Health

Talking About Mental Health

- Adam Clare

Smashing Magazine is best known for geek and design issues, recently they published an article out of the norm. It was part of {Geek} Mental Health Week. Christopher Murphy wrote about his struggle with his mental issues and encourages others to speak up, and for people without mental health issues to respect and listen to those that are struggling.

It’s a good thing to get rid of the negative stigma around discussing mental health.

Mental health is an issue, it shouldn’t be a stigma. If more of us address it, openly, we’ll be able to address some of the problems we face collectively. Our industry is, in many ways, unique in its approach. We share what we learn, pooling our knowledge for the betterment of all. We can apply this approach to greater issues, like health, particularly mental health, and in so doing win the battle of the mind.

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Lose Weight by Taking the Bus

- Adam Clare

Obesity is a health problem in North America and this is due to modern lifestyle choices. One choice is to live far from work and commute using a car (this has led to environmental problems in addition to health problems) which means that people physically move less than before. Some new research now points out that you can lose weight and keep it off by ditching the car and taking transit!

So now you can better manage your weight while reducing pollution!

In the study, which looked at 40,000 households throughout the country, men weighed around seven pounds less when they used public or active transit, and women weighed about 5.5 pounds less.

The researchers controlled for a range of other reasons that someone might weigh more or less–like diet, activity at work, fitness routines, and age.

“From the analysis we performed, it is not possible to ‘explain away’ our findings by saying that active commuters are more likely to be young, urban, wealthy, for example, and therefore thinner for these reasons rather than how they commute,” says Flint.

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Vermont Stops Their War on Drugs, Will Help People Instead

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

The war on drugs is a backwards, destructive, and anti-human campaign that has destroyed lives. It was launched by Nixon and since then it the ‘war’ has negatively impacted everything it touches from people’s lives to the global economy.

The USA tries to enforce it’s inflexible approach around the world, yet at home many states are realizing that it’s a foolish approach. Vermont has now openly backed out of the ignorant ‘battle’ against drugs and is taking a more educated approach: helping people who are addicted rather than punishing them.

Vermont has passed a battery of reforms that have turned the tiny state of about 627,000 people into a national proving ground for a less punitive approach to getting hard drugs under control. Under policies now in effect or soon to take hold, people caught using or in possession of heroin will be offered the chance to avoid prosecution by enrolling in treatment. Addicts, including some prisoners, will have greater access to synthetic heroin substitutes to help them reduce their dependency on illegal narcotics or kick the habit. A good Samaritan law will shield heroin users from arrest when they call an ambulance to help someone who’s overdosed. The drug naloxone, which can reverse the effects of a heroin or opioid overdose, will be carried by cops, EMTs, and state troopers. It will also be available at pharmacies without a prescription. “This is an experiment,” Shumlin says. “And we’re not going to really know the results for a while.”

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Being Intellectually Stimulated Can Delay Dementia

- Adam Clare

More and more studies seem to be coming out that all conclude that keeping your mind active can be helpful to all sorts of health issues. Speaking more than one language and certainly help and so can just keeping your mind intellectually stimulated through various tasks:

Examples of activities the researchers considered cognitively stimulating (if performed at least three times per week) included reading books and magazines, playing games and music, and participating in arts and crafts.

All participants then underwent a battery of neuropsychological tests designed to measure a variety of cognitive skills, including executive functioning, language, and memory.

“Higher levels of educational, occupational, and cognitive activity are independently associated with a lower risk of dementia,” they report. Among people with the APOE4 variant, who are at relatively high risk for dementia, the difference is huge: The onset of cognitive impairment was delayed, on average, by more than eight and one-half years for people who ranked in the top 25 percent in terms of lifetime intellectual enrichment, compared to those in the bottom 25 percent.

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France Pays People to Cycle to Work

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

France is experimenting with new way to subsidize transportation by getting more people to bicycle to work. Traffic in Paris is particularly awful and with ongoing population growth and car-focused infrastructure the transportation problems are only going to increase. France is hoping that getting people to ride bicycles will stymie the growth of transportation issues.

French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier, noting that commuting using public transport and cars is already subsidized, said that if results of the test are promising, a second experiment on a larger scale will be done.

The ministry hopes that the bike-to-work incentive scheme will boost bike use for commuting by 50 percent from 2.4 percent of all work-home journeys, or about 800 million km, with an average distance of 3.5 km per journey.

In Belgium, where a tax-free bike incentive scheme has been in place for more than five years, about 8 percent of all commutes are on bicycles. In the flat and bicycle-friendly Netherlands, it is about 25 percent, cycling organizations say.

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