Tag Archives: Body & Mind

Cyclists and Pollution

TreeHugger has a summary of what cyclists can do to protect their lungs from car pollution. If you’re worried about cycling in cities because of pollution, just remember that the health (and environmental) pros of cycling outweigh the cons.

By cycling instead of driving or taking public transport, you are doing your part to keep the air clean. The problem is that you have to cycle through all the pollution created by people who aren’t making any effort.

The Spacing Wire has information on what Canadians can do to get the federal government to support cycling.

Sleep Naked (it’s healthy)

SleepNaked.org is a small, but persuading, campaign about why people should sleep naked.

Not only is sleeping naked more comfortable, but it’s good for your health too. Increasing your level of comfort makes it easier for you to relax and sleep…
If you sleep with a partner, being naked heightens the level of intimacy between you, and you are likely to have sex more often. You may also feel closer to your partner as a result of sleeping naked with them

I guess one can also argue if people sleep naked less pajamas will be bought thereby saving the environment a little.

Beer Money for Babies!

May sound a bit strange, but the Labatt family has recently donated the largest philanthropic gift ever made for children’s cardiac medicine and research in North America! Arthur Labatt and his wife Sonia (owners of the Labatt Brewery in Canada) have donated $30 million dollars to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, known for it’s acceptional cardiac department. The plan is to build the Labatt Family Heart Centre as well as provide additional funding to the Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre, originally created and funded by the beer family in 1997. Having been treated at the hospital himself Arthur Labatt wants to ensure “that we don’t lose the [medical] talent we’ve got here.”

Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children is one of the largest and best centers for childrens medicine in the World. Through their research last year they have been able to reverse type 1 diabetes in mice! Human trials begin this year, and with donations such as this, more important funding can go toward research in their 8 other departments!

Narcolepsy Insomnia Link

Can’t sleep? Take heart in a recent study of insomnia: researchers at Actelion Pharmaceuticals found that blocking brain receptors to the blood peptide orexin promoted sleep in rats, dogs and humans, according to a paper in the online issue of Nature Medicine.

In an ironic link, orexin is absent in the brains of people who have narcolepsy, the disorder that causes some people to fall asleep.

Although the company doing the research is a pharmaceutical company (which normally raises red flags as to the reliability of the results), more studies may be done to analyze the quality of sleep that the subjects experienced.

Denmark is Happy

Denmark is one happy place, and has been that way for decades. When measuring life satisfaction, researchers have consistently concluded that the Danes are the most satisfied, but what is their secret to their happiness?

It’s that Danes have low expectations.

“It’s a David and Goliath thing,” said the lead author, Kaare Christensen, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. “If you’re a big guy, you expect to be on the top all the time and you’re disappointed when things don’t go well. But when you’re down at the bottom like us, you hang on, you don’t expect much, and once in a while you win, and it’s that much better.”

The above link is for the NY Times, so use bugmenot.