Ban left turns by car drivers

Someone who is both as brilliant as they come and who has a very analytical mind told me years ago that the best way to improve traffic flow in any urban environment would be to ban all left turns by vehicles, but especially by cars.

The reason is pretty simple: far too many car drivers just do that turn very badly, far too often by impeding more efficient traffic flow either in front of their car (by unnecessarily cutting off a lane) or more often, behind them (for example, by not moving out far enough to allow a 2^nd vehicle to make it through that same yellow light).

He’s right, of course, but there may be an even better reason to ban left turns, namely pedestrian safety.

According to a computer-based simulation study from Oregon State University, which is available online at http://bit.ly/kZJkWs, researchers determined that “4-9 percent of the time, drivers making a left turn don’t even bother to look and see if there are pedestrians in their way.”

Yikes!

Bottom line: if you’re crossing the street, even in a crosswalk, and you see a car turning left into your path, watch out for your life.

Walk your way to a beter health

For the millions and millions and millions of you who – like me – can’t stand running or jogging or whatever that mode of exercise is called, the good news is that a study in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology has concluded that walking is every bit as good for all intents and purposes given that the major two intents of any exercise regime - or even any extra effort at all – are of course to live longer and in better health.

In this study that analyzed data from 33,060 runners in the National Runners’ Health Study and 15,045 walkers in the National Walkers’ Health Study concluded that over the period of 6 years, brisk walkers were as able to lower their cholesterol levels, lower their blood pressure levels, and improve bother their diabetes coronary heart disease risk profiles as much as the runners were.

This was true only so long, of course, as the walkers walked briskly, not at an ambling, gee- is-that-a-flower-bed-ver-there-that-I-should go-and-smell pace?

In fact, the dirty little secret is that the walkers did even better than the runners if the walkers spent as much time walking as the runners spent running.

Walking is the sport: it’s cheap, easy to do anywhere even inside, much more sociable than running, and much less likely to lead to injury.

Now, go take a hike, OK?

Not getting enough good sleep may raise the risk of diabetes

An intriguing follow-up from the ongoing terrific Nurses’ Health Study has determined that nurses with low levels of melatonin, that hormone we produce at night during sleep, have a significantly higher (over double) the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes compared to women with higher levels of melatonin.

That raises the very interesting possibility – which this study was not designed to look for – that not getting enough sleep at night (that is, by not allowing normal levels of melatonin to be released) may lead to changes that result in Type 2 diabetes, and hence all its complications – amputations, blindness, cardiovascular disease, and on and on - as well.

One conclusion we should avoid as yet, though, namely that taking melatonin supplements can counteract that higher propensity to diabetes that’s associated with less sleep.

Supplements never work as well as the real thing, and there’s no reason to believe that this situation will turn out any differently.

Anyway, what better preventive therapy to suggest than to get  more sleep?  

False positive test results

One of the most difficult messages to get across to an average health-conscious person, especially an aging one, is that screening tests are not necessarily always benign.

Or putting that in another fashion: while not dangerous in themselves, lots of screening tests can – and do - result in ultimate harm to the person who had one.

That comes mainly from “false positive” results, which occur much more often than many people realize, and certainly much more often than doctors are generally willing to admit.

The harm from false positive results in screening tests comes from two sources: potential physical harm (biopsies are surgical interventions, and there is no such thing as risk-free surgery) and equally important, from psychological effects, although that side of things is often neglected or rejected as a minor concern., which it decidedly is not for many people.

That came home in a pretty stark fashion this week from a report in the March/April issue of The Annals of Family Medicine in which Danish researchers concluded that a small but substantial number of women who receive false positive reports from a mammogram are adversely affected by psychological problems for up to 3 years following that report.

Now it may only be a small number of women who are affected in that way, but given how common mammograms are and given how often they result in false positives (another report this week estimated that in some young women with dense breasts, the false positive rate for mammography can be as high as a whopping 60 %), the total number of women who suffer these adverse consequences is consequently huge, and we really don’t know that ultimate cost.

Now, it has to be stressed that on the very important other hand, mammograms do save some lives (although the number of lives saved by mammography is a constant topic of debate among the experts), so this should not dissuade anyone from getting a mammogram: it should just be something that every woman adds into the mix of things she has to consider before automatically getting such a test.

And what is true of mammography is also true for many (most?) other screening tests as well. 

Berries are good for you in any form

It may just be me, but I’ve always wondered if the frozen blueberries that I’m eating are as nutritious as the fresh variety that I get whenever I can find locally-grown blueberries.

I know, I know, they do have blueberries from Peru or Chile at my local fresh produce place all winter long, but I really don’t trust that something that comes all that way and was picked God only knows when before being shipped contains much goodness; and even though it probably does, to be honest I’d still rather eat stuff grown locally or at least near to here even if it has to be in a frozen form.

Anyway, if you’ve wondered about the nutrition value of frozen or even dried blueberries, wonder no more.

In an article in the New York Times, Anahad O’connor cites a study published in The Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology that concludes that there is no “significant differences between . . . fresh, dried and frozen berries” in terms of their anti-oxidant content, which is the main reason most health-conscious people eat berries (besides their terrific taste, of course).

One thing I had never considered, though, although it should be obvious from the taste: drying berries increases their sugar content so that according to this report, one “cup of fresh or frozen blueberries has about 85 calories and 14 grams of sugar (while) one half cup of dried blueberries . . . has roughly 270 calories and 25 grams of sugar” which is quite a difference, especially for anyone who needs to or wants to monitor either calorie or glucose intake.