Body & Mind

Self Control is Like the Flu: It’s Contagious

- Adam Clare

I know it’s strange to say that self control is contagious: but it is, so you should catch it by having friends that are good practitioners of self control.

“The take home message of this study is that picking social influences that are positive can improve your self-control,” said lead author Michelle vanDellen, a visiting assistant professor in the UGA department of psychology. “And by exhibiting self-control, you’re helping others around you do the same.”

People tend to mimic the behavior of those around them, and characteristics such as smoking, drug use and obesity tend to spread through social networks. But vanDellen�s study is thought to be the first to show that self-control is contagious across behaviors. That means that thinking about someone who exercises self-control by regularly exercising, for example, can make your more likely to stick with your financial goals, career goals or anything else that takes self-control on your part.

VanDellen’s findings, which are published in the early online edition of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, are the result of five separate studies conducted over two years with study co-author Rick Hoyle at Duke University.

In the first study, the researchers randomly assigned 36 volunteers to think about a friend with either good or bad self-control. Those that thought about a friend with good self-control persisted longer on a handgrip task commonly used to measure self-control, while the opposite held true for those who were asked to think about a friend with bad self-control.

Keep reading at SciGuru.

How to Stop Shopping

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

One reporter has joined a growing movement of people who have sworn off buying new things. It’s a good read and a good introduction into how one can change their shopping habits to help our friendly planet.

Here are the ground rules: No buying anything new, with three exceptions – food, booze and health essentials, like medicine and toilet paper. Mary-Margaret suggests we could use leaves, but I think she’s joking.

Also accepted: Second-hand purchases. Value Village, Craigslist, vintage shops are all fair game, as the official point is to lighten our environmental load. We are in Planet Saving Mode, not Shopaholics Anonymous.

Borrowing is encouraged.

It’s an easy case to make after the stuff-gorging of Christmas. Torontonians, on average, throw 3.7 kilograms into the household trash each week – not including compost or recycling – according to city statistics. And for every garbage bin we pack, another 70 were filled to make the stuff we’re throwing out, according to American garbage guru Annie Leonard.

So, by boycotting new things for three months, I personally will keep more than 900 bags of garbage out of landfills or incinerators around the world. Not to mention the coal-fired electricity involved in making the stuff, the truck fumes, the mining and logging …

Read the rest of the article.

Why People Go Vegetarian

- Adam Clare

There are plenty of reasons to change your diet to a vegetarian one and blogger Brain Gordon has concluded that there are four primary reasons why people go veggie.

Many millions of people have considered going vegetarian at some point in their life, and millions have. (Hundreds of millions including those who do so as part of their religion.) As climate change, fisheries collapse, desertification, and other crises become less ignorable, many of us will have to consider eating less meat, if not forgoing many animal products entirely.
In my experience, there are four reasons that people go veg:

Personal Health
Weight Loss
Planetary Health
Compassion for Animals
There is a fifth reason that may remove the choice for many: Economic. Meat and animal products may simply become too costly.

Keep reading Brain’s reasons for going vegetarian.

Two Cancer Codes Cracked

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Here’s some good news from the fine people trying to uncover the mysteries behind all sorts of cancers.

Researchers have mapped the DNA mutations in skin and lung cancer — findings that one researcher says will change how cancer is viewed.

For lung cancer, the British team found almost 23,000 mutations — one mutation for every 15 cigarettes smoked.

“This is a fundamental moment in cancer research,” said Prof. Michael Stratton from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. “From here on in we will think about cancers in a very different way.”

Scientists knew that smoking causes genetic mutations than can start tumours. But they didn’t expect to see evidence of the genome bearing scars of every cigarette smoked. When they catalogued the mutations, they saw how cancer-causing agents in tobacco repeatedly bombard the DNA.

Keep reading the article at the CBC.

Wind Turbines are not a Health Risk

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A small group of people have complained and argued that wind turbines can cause health problems. A new study confirms that those people are wrong and in fact wind turbines are not a health risk at all.

The study acknowledges that a minority of people find the intermittent swooshing noise emitted by the turbines’ giant blades to be annoying, but it also concluded: “Annoyance is not a pathological entity.”

The study says there’s “nothing unique” about the noise or vibrations emitted by wind turbines and no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds have any direct adverse effect on health.

It suggests that those who are bothered by turbines simply have a lower tolerance for annoying sounds of all sorts.

“A major cause of concern about wind turbine sound is its fluctuating nature. Some may find this sound annoying, a reaction that depends primarily on personal characteristics as opposed to the intensity of the sound level.”

Keep reading at the CBC.

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