(Reuters) – Women need to get at least an hour a day of moderate exercise if they hope to ward off the creep of extra pounds that comes with aging, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The weekly total of 420 minutes is nearly triple the 150 minutes of moderate daily exercise currently recommended by U.S. health officials and illustrates the challenge American women face in maintaining a healthy weight.
Winning that war will require individuals to make changes in their daily routines — like walking or biking to work — but it may also take a shift in policy to make it easier for people in fit exercise into their lives, researchers said.
Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, increasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, and adding about $150 billion a year to U.S. healthcare costs.
"From a public health perspective, it would be better to prevent the weight gain in the first place," said I-Min Lee of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Lee said there is ample research on people who are already overweight, but little on how to prevent weight gain as people grow older.
Current U.S. exercise recommendations differ, with 2008 guidelines recommending 150 minutes of moderate exercise — brisk walking, gardening, ballroom dancing — as a way to improve overall health, and a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies of Sciences, recommending an hour a day.
If people exercise vigorously, by running or cycling hard, for instance, less time is needed to get the same benefits.
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Continue reading “For women, battle of bulge just got tougher”
Police enforcing pedestrian safety is "breathtakingly dangerous" says Councilman
A car does not stop for a Glendale police officer dressed in a rabbit costume crossing the street at Central and Garfield avenues Wednesday. The driver was pulled over for not yielding to a pedestrian. (Raul Roa/News-Press)
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But the operation infuriated Councilman John Drayman, who said he learned of the sting only after it had taken place.
Calling the enforcement sting a “stupid traffic stunt” that was “breathtakingly dangerous,” Drayman said city resources would have been more appropriately used to clamp down on speeding motorists — an issue that prompts daily complaints from the public.
“The police may be experts in public safety, but they don’t have a padlock on common sense,” he said. “This is not law enforcement, this is taking public safety personnel, dressing them as bunny rabbits to confuse, disorient and shock drivers and then cite them with traffic tickets.”
Drayman added that he planned to raise the issue at the next City Council meeting.
Political fallout notwithstanding, police officials said they decided to seize the holiday moment and use a rabbit costume. The bunny suit also cuts down on the ability of drivers to claim they didn’t see the decoy, they said.
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Cyclist Gets Doored … You want a report? I’ll give you a report!… Get a reflector on that bike, that vest does not cut it.
The officer then walked back to his vehicle, Seymour said, returning ten minutes later with the report in hand. But that wasn’t all. He’d also brought over two summonses. The first was for riding a bike without a bell, which Seymour admits he lacked. The second cited Seymour for riding without reflectors on the wheel. According to Seymour’s lawyer, the law only requires reflectors on new bikes for sale. Seymour noted that his bright orange reflective vest and reflective helmet should have made him perfectly visible—that and the fact that it was just before 10 a.m.
Continue reading “Cyclist Gets Doored … You want a report? I’ll give you a report!… Get a reflector on that bike, that vest does not cut it.”
The American way of treating cyclists comes to Copenhagen
An American driving a rented car in Copenhagen hits a cyclists who had the right of way. "According to the Danish newspaper BT, the police have said that the American woman wasn’t used to watching for cyclists and, after the accident, couldn’t understand that it was her fault."
"American Express, through a collection agency, has been hassling Helle Kühl for $3106.41 – about 16,000 Danish kroner – for the damages to the car.
Helle Kühl said to BT newspaper: "This is completely insane. I’m an innocent victim and now they want me to pay 16,000 kroner because I got run over. This is an Americanization of the situation"."
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The most injurious to happiness is commuting
by Jonah Lehrer
David Brooks, summarizing the current state of happiness research:
The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
In other words, the best way to make yourself happy is to have a short commute and get married. I’m afraid science can’t tell us very much about marriage so let’s talk about commuting. A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called “the commuters paradox”. They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that the big house in the exurbs will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional hour to work.
Of course, as Brooks notes, that time in traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. Another study, led by Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, surveyed nine hundred working women in Texas and found that commuting was, by far, the least pleasurable part of their day.
Why is traffic so unpleasant? One reason is that it’s a painful ritual we never get used to – the flow of traffic is inherently unpredictable. As a result, we don’t habituate to the suffering of rush hour. (Ironically, if traffic was always bad, and not just usually bad, it would be easier to deal with. So the commutes that really kill us are those rare days when the highways are clear.) As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes, “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”
But if commuting is so awful, then why are our commutes getting so much longer? (More than 3.5 million Americans spend more than three hours each day traveling to and from work.) In my book, I cite the speculative hypothesis of Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who argues that long-distance commuters are victims of a “weighting mistake,” a classic decision-making error in which we lose sight of the important variables:
Consider two housing options: a three bedroom apartment that is located in the middle of a city, with a ten minute commute time, or a five bedroom McMansion on the urban outskirts, with a forty-five minute commute. “People will think about this trade-off for a long time,” Dijksterhuis says. “And most them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad.” What’s interesting, Dijksterhuis says, is that the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes. They’ll imagine all sorts of scenarios (a big birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, another child) that will turn the suburban house into an absolute necessity. The pain of a lengthy commute, meanwhile, will seem less and less significant, at least when compared to the allure of an extra bathroom. But, as Dijksterhuis points out, that reasoning process is exactly backwards: “The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute does become a burden after a while.”
The same thing happens when we go car shopping. We tend to become fixated on quantifiable variables like horsepower (they’re so easy to compare), while discounting factors, such as the cost of maintenance or the comfort of the seats, that will play a much more significant role in our satisfaction with the car over time. I’m always surprised when people brag about variables like torque or the speed with which the car can rocket from 0-60 mph. Who cares? I’d much rather spend 30 minutes testing out the front seat.
Update: Matthew Yglesias argues that the misery of commuting should lead to congestion pricing. I agree.
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Beware of "iPod zombies," warns the AAA Mid-Atlantic.
The iPod zombies are cyclists, pedestrians and motorists who have on portable music devices with headphones or earbuds while attempting to cross streets or drive — in essence becoming oblivious to the rest of the world, said AAA Mid-Atlantic spokeswoman Christine Delise.
"It’s very dangerous because the headphones block out sound, and you can’t hear if there’s an ambulance behind you trying to get through or horns blowing to alert you to danger," she said.
Pedestrians, runners and bicyclists risk death or injury because the devices often make them inattentive to traffic and road conditions.
The automobile advocacy group pointed to several recent instances: A 14-year-old Baltimore County girl was killed by a train as she crossed the track while wearing her headphones in January; a 23-year-old Pennsylvania woman on a bicycle was killed last summer as she crossed an intersection while wearing headphones in Ocean City; a 51-year-old Washington, D.C., woman was struck and killed March 6 by a tractor-trailer as she crossed against the light while wearing headphones.
With the weather warming, more people will be out for walks, jogs and bike rides, Delise said. That increases the chances for accidents.
AAA urges people to either leave their devices at home or keep the volume down low enough so that they can still hear traffic, particularly at intersections, Delise said.
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Cycling Provides a Break for Some With Parkinson’s
Underneath all the practical reasons for cycling there is almost a magical quality that transforms the mind and spirit as evident in this article:
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“I said, ‘This cannot be,’ ” Dr. Bloem, a professor of neurology and medical director of the hospital’s Parkinson’s Center, recalled in a telephone interview. “This man has end-stage Parkinson’s disease. He is unable to walk.”
But the man was eager to demonstrate, so Dr. Bloem took him outside where a nurse’s bike was parked.
“We helped him mount the bike, gave him a little push, and he was gone,” Dr. Bloem said. He rode, even making a U-turn, and was in perfect control, all his Parkinson’s symptoms gone.
Yet the moment the man got off the bike, his symptoms returned. He froze immediately, unable to take a step.
Dr. Bloem made a video and photos of the man trying to walk and then riding his bike. The photos appear in the April 1 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
After seeing that man, Dr. Bloem asked 20 other severely affected patients about riding a bike. It turned out that all could do it, though it is not clear why.
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Let Him Ride!
Leading the way to a green lifestyle
By Brittany Kenworthy For the CDT
It is an early morning at Penn State, and Lydia Vandenbergh is riding her red, 15-year-old Trek mountain bike across campus.
A program coordinator for the Campus Sustainability Office at Penn State, Vandenbergh forgoes a commute by car and opts for the 15- minute bike ride, stowing her briefcase in the “functional, yet dorky” basket attached to the back. She’s determined to decrease her carbon footprint, and even this time of year, she opts to pedal rather than drive her car most days of the week.
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Described by her colleagues as innovative and resolute, Vandenbergh developed and is implementing a program called “Green Teams” that uses teams of staff and faculty to advocate to their peers to save energy by changing behaviors, such as turning off lights, shutting down computers, opening the blinds to let sunlight in and sharing appliances.
Vandenbergh said the key to conservation is that people “look at their circumstances and look at all of the implications of their actions.” It is important for people to make decisions about how to conserve energy based on their own circumstances, she said.
She admits that an action that is right for one person may not be for another. Her family hangs clothes in the attic to dry instead of using a dryer, but for a student living in small apartment this would not be practical.
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Learning to conserve is a two-stage process in the home, on campus and in society. “First an action becomes conscious and then it becomes unconscious because you just do it,” Vandenbergh said.
She believes that if people consider their circumstances and the implications of their actions, they will be able to understand the consequences of their choices. By biking to work she conserves energy and exercises at the same time. It is much faster than walking or taking the bus, and it prolongs the life of her car. She can park outside the building instead of a far parking lot.
Vandenbergh said, “When you observe the personal and societal impacts of conservation, it just makes sense.”
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We need more room … for parked cars?
From How We Drive:
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If the percentage of parking lot area in the county (0.44%) is scaled to the area occupied by the conterminous United States, the entire states of Connecticut, and Massachusetts (12,550 + 20,305 = 32,855 km2 ) would be paved over with parking lots.
To put this another way: The American parking lot currently consumes much more space than the entire country’s population would if it were scaled to Brooklyn-style density.
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