Call us toll free: +1 4062079616
How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
Call us toll free: +1 4062079616
29 Jan 2023
Comments: 0

The Science of How Your Body Ages

Ask people what they think they’ll look like in 25 years, and chances are they’ll mention how their parents looked at that age. And while genetics certainly play a part, research shows there’s more to the story. Only about 30% of what we see as aging is inherited, explains John Rowe, M.D., Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

When you look specifically at things above the neck — like cognitive function, vision, and hearing — that number goes up to about 50%. “People feel there’s some intrinsic clock playing out a program in their body that they don’t have influence over,” says Dr. Rowe. “It’s just not true.”

Yes, good news: We have real control over how our bodies age. Aging is happening on a cellular level at every moment, so for a long and healthy life, it’s vital to stay on top of the changes within your body and your mind. For a better understanding of these shifts through every decade, we talked to the experts.

In Your 20s

In our 20s, we’re generally at the peak of physical health. In several ways, our bodies are still on the upward curve of development — even our menstrual cycles maybe more regular than in our teens! — and our brains and bones are growing to their full potential.

Brain

Your brain is changing well into your 20s, says Shanna Levine, M.D., a New York City–based internist working in private practice for Goals Healthcare. Research has shown that your prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for factors like inhibition, high-level functioning, and attention — continues growing until around age 25.

POWER UP: It’s never too early to prioritize brain health! Keep your noggin sharp through the decades with these brain-boosting tricks:

  • Plan to volunteer. One study found that giving back, even for less than two hours a week, could slow cognitive decline — likely because doing so promotes social connection and mental engagement, which research has proven can help stave off dementia.
  • Study a new language. It may be easier to learn one when you’re young, but studying another language at any age can “promote thinking skills, increase mental agility, and delay the aging of the brain,” found one study. Plus, if you take group classes, you get the social benefit.
  • Learn to play an instrument. Even if you don’t see yourself as musically inclined, give it a shot. In one study, people 60 and over showed improvement in cognitive functions after just four months of piano lessons.

Bones

By the time you’re 18, you already have up to 90% of your peak bone mass, including strength and density. However, you’re still adding more mass than you’re losing (that changes around age 30). While the amount you develop is primarily based on set factors like race and gender, about one-quarter of it is determined by things you can control.

POWER UP: Exercise regularly, get enough calcium in your diet (about 1,000 mg per day), limit alcoholic beverages, and don’t smoke.

In Your 30s

Many people see this as their best decade. During our 30s, we’re likely getting more settled in our careers and families, and according to one study our happiness levels are still actively increasing. This is also when making real lifestyle changes can help stave off long-term issues.

Metabolism 

You may notice that it takes extra effort to shed pounds. This is because of a slower metabolic rate — it can start to decline in our 20s and continues to decrease by 2% to 3% every 10 years. The reason you likely won’t realize that until now: This is also when we start losing muscle mass (3% to 8% per decade after age 30). This metabolic shift may translate into an increase in body fat around your middle. While you might be annoyed about how your jeans suddenly fit (or don’t), the deeper belly fat around your organs (called visceral fat) is more of a concern— it can increase your risk of things like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure.

POWER UP: Eat healthfully and start a regular exercise routine; it’ll help build muscle mass, which gives your metabolism a boost.

Skin

Seeing new fine lines and wrinkles in the mirror? You can blame decreasing collagen and elastin levels. And cell turnover slows after your late 20s, so skin can look dull and tired without extra exfoliation. Our Beauty Lab recommends adding a facial peel to your weekly routine. This is also when damage from past unprotected sun exposure can start to rear its ugly head.

POWER UP: Prevent future sun damage by wearing SPF 30 or higher every day — even if you’re not hitting the beach or the pool.

In Your 40s

Everything seems to come together when you hit your 40s. While your family life and career are likely at a high point, caring for aging parents and planning for the future can make it a stressful time.

Eyes

Struggling to read the restaurant menu? Eyesight begins to weaken at this age because of changes in the eyes’ focusing ability. But you won’t see the more profound consequences for two more decades, says Dr. Levine.

POWER UP: Focus on your diet. “Just one cup of kale has more than a whole day’s worth of the carotenoids zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene, which help shield ocular tissue from harmful UV damage and may also reduce your risk of developing cataracts,” says GH Nutrition Director Jaclyn London, M.S., R.D.

Height

“Every 10 years after the age of 40, we lose about half an inch of height” because of changes in bones, muscles, and joints, says Dr. Levine. But talk to your doctor about any rapid height loss — it could be a sign of osteoporosis.

POWER UP: Get exercise. There’s no way to fully stop shrinking, but a study found that people who did so regularly could cut the height they lost almost in half. This was true even for those who became moderately active only after 40 (compared with those who never exercised regularly and those who ended their activity as they got older).

In Your 50s 

As your children head off to high school and college, now is when you think about how you would like to spend your time. Whether you focus on a new hobby, a volunteer project, or a career change, this decade is all about starting to concentrate on your own wants and needs.

Hormones

The big health story during this decade? Menopause. It hits some women in their 40s, but the average age is 51. Menopause is diagnosed when you haven’t had your period for over a year — and when your ovaries stop producing estrogen, the effects can be challenging both physically and emotionally. The classic symptoms include hot flashes, insomnia, mood swings, and even anxiety or depression — but not all women will experience every one of these.

POWER UP: Keep cool! While there hasn’t been much research on supplements and herbal remedies, some women have found that black cohosh eases hot flashes; one study showed that listening to relaxing music or practicing slow-breathing exercises could reduce their frequency. For many women, the end of periods — and cramps, bloating and PMS-ing — is something to celebrate!

In Your 60s

Welcome to a new concept: freedom! Whether it’s thanks to becoming an empty nester, being newly retired, or just shaking off societal expectations, it’s all about you from now on. Here’s to prioritizing your mental and physical well-being!

Hearing and Vision

Along with declining vision, hearing loss is an issue: One-third of Americans in their late 60s and early 70s have hearing loss. And after 75, half of us will have difficulty hearing.

POWER UP: Ask for help, especially since this can be socially isolating. Today’s hearing aids are often more discreet than previous models, so don’t hesitate to talk with your doc about whether you’re a candidate. Only 30% of adults 70 and older who could use them ever have, reports the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Bones

Women are at higher risk of developing osteoporosis (about one-quarter of women age 65 and older in the U.S. suffer from it, versus less than 6% of men) because of rapid loss of bone density during and after menopause.

POWER UP: Take a proactive approach and get screened regularly for bone disease. You can help lower your odds of it by starting an exercise plan with weight-bearing movements (like walking, hiking, jogging, climbing stairs, weight training, and even dancing) and making sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D.

The Future of Aging

Somewhere between early adulthood and middle age, a compound in your cells called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) begins a gradual decline. NAD+ helps power hundreds of metabolic processes and keeps a group of proteins called sirtuins active. You want them to stay active, since they can contribute to overall health and longevity.

Leonard Guarente, Ph.D., director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT and chief scientist and cofounder of Elysium Health, discovered their role and importance. He says sirtuins are the “guardians of health maintenance” in cells.

While experts are able to make some generalizations about growing older, it’s a different experience for everyone. “People are very diverse in terms of their aging rates, and the level that one person hits by age 50, another may not hit until 60,” says Morgan Levine, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine.

Biological Age

This is why many researchers also talk about biological age, a measurement focusing on biological markers that show how your systems are actually aging. “About 68% of people will have a biological age within five years of their chronological age, but you can also find individuals who are 10 years older or younger,” she explains.

You can’t stop aging, of course, but lifestyle choices make a real difference. And research is focusing on what else can be done. “People want to play an active role in their own health maintenance,” says Dr. Guarente. He and his team at Elysium Health are looking to develop a test that will let people find out and monitor their NAD+ levels.

True Age 

The hypothesis is that NAD+ levels are a better measure of aging than chronological age. And in theory, knowing them would help people make profound changes. “Successful aging is not the imitation of youth,” says Dr. Rowe. “Making yourself look better on the outside won’t impact what’s going on inside.” At the end of the day, it’s internal functions that actually matter for our health and life span.

 

 

Original article here

26 Jan 2023
Comments: 0

Who Has Time for Hobbies?

One of the bigger lessons I got from reading Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism, was the importance of scheduling your leisure time.

Scheduling time for hobbies may sound unnecessary. Aren’t those the things you do for fun?

Yet, I would wager that most of us have activities we’d like to do on the side but never seem to have time for:

  • Learning a language
  • Art
  • Sports and activities
  • Reading for fun
  • Creating something

A common way to look at this state of affairs is to argue that we don’t have time for these things because we’re too busy. We want to relax at the end of a hard day, with whatever meager hours are left over.

This idea assumes we mostly use our time wisely, and if there isn’t time for something at the end of the day, it must be because there wasn’t time for it to begin with.

Where Does Your Free Time Really Go?

The view put forth by Newport in his book is that we tend to invest a lot of our time on various, low-value leisure activities that neither give us meaning or much enjoyment. Think television, Netflix, video games, social media and web surfing.

These activities often don’t provide much value, but they have really low barriers to get started. That combined with carefully engineered reward mechanisms keep them occupying our attention for many hours in the day.

In this view, it’s not that we don’t have time for high-quality pastimes because we’re too busy. Rather it’s because the default is to do something less worthwhile. If we could momentarily push ourselves out of these bad habits and onto something else, we’d be happier overall.

The solution is simply to schedule time for activities you care about.

How I’ve Been Applying This Idea 

There’s two ways I’ve been working to integrate this idea more in my own life:

The first is to set strict limits on internet and television use, outside of a few high-quality areas. Right now I have LeechBlock configured on my phone to block my biggest time-wasting websites if I use them more than an thirty minutes per day total. I also have ten minute blocks on my iPhone per day for YouTube and other apps that I mostly use to waste time. 

Thirty minutes per day is still more than enough time to follow everything I care about.

The second way I’ve been trying to integrate this idea is proactively scheduling time for higher-value hobbies. Making a goal to do some activity every evening, Monday to Thursday, whether it’s learning salsa, painting, attending a Chinese language meetup or going to the gym with friends, makes me less likely to fall back into binge-watching old television shows before going to sleep.

 

 

What If You Really Don’t Have Time?

The idea of scheduling hobbies tends to provoke one of two reactions:

The first comes from people who don’t like the idea of putting in effort to have fun. Why should you schedule fun–shouldn’t it be spontaneous?

However, I think the problem is often that there are barriers to starting activities you’d find really meaningful and enjoyable in your life, so the path of least resistance is usually not the most satisfying. Scheduling is just one way to avoid this trap.

The second reaction comes from people who argue they actually don’t have any time for hobbies. They’re truly too busy to do any of those things, since they work eighty hours per week, have seven kids and are studying for a dozen exams.

It’s hard to respond to this second objection because, there really are people in such a situation. You may even be in this situation yourself.

However, I also know that some of the highest-achieving, busiest people I know, nonetheless put in a lot of time in high-quality leisure activities.

Do You Really Lack Time, or Are You Just Stressed and Tired?

This suggests to me that the feeling that you have no time is often a reflexive evaluation about the amount of stress and exhaustion you experience to do the things you have to do in life, rather than an objective assessment about the number of hours per day you have no choice over.

My guess is that for most people in this situation, if you did a timelog, you’d find there’s lots of “wasted” time, and that your self-assessment mostly reflects the fatigue and stress you feel.

However, if it truly is fatigue and stress, rather than genuine lack of time, then that’s all the more reason to invest in high-quality hobbies. It’s the meaningless web surfing and Netflix binging that can make your life feel like a complete grind. Creating, learning, adventuring, socializing and experiencing are ways to reduce that stress and fatigue.

Therefore, paradoxically, I think it’s often the very people who claim they cannot possibly schedule their hobbies that need to do it most.

 

 

Original post here

23 Jan 2023
Comments: 0

Why some people can’t tell left from right

 

It can seem like an almost childish mistake, but a surprising number of adults confuse left from right and scientists are only just starting to understand why.

When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient’s bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column.

Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These “never events” – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right.

While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice.

“Nobody has difficulty in saying [something is] front and back, or top and bottom,” says Ineke van der Ham, professor of neuropsychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But telling left from right is different, she says. “It’s because of the symmetry, and because when you turn around, it’s the other way around, and that makes it so confusing.”

Left-right discrimination is actually quite a complex process, calling upon memory, language, visual and spatial processing, and mental rotation. In fact, researchers are only just beginning to get to the bottom of exactly what’s going on in our brains when we do it – and why it’s much easier for some people than others.

“Some individuals can tell right from left innately, just can do it without thinking,” says Gerard Gormley, a GP and clinical professor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “But others have to go through a process.” In an effort to understand what happens in wrong-sided medical errors, Gormley and his colleagues have conducted research on medical students’ experience of making left-right decisions and examined the process.

“First of all, you have to orient right from left in yourself,” he says. When the answer doesn’t come instantly, participants described various techniques, from making an L shape with their thumb and index finger, to thinking about which hand they use to write, or strum a guitar. “For some people it’s a tattoo on their body or a piercing,” Gormley says.

Then, when figuring out which side is someone else’s left or right, the next step is mentally rotating yourself so you’re facing in the same direction as the other person. “If I’m facing you, my left hand will be opposite your right hand,” says Gormley. “That idea of mentally rotating an object adds an extra degree of complexity.” Other research shows that people tend to find it easier to judge if an image shows a left or right hand by imagining their own hand or body rotating.

Research published by Van der Ham and her colleagues in 2020 found that around 15% of people rate themselves as insufficient when it comes to identifying left and right. Almost half of the four hundred participants in the study said they used a hand-related strategy to identify which is which.

The more asymmetrical someone’s body is – in terms of writing hand preference, for example – the easier they find it to tell left and right apart

The researchers used something called the Bergen right-left discrimination test to dig deeper into how these strategies work. Participants looked at pictures of stick people either facing toward or away from them, with their arms in various positions, and had to identify their highlighted hand as their left or right. “It seems simple, but it’s kind of frustrating if you have to do a hundred of these as quickly as you can,” says Van der Ham.

In the first experiment, the participants sat with their hands on a table in front of them. “There was a very clear effect from how this little stick figure was positioned,” says Van der Ham. “If you were looking at the back of the head, so it was aligned with you, people were a lot faster and more accurate.” Similarly, when the stick person was facing the participant but had their hands crossed, so their left hand was on the same side as the participant’s left hand, people tended to do better.

“That tells us that the body really is involved in this,” says Van der Ham. The next question was whether participants were using cues from their body at the time of the test to identify left and right, or referring to a stored idea of their body instead.

 

To answer that, the researchers repeated their experiment, but this time tested four different scenarios: participants sat with their hands either crossed or uncrossed on the table in front of them, and had their hands either visible during the test, or covered with a black cloth.

But the researchers found that none of those changes influenced test performance. In other words, participants didn’t need to actually see their hands in order to use their own body to distinguish right from left.

“We haven’t completely solved the issue,” says Van der Ham. “But we were able to identify our bodies as being a key element in identifying left from right, and that we consult our body representation as we have it in a more static way.”

In Van der Ham’s experiments, the boost in performance that came from being in line with the stick person was more pronounced in people who said they use a hand-related strategy to tell left from right in their daily lives, as well as in women generally. The researchers also found that men tended to be faster in responding than women, but the data did not back up previous research showing that men perform better overall in left-right discrimination tests. 

Exactly why people differ in their ability to tell left from right isn’t clear, though research suggests that the more asymmetrical someone’s body is (in terms of writing hand preference, for example) the easier they find it to tell left and right apart. “If one side of your brain is slightly larger than the other, you tend to have a better right-left discrimination,” says Gormely.

But it could also be something that we learn in childhood, like other aspects of spatial cognition, says Van der Ham. “If kids are in charge of finding the way around, if you just let them walk in front of you for a couple of metres and make the decisions, those are the kids that ended up being better navigators,” she says.

Research by Alice Gomez and colleagues at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France hints that left-right discrimination is something that children can pick up quickly. Gomez designed a two-week intervention programme, delivered by teachers, designed to increase five-to-seven-year-olds’ body representation and motor skills.

When they were tested on their ability to locate the correct body part on themselves or a partner – their right knee, for example – after the programme, the number of left-right discrimination errors were almost halved. “It was very easy for us to increase the abilities of children to be able to locate the [body part] on the basis of the name,” says Gomez.

One reason for this might be that the children were taught a strategy – to think about their writing hand – for when they couldn’t remember right and left. The programme’s focus on children’s own bodies is another possible explanation, especially as other research shows that an egocentric reference frame is key when we make left-right decisions.

In a typical classroom, children might label body parts on a diagram rather than their own bodies, because the latter is more time-consuming and difficult to assess for a teacher, says Gomez. “It’s very rare that they will have the time to be egocentric,” she says.

While there are plenty of everyday scenarios where knowing left from right is important, there are some situations where it’s absolutely critical. Brain surgeon Marsh was able to put right his wrong-sided trapped nerve surgery – but a surgeon removing the wrong kidney or amputating the wrong limb, for example, would have devastating consequences.

Medicine is not the only field where left-right errors can make the difference between life and death: it’s possible that a steersman turning the ship right instead of left was a contributing factor in the sinking of the Titanic.

But while some people have to put in more effort to judge left and right, everybody has the ability to get left-right decisions wrong, says Gormley. He hopes that more awareness of how easy it is to make such a mistake will lead to less stigma for those who need to double check their decision.

“As health care professionals, we spend a lot of time labeling spatial orientations: proximal, distal, superior, inferior, but really pay no attention to right or left,” he says. “But actually, of all the spatial orientations, that is the most challenging.”

 

 

Original article here

14 Jan 2023
Comments: 0

The Mind Gym: Five Ways to Make Exercise a Pleasure

For most of my adult life, exercise was an ordeal. Even mild workouts felt grueling and I left the gym in a fouler mood than when I’d arrived. The very idea of the runner’s high seemed like a cruel joke.

As a science writer investigating the mind-body connection, however, I was surprised to discover many psychological tricks that can turn the pain into pleasure. Putting these simple tips to the test, I now happily burn between 6,000 and 7,000 calories a week with high-intensity interval training, 5km runs and yoga. What was once a torment is now the highlight of my day.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s the science behind the five strategies that I found most transformative.

1. Let music be your pacemaker

Choosing the right music for a workout can be as important as picking the right playlist for a party, with ramifications for your enjoyment and your performance.

The benefits are not only found in motivational lyrics – though there’s no doubt that upbeat tracks can infuse you with positive feelings that can help to drown out the sensations of fatigue; when you are lost in the music, you simply forget how hard you are working out.

There are also some physical benefits. Loud, high-octane music also increases our “physiological arousal”, resulting in a faster heart rate that will deliver more oxygen to our muscles. And research by Costas Karageorghis, a professor of sport and exercise physiology at Brunel University London, shows that we naturally synchronise our body’s motion to the underlying rhythm. This reduces any energy-wasting irregularities in our movements and results in more efficient use of our muscles.

If you want to make the most of the pacemaker effect, the tempo of the music must match the type of exercise you are trying to perform. If you are taking a step for every beat, around 170-180bpm (such as Roar by Katy Perry) would be right for a high-intensity run. For energetic cycling, you might want something slower, such as Dangerous by David Guetta ft Sam Martin, at 92bpm.

2. Ignore #fitspo posts

Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, you’ll come across countless “fitspiration” accounts offering pictures of perfect pecs and tight torsos – a portrait of what might be possible if you only follow the right regime. Such images might seem like a sensible source of motivation, a way of focusing your mind on what you want to achieve. But a study led by Ivanka Prichard at Flinders University, Australia suggests these accounts can lead to a less rewarding workout.

The participants first scrolled through a set of 18 images. Some saw supposedly motivational photos related to fitness, such as before-and-after shots depicting a body transformation. Others saw travel photos of attractive locations. They then took to the treadmill for a 10-minute workout. Far from encouraging the exercisers, the #fitspo images had a negative effect on their mood and increased their rating of “perceived exertion”, so that they found the activity more tiring than the people who had seen the travel snaps. This seemed to be tied to lower body satisfaction – the sight of the fitness gurus had left them feeling less attractive and more concerned about their weight and shape, which put a downer on the whole experience.

3. Reframe the pain

If you are just getting started on a new fitness regime or simply having a bad day, it’s very easy to interpret feelings of fatigue as a sign of failure. The heart thumping hard in your chest, the burning of your lungs, the aches of your limbs – your body seems to be yelling at you to stop exercising. The sensations may even trigger cycles of catastrophic thinking, in which you start to exaggerate your discomfort – “this is awful”, “I can’t take it”, “I’m never going to get fit”.

Psychological science suggests that these thoughts will only amplify your distress – which may, of course, discourage you from continuing your workouts in the future. To avoid this fate, you can practise “cognitive appraisal”. This could involve taking a deliberately dispassionate view that avoids negative interpretation; you might try to passively observe the feelings without judging them. You might even try to see discomfort as a sign of progress – that you are successfully pushing your body to the max.

Studies show that these small changes in mindset can soften the sense of physical distress and the perceived exertion of exercise. Through the mind-body connection, they could even activate a beneficial “expectation effect” – akin to the placebo effect – that alters the physiological response to the exercise. One experiment by Prof Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin found that reframing muscle aches as a positive signal can ramp up the production of the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids and opioids, natural analgesics that could mask the strain.

4. Engage your imagination

Many athletes swear by the power of visualisation. American swimmer Michael Phelps, for example, imagined each event in exquisite detail. “I can see the start, the strokes, the walls, the turns, the finish, the strategy, all of it,” he wrote in his autobiography, No Limits. “Visualising like this is like programming a race in my head, and that programming sometimes seems to make it happen just as I imagined it.”

Sports science seems to back this up: the use of mental imagery can improve the accuracy of our movements, and even our overall strength. Studies show that people who spend a few minutes each day visualising the lifting of heavy weights see bigger strength gains than those who did not practise an imaginary workout. The mental rehearsal is thought to boost the nerve signals sent from the brain to the muscles, increasing the force you can exert when you finally visit the gym. This technique can be especially useful in minimising the loss of strength while recovering from injury.

5. Use temptation-bundling

For many of us, the biggest battle is getting to the gym in the first place when there are so many other activities vying for our time and attention. It’s much harder to summon the willpower to put on your trainers when you might be curled up on the sofa with a trashy novel.

If this is an issue, you can try temptation-bundling, which involves packaging the things you don’t want to do with one of your guilty pleasures. The technique was developed by Prof Katy Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave people iPods loaded with four addictive audiobooks to enjoy while they worked out. The simple strategy increased their gym attendance by 29% over the following seven weeks.

So dust off your trainers. With each of these strategies nudging you towards your fitness goals, you may find soon find yourself making substantial gains with very little pain.

 

 

 

Original article here

29 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

How to Coexist With Animals in Cities, From Rats to Coyotes

 

When the U.S. tried to rid its cities and rural towns of coyotes starting around the 19th century, the effort backfired. While coyote control programs — involving chemical poisons, steel traps and paid bounties — did in fact kill tens of millions of the species, the population only spread further out.

“They responded by taking over the entire continent,” says Peter Alagona, an environmental historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Coyotes can now be found in every state except Alaska, as well as in parts of Canada and Central America, and they’ve moved from the fringes of cities to urban backyards.

“You have to admire their grit and adaptability for being able to live in Arctic tundra, in tropical rainforest, in deserts and in places like, you know, the Bronx,” he says.

The resiliency of coyotes is recounted in Alagona’s 2022 book, The Accidental Ecosystem, which retraces the land use decisions that have, intentionally or not, allowed some wildlife species to proliferate across the the U.S. even after they’d been deliberately targeted to make way for cities. It’s not just coyotes and commonly sighted critters like squirrels black bears, foxes and even pumas have been spotted wandering the streets of crowded metro areas.

Bloomberg CityLab spoke with Alagona about the ways in which animals have adapted to cities and even thrived there, while urbanites struggled to coexist with them.

Can you help us set up the series of events that led to the so-called “accidental ecosystem” in American cities?

There’s this early phase in which cities get established disproportionately in areas that were really rich and productive biologically, and where prosperous indigenous communities sprouted up. Wildlife gets cleared off the landscape and replaced in many of these growing urban centers with huge numbers of domesticated animals — livestock and animals we often think of today as pets — that were kind of filling the niches that wild animals would have filled.

These domesticated animals then get cleared out by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading to this period from about 1920 to 1950 where there are fewer wild animals living in urban areas, particularly in North America, than really at any time before or since. This is a period in which some of the greatest thinkers about urban life were doing their writing, and almost everybody assumed that cities weren’t going to have animals in them.

But that gap in time is fascinating because cities, by planting trees, establishing new parks and cleaning up polluted areas — decisions that people made consciously for reasons that had to do with human health, human well-being, the urban environment, real estate values, those sorts of things — were setting the stage for wildlife to come back. The increasing leafiness meant that some creatures that depended on a tree canopy, like Eastern gray squirrels or the many birds that passed through, could return.

But it wasn’t just decisions that were made inside cities that enabled not only small critters but also large mammals and predators to return?

Inside cities, creating new parks from old industrial areas created new spaces for animals to hide out during the day, and then “commute” [further] into the city at night to access resources.

At the wildland urban interface, where you have urban areas and suburbs butting up against large natural areas, you see more of these larger animals like black bears and occasionally even pumas, certainly lots of coyotes. Those are places where animals, again, can take cover during the day, and access resources along the urban fringe in the evening. This is particularly prevalent in areas like north of Los Angeles, where these foothill communities have grown right up to the edge of the national forest.

As the local environment in Pittsburgh recovered from its post-industrial era, raptors like the bald eagle returned. Big cats have always existed on the fringe of Los Angeles, but in 2016, a puma dubbed P-22 made his way into the city. Illustrator: Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studio/Courtesy of University of California Press

Then there are conservation activities in the outlying areas. On the East Coast and the Midwest, efforts to recover populations of white tail deer — which had declined dramatically during the 19th century, down to 5% of its historic numbers — in rural areas enabled those creatures to then start to colonize areas like suburbs, as suburbs grew much more widely after World War II.

How were animals able to adapt, and even thrive, in habitats that are so different from their natural ones?

It used to be thought that most creatures were fixed in their behaviors, and behavioral change would be really slow, if at all. It’s turned out, though, that quite a few creatures have shown themselves to be more flexible than people ever thought.

You have the urban exploiters, which are at home in cities and often live in cities in great numbers. These include pigeons, rats and some squirrels. Then there are the urban adapters that are not really truly at home in cities, but they come because of the resources, and they have proven pretty adaptable. If you’re driving on the freeway, and see a great blue heron foraging in a drainage ditch, those are urban adapters.

And finally, the urban avoiders are those you almost never see in cities, and when you do, it’s usually because there’s something wrong. They’re either trying to get from one patch of natural habitat to another, or they found themselves there by accident. These are creatures like pumas and wolverines.

So we can see that there are a wide variety of adaptations and evolutionary histories are at play in allowing some creatures to tap this amazing bounty of resources in our cities, while avoiding hazards including night light, chemical pollution and certainly automobiles.

Black bears and raccoons have become great at dumpster diving, and certain animals know when is the best time to come out to avoid humans. Are there concerns about how easily some animals have adapted?

There are an expanding number of these examples of rapid human-induced evolution. There are a handful of entirely new species or subspecies, particularly of insects, that have developed in particular kinds of urban environments. And then there are a wide variety of behavioral adaptations, or even physical adaptations, that seem to have occurred as a result of certain kinds of animals being put under extreme, selective pressures by the changing environments that people create.

But these examples are exceptions, not the rule. And this is very time-dependent: Although there are a small number of creatures that can adapt very quickly, for most others, this would take a long period of time — much longer than it takes for their populations to go extinct. And so the problem is [talking] about this as a solution to the fact that we’re rearranging and degrading ecosystems in ways that make the world a much harder place to live for the vast majority of species out there.

Humans, meanwhile, have struggled to adapt to the presence of wildlife. Your book describes many attempts to control animal populations, whether it’s to get rid of them or protect them, that haven’t always had the intended effect — like with coyotes. Why is that?

A big part is that emotions shape our interactions with animals. The first time a new animal shows up in an urban environment, people often react with surprise and sometimes fear. But emotions aren’t really indicative of what they are actually doing. When we see a black bear on the outskirts of a city, for example, we tend to think it’s lost or stranded [instead of] maybe taking advantage of the habitat.

These animals, though, aren’t just responding to us directly but to things we’re doing to the environment. The removal of apex predators like wolves and pumas has enabled creatures like coyotes to become the top dogs of the American landscape in many regions, even as we tried to control them. We got rid of 10 wolves, and in return in some areas, we got a hundred coyotes.

Over time, assuming that there aren’t too many kinds of negative incidents, people get used to them. In cities like Chicago, where there are large numbers of coyotes and low numbers of conflict incidents, people have really embraced these animals and come to see them as normal or even natural parts of their environment.

What is a better way to understand wildlife in our cities as we continue to coexist?

Whether we’re talking about rats or black bears, which many people perceive as being really, really different, what are the qualities that they have? Most of them are omnivores and habitat generalists, meaning even in their historic natural environments, they inhabit a lot of different kinds of ecosystems. Many of them care for their young. Many of them are curious; they learn lessons and pass on their knowledge to other members of their group. If you add all these things up together, what does that sound like?

Humans?

Exactly! People don’t want to hear that there are so many rats in cities because rats are kind of like us, and have some of the same fundamental biological qualities that make humans so successful.

And so it’s good to remember that we’re all inhabiting the same environments in many cases because there are at least a few things that we have in common.

What does that mean, then, for how cities should approach wildlife management going forward?

This goes back to the legacy of that key period in the early 20th century, when people were thinking about what modern cities should be. In cities, we tend to think of wildlife, if at all, in terms of pest control.

But what if we thought about wildlife in terms of conservation? What kinds of habitats do we want to create, and what kinds of creatures do we want to surround ourselves with? To do that, we need to think about reorienting pest control toward habitat management and not so much just like lethal control. We need to think about the fact that our agencies don’t really have good mechanisms for including wildlife in their decision-making processes.

And on an individual basis, people are doing kind of crowdsourced wildlife management all the time, and they just don’t know it. If you’re planting trees around your home, you are repelling some creatures and inviting others. If you’re going twice the speed limit, you’re increasing the risk that some species are going to die on the roads. If we account for these creatures more often, it would probably create a better, healthier environment for them and for us.

 

 

 

Original article here

26 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

In Praise of Doing Nothing

 

In the 1950s, scholars worried that, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time.

Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society.

It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.”

It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness.

Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times.”

In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable.

But it’s never been more important.

Acceleration for the Sake of Acceleration

In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing?

Why aren’t things easier?

It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration.

According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions.

We see this on factory floors, where “just-in-time” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.

Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration.

To Rosa, this acceleration eerily mimics the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight.

The Oppression of Speed

Unchecked acceleration has consequences.

At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed.

At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.

 

 

For example, research finds two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.

When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – a number that’s only expected to grow. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.

American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.

Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.

It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.

Doing Nothing and ‘Being’

In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.

But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.

Much research – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.

Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with non-productivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological research suggests that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies.

As legends go, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well known for staring for hours into space in his office.

The academic sabbatical is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas.

Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something.

The key is to balance the two.

Taking Your Foot Off the Pedal 

Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.

Danish researchers found that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. In another experiment, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.

Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The Slow Food movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming.

As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that those who are very busy must be involved in important projects.

Touted by the mass media and corporate culture, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “the good life” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness.

French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

 

 

Original article here

22 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

Not just light: Everything is a wave, including you

In 1905, the 26-year-old Albert Einstein proposed something quite outrageous: that light could be both wave or particle. This idea is just as weird as it sounds. How could something be two things that are so different? A particle is small and confined to a tiny space, while a wave is something that spreads out. Particles hit one another and scatter about. Waves refract and diffract. They add on or cancel each other out in superpositions. These are very different behaviors.

Hidden in translation

The problem with this wave-particle duality is that language has issues accommodating both behaviors coming from the same object. After all, language is built of our experiences and emotions, of the things we see and feel. We do not directly see or feel photons. We probe into their nature with experimental set-ups, collecting information through monitors, counters, and the like.

The photons’ dual behavior emerges as a response to how we set up our experiment. If we have light passing through narrow slits, it will diffract like a wave. If it collides with electrons, it will scatter like a particle. So, in a way, it is our experiment, the question we are asking, that determines the physical nature of light. This introduces a new element into physics: the observer’s interaction with the observed. In more extreme interpretations, we could almost say that the intention of the experimenter determines the physical nature of what is being observed — that the mind determines physical reality. That’s really out there, but what we can say for sure is that light responds to the question we are asking in different ways. In a sense, light is both wave and particle, and it is neither.

This brings us to Bohr’s model of the atom, which we discussed a couple of weeks back. His model pins electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus to specific orbits. The electron can only be in one of these orbits, as if it is set on a train track. It can jump between orbits, but it cannot be in between them. How does that work, exactly? To Bohr, it was an open question. The answer came from a remarkable feat of physical intuition, and it sparked a revolution in our understanding of the world.

The wave nature of a baseball

In 1924, Louis de Broglie, a historian turned physicist, showed quite spectacularly that the electron’s step-like orbits in Bohr’s atomic model are easily understood if the electron is pictured as consisting of standing waves surrounding the nucleus. These are waves much like the ones we see when we shake a rope that is attached at the other end. In the case of the rope, the standing wave pattern appears due to the constructive and destructive interference between waves going and coming back along the rope. For the electron, the standing waves appear for the same reason, but now the electron wave closes on itself like an ouroboros, the mythic serpent that swallows its own tail. When we shake our rope more vigorously, the pattern of standing waves displays more peaks. An electron at higher orbits corresponds to a standing wave with more peaks.

With Einstein’s enthusiastic support, de Broglie boldly extended the notion of wave-particle duality from light to electrons and, by extension, to every moving material object. Not only light, but matter of any kind was associated with waves.

De Broglie offered a formula known as de Broglie wavelength to compute the wavelength of any matter with mass m moving at velocity v. He associated wavelength λ to m and v — and thus to momentum p = mv — according to the relation λ = h/p, where h is Planck’s constant. The formula can be refined for objects moving close to the speed of light.

As an example, a baseball moving at 70 km per hour has an associated de Broglie wavelength of about 22 billionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter (or 2.2 x 10-32 cm). Clearly, not much is waving there, and we are justified in picturing the baseball as a solid object. In contrast, an electron moving at one-tenth the speed of light has a wavelength about half the size of a hydrogen atom (more precisely, half the size of the most probable distance between an atomic nucleus and an electron at its lowest energy state).

While the wave nature of a moving baseball is irrelevant to understanding its behavior, the wave nature of the electron is essential to understand its behavior in atoms. The crucial point, though, is that everything waves. An electron, a baseball, and you.

Quantum biology

De Broglie’s remarkable idea has been confirmed in countless experiments. In college physics classes we demonstrate how electrons passing through a crystal diffract like waves, with superpositions creating dark and bright spots due to destructive and constructive interference. Anton Zeilinger, who shared the physics Nobel prize this year, has championed diffracting ever-larger objects, from the soccer-ball-shaped C60 molecule (with 60 carbon atoms) to biological macromolecules.

The question is how life under such a diffraction experiment would behave at the quantum level. Quantum biology is a new frontier, one where the wave-particle duality plays a key role in the behavior of living beings. Can life survive quantum superposition? Can quantum physics tell us something about the nature of life?

 

 

 

Original article here

19 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

How “Good Will Hunting” Changed Men’s Mental Health for the Better

Brian was just a kid when he first saw the movie Good Will Hunting and wasn’t thinking about therapy or his mental health. The 29-year-old engineer was mostly just fascinated by stories about repressed geniuses and Matt Damon’s background story of being a Harvard dropout. He also thought it was pretty rad that the original script was intended to be a spy-thriller.

All of that combined appealed to his sixth-grader sensibilities when he saw the film broadcasted on cable seven years after it was released — so much so that the story of a guy who went to therapy to avoid jail time is still one of his favorite movies.

It wasn’t until he began struggling with anxiety and symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in his early twenties that Brian even thought about going to therapy. He was checking his locks and the stove 10 times before leaving the house, and then one night when he was coincidentally watching another Matt Damon spy movie, The Bourne Identity, his buddy gave him an edible that was too strong and he had a complete breakdown.

“I went for a walk and started having all these intrusive thoughts,” Brian tells me. “I found a therapist the next week.” After his first few sessions, Brian started to realize how much his favorite movie shaped his expectations. “Therapists kind of guide you to the answers rather than try to solve things for you,” he recalls. “The therapist is more or less trying to help him find his own way.”

Counselor and life coach Sam Nabil recalls seeing Good Will Hunting in 1997 when it first hit theaters. He didn’t realize at that moment that he wanted to work in the mental health field, but in retrospect, it steered him in that direction. And like Brian, the movie gave him a sense of what the therapeutic process was really like.

“It didn’t reinforce the idea that going to therapy magically cures all their dysfunctions,” Nabil explains. Rather, Good Will Hunting showed how complex, uncomfortable and intense real introspection can be, even with the help of a mental health professional and a genius-level IQ. The movie may not have convinced men to go to therapy directly, but it gave a lot of guys a reference point for how the process might go once they got there on their own.

Of course, not every guy is expecting to get choked by their therapist for disrespecting their dead wife, like Damon’s character Will does at his first appointment with Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams. But even in scenes that are obviously exaggerated by Hollywood, it shows “how therapy can easily become a pissing contest, especially when unprocessed trauma calls the shots and makes intimacy feel like the silliest and scariest thing in the world,” clinical psychologist Michael Alcee says. In other words, it gives guys an idea of how therapy might feel at its worst — like you’re up against a wall and can’t breathe.

 

 

Alcee, who also saw the movie in 1997 at the age of 20, remembers being intrigued by the therapy scenes years before he decided to become a psychologist. “This model of men sharing in strength and vulnerability together in the process of therapy was very revolutionary,” he notes.

Not every guy who is a fan the movie is convinced that Good Will Hunting represents therapy accurately. To Noam, who saw the movie on cable when he was 10 and has been in therapy for depression on and off since his teenage years, Will and Sean’s exchanges were not like any of his therapy sessions. “Therapy, in my experience, is boring. It’s work. It’s not usually thrilling or exciting or hilarious,” Noam, a 31-year-old academic studying philosophy, says. “Few therapists are as charismatic as Robin Williams.”

Casey, a professor of psychology at a local community college, echoes similar critical sentiments. As much as the movie “rocked my world on many frequencies,” it also made him feel more let down by the therapeutic process in real life. “The movie may provide some very unrealistic expectations for the rate of growth Will experiences. It doesn’t happen that quickly,” Casey notes, with some hope. “I’m always looking for my Robin Williams of therapy.”

At the same time, Casey connects with the movie to this day and credits it with getting him interested in the field of psychology. Hoping to become a therapist himself one day, Casey recently got a tattoo on his ribs of the math equation Will was completing at MIT because of how much the movie affected him. “It spoke to me in a way that made me feel, just, kind of seen,” he says.

Noam agrees: “It’s a mixed bag, but I love it.” For instance, by today’s standards, the movie may present a limited, hyper-masculine view of therapy, where men only get help when it’s court-ordered.

But for 1997, Noam suspects the movie did a lot for men’s mental health that they needed. “It’s not hard to make the case that the movie expresses a kind of toxic masculinity in addition to sensitive masculinity,” he says, but it was crucial to show men talking about their feelings in this way, even if it was not entirely realistic. “The ways it depicted men as emotional and able to connect with one another, not in contrast to their masculinity but as an expression of their masculinity, has had a real, positive impact.”

Jay didn’t think the therapy scenes were that important to the movie when he first saw the movie when he was 17. “For like a decade after release, I saw this as a movie about Will’s relationship with his friends and Skylar more than anything else,” the 41-year-old who works in tech sales tells me. But after starting therapy to work on his own relationships over the past three years, he recently re-watched the movie after a trip to the bench Damon and Williams sat on. That was when something finally clicked. Your move, Chief.

As much as the movie meant to him initially, like many people, “I didn’t think therapy was the answer, I thought it was a small part,” Jay says. Now that he’s talking to a therapist, “I see why I was so drawn to the movie. I needed to unburden, I needed someone to tell me that it’s not my fault, instead of hanging onto so much for so long.”

Even after the tragic manner in which Williams lost his life to suicide in 2014, the movie remains an essential touchpoint in many men’s internal work on themselves. On top of that, the loss of musician Mac Miller, who died of an accidental overdose in 2018 and sampled dialogue from the movie on with song “Soulmate” have made men “realize that mental health struggles are, indeed, real and in need of addressing,” Nabil says.

These tragedies have “emphasized that having insight into how you should handle and manage your mental health is far different from actually feeling it and experiencing all that it comes with,” Nabil adds. “To men and their mental health, the loss of an icon known to make people laugh and entertain reinforced their tendency to keep it all in and be quick-fixers.”

As men continue to die by suicide and experience substance abuse at disproportionately high rates, it’s apparent that they need more than platitudes like “It’s not your fault.” But as Jay felt that day visiting the bench, sometimes that phrase is a good place to start, no matter how cheesy the movie may make it seem over 20 years later. To this day, it’s Brian’s favorite movie to quote with his therapist, who he still sees regularly. “I say it to my friends all the time,” Brian says.

It might be difficult to imagine a psychologist saying that to a client in earnest, but to Alcee, it’s even harder to avoid it. “It can actually be a quite important and useful sentiment to convey to clients, especially those who have been abused and had to internalize abuse as their own fault,” he explains. “But the phrase probably can sound trite because it was used in the film and took on a life of its own like any famous line.”

And while he tries to rephrase the same sentiment in sessions when it’s necessary, sometimes the quote slips out. But ultimately, he knows it’s not his fault.

 

 

Original article here

15 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

In These Cities, Car-Free Streets Are Here To Stay

What happens when you close down a city street to cars? More people do non-driving things, like walking, biking, strolling, skating and frolicking in the space normally reserved for motor vehicles. Car-free advocates would say that as greenhouse gas emissions and traffic violence go down, happiness and connection go up — it’s hard to connect with your neighbors while ensconced in two tons of steel.

Despite the benefits, closing streets to cars can make some people, er — a bit upset. Opponents argue that businesses will suffer (despite evidence to the contrary), congestion will increase (not so, says CityLab) and disabled and elderly people will have less access to public space (there’s a column for that). Like any change that pushes back against car culture, car-free streets face significant challenges.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, cities around the world closed down streets to cars and opened them up for people. Over two years later, some of these experiments were so popular that they are here to stay. Here are four car-free streets that are still going strong or just getting started.

John F. Kennedy Drive in San Francisco

The people of San Francisco have spoken: Keep JFK Drive car-free. Historically, JFK Drive (now known as JFK Promenade) has been closed to cars on Sundays since 1967. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the city and put a premium on outdoor space for socially-distanced play, it made sense to keep the street car-free seven days a week.

As anyone who has biked, skated or rolled during an open streets event can attest — once you go car-free it’s extremely hard to go back. Making JFK Drive car-free not only increased walking and biking, it turned the street into a space for art, music, celebration and connection.

In April, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a motion keeping JFK Drive closed to cars, along with 40 improvements that would make the park more accessible to disabled people, seniors and others.

The 1.5 mile street in San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate State Park was then the subject of dueling ballot measures this month — Prop J would keep cars out and Prop I would reopen the street to motorized vehicles. Supporters of Prop I argued that permanently closing the drive to cars would exclude people with disabilities from accessing the park. In the end, voters passed Prop J with almost 60% voting “yes” and rejected Prop I with over 60% voting “no.”

Jodie Medeiros, who leads the pedestrian advocacy group Walk San Francisco, says car-free movement at JFK is critical to protecting pedestrians from vehicle traffic. “For two years, we have seen how much people not only love but really need this car-free space,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Car-free JFK is all about our safety.”

According to San Francisco Recreation and Parks, visits to the park increased 36% since the closure, totaling nearly 7 million visits, while over 90% of the streets in the park are still open to cars.

Griffith Park Drive in Los Angeles

It started with tragedy: On April 16, 77-year-old Andrew Jelmart was riding his bike through Griffith Park when he was struck and killed by a speeding driver. While the park is a popular spot for hiking, biking and horseriding with over 50-miles of trails, cars often use it as a shortcut to avoid adjacent freeways. Los Angeles has long been known for its car-centric culture, but Jelmart’s death sparked a movement to make at least part of Griffith Park Drive car-free.

It might seem like a no-brainer that parks should be for recreation, rather than for drivers trying to get from point A to point B faster, but the tragic death of a cyclist drove the point home. By the end of June, the park announced it was temporarily shutting a stretch of Griffith Park Drive to cars. By Aug. 18, the change was made permanent.

As mobility advocates and writers have pointed out, most of the park is still open to cars — the section of Griffith Park Drive that is newly car-free is less than a mile long. However, city officials estimate that the closure keeps about 2,000 cars per day from cutting through the park, making it safer for people walking and rolling.

The city of L.A. has rarely moved this quickly to implement safety improvements for people outside of cars, even in the face of tragedy. In this case, it helped that the Department of Recreation and Parks has sole jurisdiction over Griffith Park Avenue, avoiding some of the public pushback that projects like this often face. In addition to the closure, the park has also announced new plans to curb speeding, calm traffic and improve cycling infrastructure.

34th Ave in New York City

Although not shut down to cars 24/7, one of the most successful car-free street projects is 34th Avenue (now known as “Paseo Park”) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Currently, the street is car-free every day between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m, turning 26 city blocks into a de facto public park. With the newfound space, the neighborhood hosts a myriad of cultural activities, including yoga, dance, gardening, ESL classes and arts and crafts for kids.

Started in the early days of the pandemic, the 34th Avenue open street project was organized as part of New York City’s Open Streets initiative. Volunteers from the neighborhood put out traffic barriers every morning and started organizing events, activities and games. This year, only 20 miles of open streets remain in the city, down from a high of 83 miles.

The city’s department of transportation says that the project has reduced traffic violence involving pedestrians by a whopping 41.7%. A study conducted by Streetsblog showed a dramatic reduction in all car crashes.

Although the project has sparked controversy in recent months, 34th Avenue is a testament to community organizing and the possibilities of a street centered on people, not cars.

Capel Street in Dublin

Capel Street is a popular retail and restaurant district in Dublin that went car-less in May, making it the longest car-free street in the country — but not without some pushback.

On the face of it, the street – since named one of Time Out’s coolest streets in the world – seems perfect for pedestrianization. Capel is home to such TikTok-famous eateries as Krewe, Bovinity and a secret Asian street food restaurant hidden in the back of a supermarket. A new report out of New York City has found that far from hurting restaurants, car-free streets actually increased business for restaurants enrolled in the Open Streets program. They saw a 19% increase in revenue over previous years, or almost $6 million total during summer 2021.

Capel Street’s car-free journey started gradually, with more space on the street dedicated to outdoor dining during the pandemic. Then, last year, Dublin piloted a program shutting down the street to cars during weekend evening hours for 17 weeks. A public outreach survey found that almost 90% of respondents supported making Capel Street traffic-free, saying that it “improved their experience” of the street.

While some businesses were opposed to the idea, Dublin city councilors voted this month to keep the street closed to motor vehicles.

Before the Pandemic

Even before the threat of a highly-infectious airborne virus pushed cities to begin getting serious about outdoor dining and pedestrianized streets, some cities were already working toward implementing car-free zones in their city centers. In Paris, air and noise pollution pushed Mayor Anne Hidalgo to institute several car-free days beginning in 2015. Reports by the Airparif association, which measures urban pollution levels, suggest that nitrogen dioxide levels fell by nearly a third on the Champs-Élysées, by as much as 40% along the Seine, and about 20% at the Place de l’Opéra, during a car-free day in September 2015. Now, the city plans to ban private vehicles from the city’s historic center by 2024, ahead of the Paris Olympics.

The success of the occasional car-free days in Paris also inspired a movement in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2016, Mayor Fernando Haddad announced a ban on cars every Sunday along the city’s iconic Paulista Avenue. The move has been welcomed, including by the local business owners who were initially skeptical: A 2019 study conducted by a group of local NGOs found that 86% of store owners supported the program. Indeed, many are encouraging the city to expand the ban to Saturday afternoons as well, to encourage more foot traffic and sales.

“With the closing for cars, people started to walk a lot more, to stroll around, and the sales on Sundays grew seven-fold,” one local bookstore manager told Next City. “It was the best thing that could have happened for us. Sundays are now, by far, our busiest days.”

 

Original article here

09 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

The U.S. diet is deadly. Here are 7 ideas to get Americans eating healthier

The data are stark: the typical American diet is shortening the lives of many Americans. Diet-related deaths outrank deaths from smoking, and about half of U.S. deaths from heart disease – nearly 900 deaths a day – are linked to poor diet. The pandemic highlighted the problem, with much worse outcomes for people with obesity and other diet-related diseases.

“We’re really in a nutrition crisis in this country.” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

Now, there’s growing momentum to tackle this problem. The Biden administration will hold the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on September 28th, and will announce a new national strategy. This comes more than 50 years after a landmark White House conference that helped launch today’s major federal food assistance programs.

“The 1969 conference was transformative,” Mozaffarian says. The programs it ushered in, like the WIC program, have helped feed millions of low-income families.

But this hasn’t been enough to solve the dual problems of food insecurity and diet-related disease. Food policy leaders say it’s time to think anew and build on what we’ve learned. The U.S. can’t “fix” hunger by just feeding people cheap, high-calorie, processed foods – the food that’s so abundant in our food supply, they say. Instead, it’s got to find ways to nourish people with healthy, nutrient-dense foods.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm and thinking about food more broadly and how we can fix this crisis,” Mozaffarian told NPR. He’s co-chair of an independent task force that includes doctors, chefs, food policy and business experts, as well as farming and health advocates, who are helping form the agenda at upcoming the White House conference.

In a new report, they’ve proposed a wide-ranging set of recommendations to end hunger, advance nutrition and improve health. Here are seven big ideas they’re excited about.

 

Treat food as medicine

There’s a growing movement to integrate food and nutrition into health care, by providing healthy meals and groceries to patients to help prevent or manage diet-related illness. The task force wants to see this kind of work expand.

“We should pay for food-based interventions that are effective,” Mozaffarian says.

For example, there’s mounting evidence that providing prescriptions for fruit and vegetables can spur people to eat better and manage weight and blood sugar. The idea is for health care systems or insurers to provide or pay for healthy groceries, combined with nutrition education, to help patients change their eating habits. It is being piloted around the country.

“Produce prescription programs help improve diet quality and food security,” says task force member Dr. Hilary Seligman, a food insecurity expert and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, noting that they can help with diet-related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.

Another idea is to offer medically tailored meals aimed at helping people who are already sick reverse chronic disease. Currently the federal government is running pilot programs that let Medicaid or Medicare pay for the meals in several states.

Focus on quality of calories, not just quantity

The U.S. food supply is awash in cheap calories. And when you’re on a tight budget or relying on benefits like SNAP (food stamps), processed foods like chips and soda can set you back less than fresh produce. Of course, eating processed foods also contributes to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, warns Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association.

Brown says federal food assistance programs have helped to address hunger. “However, many U.S. food policies and programs focus on improving access to sufficient quantities of food,” she says. Instead, it’s time to modernize these policies and focus on the quality of food, “so people have access to enough nutritious food.”

The task force wants to see food programs redesigned to nudge people towards healthier options. The report points to the GusNIP nutrition incentive program – which, in select communities – gives SNAP participants more money to buy fruit and vegetables. It’s a similar concept to the Double Bucks program which doubles the value of SNAP benefits when used to buy produce at farmers markets and other venues.

“It is important to scale up these efforts to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food options,” says task force member Angela Odoms-Young, a nutrition professor at Cornell University.

The task force recommends that Congress establish a nationwide produce incentive program for all SNAP participants. “These types of programs can help promote equity,” Odoms-Young says, noting that people of color disproportionately suffer from chronic illnesses.

Expand access to dietary and lifestyle counseling

The Affordable Care Act mandates that diet counseling be covered by insurers as a preventive care benefit for those at higher risk of chronic disease. The exact details of who is eligible for which services are left up to an advisory group of doctors and health care providers, as well as insurers, and many patients who would benefit may not have access to this service.

“The vast majority of Americans should be getting preventative behavioral lifestyle treatment,” Mozaffarian says. Too often, he says, doctors prescribe drugs for conditions before recommending or trying lifestyle changes. “Doctors go right to the drug,” he says. “I think that’s a big problem.”

The task force recommends that Congress expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage for medical nutrition therapy to people with high blood pressure, prediabetes, celiac disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer and other diet-related conditions. It also calls for expanded coverage of cooking classes and nutrition assistance, as well as coverage of the Diabetes Prevention Program, delivered by telehealth.

This behavior-change program has been shown to be more effective than medicine in reducing the onset of Type 2 diabetes among people at high risk.

Support food entrepreneurs

People who start food businesses can help nourish their communities and create jobs. The task force calls on the federal government to pass policies that boost new healthy food enterprises, including providing new loans and grants to food and nutrition-related companies centered on health, equity, and sustainability. The idea is to focus especially on businesses owned by people of color and other marginalized groups.

“We don’t need more businesses creating diabetes and obesity,” says Tambra Raye Stevenson, who runs Wanda, a non-profit group that aims to build a pipeline and platform for a million Black women and girls to become local food leaders. “We need entrepreneurs that provide teaching kitchens, community gardens, healthy food retails, wellness studios, nutrition services, healthy consumer products, and urban agricultural centers,” she says.

She points to food entrepreneurs like Amanda Stephenson who opened a specialty food market in an underserved neighborhood in Washington, DC, Fresh Food Factory, and Mary Blackford of Market 7 who is planning a food hall that features Black-owned food and lifestyle businesses. “They are our food she-roes making a positive impact and providing healthy food access for our children and other women,” says Stevenson.

In the lead up to next month’s White House conference, groups like Food Tank, a food think tank, have organized listening sessions with food researchers and entrepreneurs. “For food to be more accessible and affordable, we need entrepreneurs that use science and technology,” says Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank. She points to innovators like Journey Foods, which is helping entrepreneurs bring nutritious foods and snacks to market.

Increase the number of new farmers growing healthy foods using regenerative farming techniques

If all Americans began to eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables each day, there would be shortages. That’s because corn and soybeans are grown on most cropland in the U.S.. Now, there’s growing recognition of the need for more specialty crops – including fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

The task force recommends that Congress create a Farmer Corps to support new farmers, building on the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program. The idea is to provide new farmers with paid internships and apprenticeships to learn about sustainable farming, and funding to cover a living wage and housing. It also is pushing for loans to go to farmers growing with sustainable practices.

Growing the same crop, season after season, as many farmers do, can make lands less productive over time, and deplete nutrients from the soil.”The unfortunate reality is that today we subsidize conventional practices that degrade the soil,”says David Montgomery, a professor at the University of Washington and the author of What Your Food Ate, who attended a listening session.

“What we need to sustain agriculture is to incentivize restoring healthy soils and train more farmers to be successful doing that,” he says.

Make school meals free for all students

School meals have been a fixture in U.S. schools ever since President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act back in 1946. For decades, the federal government has reimbursed schools for meals they serve, and low-income students can qualify for free or reduced priced meals. Research has shown that low-income children who participate have better health.

Yet, many families who are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals may not receive them, sometimes due to the paperwork, bureaucracy or stigma of participating or enrolling. Amid the pandemic, school meals have been offered for free to all students. Now, the task force says this should be a permanent change.

“Without access to free meals at school, many children go without food at all during the day, and many more do not have access to the nutritious foods they need to thrive,’ says Seligman, of UC, San Francisco. She notes that school meals help not only with kids’ nutrition, but they also reduce absenteeism and improve academic outcomes.

Establish a federal ‘food czar’

In order to turn ideas like these into action, the task force recommends the creation of a new role in the federal government, a national director of food and nutrition, a food czar figure, if you will. The new director would help streamline and coordinate the many disparate efforts already underway. The U.S. government spends more than $150 billion each year on food and nutrition related programs, and the health care system also spends billions on treatment of diet related diseases.

“This spending is fragmented across 200 separate actions and 21 different departments and agencies without harmonization or synergy,” the task force concludes. Now, they conclude, it’s time for a new approach.

 

 

Original article here