Posts tagged as:

health

Get outside:

NEARSIGHTEDNESS CAUSED BY not enough sun? “Researchers suspect that bright outdoor light helps children’s developing eyes maintain the correct distance between the lens and the retina — which keeps vision in focus. Dim indoor lighting doesn’t seem to provide the same kind of feedback. As a result, when children spend too many hours inside, their eyes fail to grow correctly and the distance between the lens and retina becomes too long, causing far-away objects to look blurry. . . . Luckily, there is a simple way to lower the risk of nearsightedness, and today, the summer solstice — the longest day of the year — is the perfect time to begin embracing it: get children to spend more time outside.”

via Instapundit.com

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If you’re sitting in a chair for most of your day, doing your job, you might want to take notice: Just How Dangerous Is Sitting All Day?

Sitting down for extended periods makes you 53% more likely to have a heart attack, according to a study in a medical journal.

Parents with desk jobs are sitting all day long. That’s not good. Kids have to go to school, move between classes, walk from the bus to home and they’re more likely to be moving around and having varied activities. How many office-working adults are on a sports team.

Of course, kids have their summer vacations. Maybe they prefer to stay indoors where the A/C is on and sit for eight hours with only their thumbs moving as they play with a half-dozen friends on some Xbox Live game.

Even adults can make use of ComputerTime to make them get up, stretch, walk around, by setting session limits with mandatory five-minute breaks. The other alternatives are stand-up desks. You’ll burn more calories if you’re standing and moving around a little while you’re working. You don’t have to worry about an expensive ergonomic chair. It’s apparently better for your back, and you probably have less of a risk of throwing a clot from your butt to your brain, resulting in a stroke.

If you use a stand up desk, tell us how you like it by leaving a comment below.

Do you think stand up desks might be good for your kids too? Do you think they might be less comfortable about spending too much time on the computer if you made them stand while being on the computer?

Maybe the treadmill computer desk is the way to go.

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Nobody that I know likes the light produced by compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). I don’t like the 60Hz flicker that accompanies them, and the color is very displeasing. I’ve given them a chance more than once, but even my kids complained about the light quality. So I used them where we’re generally not living, reading, eating, cooking. I’ve been using them outdoors (but they take forever to warm up in the cooler seasons), and in rooms that we don’t spend much time.

They may cause migraines. They contain about 5mg mercury per bulb, requiring that they be disposed of at CFL recycling locations — inconvenient enough that many people will just toss them into their regular garbage and end up in landfills. What’s so environmentally friendly about that?

So now they might cause cancer?

Energy saving light bulbs ‘contain cancer causing chemicals’:

Their report advises that the bulbs should not be left on for extended periods, particularly near someone’s head, as they emit poisonous materials when switched on.

Peter Braun, who carried out the tests at the Berlin’s Alab Laboratory, said: “For such carcinogenic substances it is important they are kept as far away as possible from the human environment.”

Ann Althouse also justifiably rants about the activism that never ends. It’s always something that has to be made a big deal out of and the activists have to force their conclusions on the rest of us.

So before we have an adequate replacement for the incandescent bulb, politicians around the world are banning them and trying to force people into using fluorescent bulbs or alternatives that just plain suck!

Don’t take my choices away from me! Let the market deal with it in it’s own way, and when we have viable alternatives, people will switch to the best product that saves them money, is safe, and provides them with sufficient quality light.

If the government is going to mandate them, then consumers no longer have a choice. Manufacturers won’t have to expend any real effort to improve their CFL products or develop alternatives. If consumers don’t have a choice, where is the incentive to innovate?

UPDATE: Amy Alkon recommends a place to get a good deal on incandescent bulbs if you want to start hoarding them by the hundreds.

UPDATE: Don’t expect the GOP to come through for us on this one either.

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Hot Nuts!

Get Your Roasted Nuts Here!

by mark on November 7, 2010

When I get off of the train at Grand Central and head on up to the streets for a visit to NYC with my kids, we keep an eye out for those street vendors that sell roasted nuts. They mix them up with some sort of sugar in a hot bowl and pour them into small wax paper bags and sell them for a few bucks. My kids had them on their first trip to NYC and they were such a hit that it’s part of the tradition.

But now as a parent I need to talk to my kids… well, my son at least, about how dangerous hot nuts can be (at least for reproductive health), and that he had better change his laptop usage habits.

[h/t Instapundit]

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Cell Phone – Brain Tumor Link, in Kids

by mark on March 25, 2009

Cellphones trying to pop corn kernals with their radiation! (urban legend)

Photo by Jakub Hlavaty

Another great reason why kids should spend more time face-to-face.

Cellphone use in kids linked to brain tumours

“What stands out is the consistency of the association of exposure and disease. The evidence, as I see it, is sufficiently strong that there needs to be public warnings, there needs to be establishments of exposure guidelines and that the present guidelines — in Canada, the United States or anyone else — are not protective of human health.

“I see us facing a major problem in the future because of the fact that young children are on cellphones constantly, and we may be setting ourselves up for an epidemic of brain cancer, the same thing we did with cigarette smoking and lung cancer.”

According to Columbia University physiology professor Martin Blank, who edited the special issue, the laboratory studies “point to significant interactions” of both power frequency and radio frequency with cellular components, especially DNA.

The epidemiological studies “point to increased risk” of developing certain cancers associated with long-term exposure to radio frequency, he said.

Learned about this story through Tina Su‘s Tweet. Thanks for that link Tina!

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…and again, and again…

Basically don’t stop thinking. You’ve graduated from a fine school perhaps, but that’s no reason to stop learning. The benefits of education don’t end.

Some studies even suggest a correlation between longevity and continuing education.

Reading won’t just stave off Alzheimer’s by exercising your mind, you will learn to make better decisions in all aspects of your life.

Learning new things improves your job prospects or can help you succeed in your own business.

The Internet is great for researching topics and quickly jumping to a piece of information with a Google search. But what about deeper learning? There are libraries of ebooks that you can read for free. Many of the classics of literature. There are course that you can take online. Free course materials that you can dig through at your own pace. Educational Podcasts.

A great place to start would be the Self-Education Resource List.

You could easily lose yourself for eight hours a day with all of these resources. However, you know the Families and Technology shtick: The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it should not supplant the very valuable interaction with real people, the outdoors, and actually doing things.

If you find yourself getting addicted to online learning, install ComputerTime to reintroduce some balance in your activities.

How do you make good use of information resources?

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Those Loud Headphones Will Hurt your Ears!. WHAT!!? ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?!!

The report said that those who listened for five hours a week at high-volume settings exposed themselves to more noise than permitted in the noisiest factory or work place. Maximum volume on some devices can generate as much noise as an airplane taking off nearby.

The study — from a team of nine specialists on the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks — also warns that young people do not realize the damage until years later. (NYT)

Later in the eighties, I remember hearing or reading that Kerry Livgren (keyboardist/guitarist from Kansas) put out his own PSA of sorts warning of hearing loss and he spoke from personal experience:

A recent occurrence in my life has compelled me to write this letter. It concerns a subject that is relevant to everyone — our sense of hearing.

I have been a professional musician since 1965. I spent years playing in clubs, schools, and all the other types of gigs that musicians do, not counting the myriad hours spent in rehearsals. As the
guitarist-keyboardist for Kansas, I have recorded ten albums with that group, two solo albums, and three more albums with the group A.D. In addition to all that studio time, my ears logged thousands of hours of high-decibel concerts, sound checks, etc., over fourteen years of touring.

I recently completed recording my first instrumental project for Sparrow records, and I was schedules to master it in Nashville. The night before my mastering date I was rudely awakened at 3 a.m. by a loud ringing in my right year. I had experienced something like this before, but never at so alarming a level. It was still there in the morning, so I had to rely on the ears of other engineers and friends at the mastering facility.

When I got home, I went through a battery of tests with doctors and audiologists who told me what I suspected anyway: noise-induced hearing loss. Even though for the last several years I have been monitoring at very conservative levels, my ears seem to have been seriously affected, and the prognosis for this type of damage to one’s hearing is not very encouraging.

Little or nothing can be done about it. Unfortunately, our lives do not have an “Undo” command. If I had one, I would most certainly use it, for in retrospect all those wonderful decibels that were so exciting at the time were destroying the very means I had of perceiving them. Now my career, and other areas of my life, are in question, for deafness destroys a great deal more than just the enjoyment of music. All of these wonderful toys we read about in this publication [Electronic Musician] become scrap metal without a God-given ear to hear them with.

It’s not worth it, my friends. Rock and roll takes its toll. I wish I had listened to my dad in 1965 when he opened the garage door and yelled: “Can’t you turn it down and still enjoy it?”

Kerry Livgren
Georgia

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