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Top Instagram reels from Goats and Soda in 2025: Plumpy'Nut, aid cuts, soccer grannies

By Marc Silver,
Ben de la Cruz
Published December 26, 2025 at 10:37 AM EST
From left: Players celebrate during the grannies soccer tournament in South Africa. A Dalit kitchen in India. Plumpy'Nut bars manufactured at the Edesia Nutrition plant in Rhode Island. Mary Mayongana, 42, lost access to her HIV medicine as a result of U.S. aid cuts in Zambia.
From left: Ryan Brown for NPR; Diaa Hadid/NPR; Gabrielle Emanuel/NPR; Ben de la Cruz/NPR
From left: Players celebrate during the grannies soccer tournament in South Africa. A Dalit kitchen in India. Plumpy'Nut bars manufactured at the Edesia Nutrition plant in Rhode Island. Mary Mayongana, 42, lost access to her HIV medicine as a result of U.S. aid cuts in Zambia.

Instagram reels are reely ... er ... really popular. (Editor's note: It turns out that "reely" is really an alternate spelling for "really" from long ago — way before reels were invented.)

Is there data to back this up? Mark Zuckerberg says so. The CEO of Meta, which owns Instagram as well as Facebook, reports that in 2025 reels have reached new heights on these platforms: 200 billion plays a day.

NPR's global health and development blog was responsible for millions of those views. Here are our biggest Instagram reels this year.

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Marc Silver
Ben de la Cruz
Ben de la Cruz is an award-winning documentary video producer and multimedia journalist. He is currently a senior visuals editor. In addition to overseeing the multimedia coverage of NPR's global health and development, his responsibilities include working on news products for emerging platforms including Amazon's and Google's smart screens. He is also part of a team developing a new way of thinking about how NPR can collaborate and engage with our audience as well as photographers, filmmakers, illustrators, animators, and graphic designers to build new visual storytelling avenues on NPR's website, social media platforms, and through live events.
See stories by Ben de la Cruz