. As a junior investigator, he needed the time, mentorship, and infrastructure to generate preliminary data that could anchor an independent research trajectory. The award provided exactly that. With the Irving Institute’s support, Diaz began exploring what he calls “movement breaks”, brief, low-intensity bouts of activity designed to interrupt sedentary time. His early experiments, conducted during simulated workdays, revealed a clear pattern: regular, short walks could reverse many of the body’s negative responses to prolonged sitting.  

Just five minutes of walking every half hour was enough to stabilize blood sugar, lower blood pressure by four to five points, and dramatically reduce post-meal glucose spikes by nearly 60%. Participants also reported feeling more alert and less fatigued, suggesting that the benefits of movement extend beyond physical health to overall wellbeing. 

Two Irving Institute resources proved especially critical in ensuring scientific rigor: 

• Bionutrition Core – Provided standardized diets and controlled meal timing to eliminate confounding effects from dietary variation. 

• Biomarkers Core – Delivered validated assays and precise sample processing to measure cardiometabolic endpoints such as glucose regulation, lipid profiles, and inflammatory markers. 

These core facilities, paired with Irving Scholar mentorship, allowed Diaz to expand beyond exercise physiology toward a broader socio-ecological model of movement - one that examines not just individual habits, but the systems and spaces that shape them. 

In 2023 Diaz partnered with National Public Radio’s Body Electric series to take his research out of the lab and into the everyday lives of their national audience. Working with the show’s producers, he helped design and launch a two-week, real-world movement experiment in which more than 23,000 NPR listeners were encouraged to take frequent short walking breaks during their workdays and log how those interruptions affected their energy, mood, fatigue, and focus.  

The outcomes showed that people who took regular movement breaks reported improvements in mood, higher energy, reduced fatigue, and greater engagement during the day compared with their usual routines. While the project was not a controlled clinical trial, it provided large-scale, self-reported evidence that people can integrate short bouts of activity into sedentary work patterns and feel tangible benefits, demonstrating how his science can be tested and experienced outside a laboratory setting. 

“The lab tells us what works physiologically,” Diaz explains. “But the real question is whether people can actually do this in their world of back-to-back meetings and constant screens.” 

By merging public participation with rigorous data collection, The Body Electric study demonstrated how accessible, community-driven research can extend the reach and relevance of behavioral science. 

Systemic Change: Shaping the US Physical Activity Guidelines 

Diaz views sedentary behavior not as a personal failing but as a public health challenge. 

“We have great lab science showing that movement breaks work,” he says. “The harder question is how do we get people to actually do it? How do we design workplaces, schools, and cities that make movement the easy choice?” 

His current research pushes this work further, contributing data to inform large-scale meta-analysis and shaping the quantitative standards for  Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The aim is clear: move beyond broad advice to define evidence-based thresholds for how often, and for how long, people should interrupt sitting, guiding policy and workplace standards with precision. 

Ultimately, his work focuses on system-level solutions - rethinking policies, environments, and cultural norms that reinforce stillness. From office layouts to organizational routines, Diaz is advancing an approach to health rooted not in willpower, but in design. His work exemplifies the Irving Institute’s purpose: to equip investigators with the mentorship, infrastructure, and collaborative resources needed to turn promising ideas into measurable advances in human health. Through this support, his research on movement breaks has evolved from a laboratory concept into a growing public health framework - demonstrating how translational science at Columbia can change not just individual behaviors, but the environments that shape them. 

Diaz offers a piece of advice for early-career researchers: 

We tend to try and take on everything ourselves - to become masters at everything. The more you leverage existing resources, expertise, and collaboration, the stronger your science will be. The Irving Institute gives you access to all of that. If I could tell my younger self one thing, it would be to use those supports early and often.