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?