Pollution is killing our children. Here’s how we can save them | Geraint Davies

Every weekday, millions of primary school children across the UK put their lives at risk. Break time brings relief for busy teachers and is often met with screams of delight as children run out onto the playground. But in many of our major cities, tens of thousands of children in hundreds of schools, nurseries and colleges are at risk as they inhale diesel pollution breaching EU air quality standards.

Across the UK, more than 40,000 people die prematurely from diesel pollution, at a cost of £20bn each year, according to the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Paediatrics 2016 report. Now 50% of new cars are diesel, with each car producing many times more fumes than laboratory tests had previously indicated. The VW scandal has shown that the motor industry cannot be trusted and the royal colleges’ report finds that babies and children are particularly at risk. Foetuses in pregnant women exposed to air pollution are more likely to suffer effects to their lungs, heart and neurological development. Children in “clean air zones”, areas where the air quality problem is most serious, have a 10% reduced lung capacity and have more respiratory problems, together with effects on their nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems. This leads to physical and mental health problems in later life.

The government has compelling evidence to act now. Instead it fears the backlash of diesel drivers who bought their cars in good faith and are still encouraged to do so by lower vehicle tax rates. The public-health risks of diesel particulates have been well known since the days of Margaret Thatcher. However, the impact of nitrogen oxides and the scale of underestimated pollution from lab tests compounded by the sheer volume of cars has now become a public-health catastrophe. That’s why the demand for a new Clean Air Act grows. Meanwhile, the supreme court has demanded that the government produces a clean air strategy, to fulfil our EU air quality obligations. Today, I publish my clean air bill to give shape and ambition to the government’s plan.

Britain needs to take bold leadership. We already know that four capital cities – Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City – have plans to remove diesel vehicles by 2025 and that the markets are investing in zero-emissions futures. Tesla, founded in 2003, produces just 76,000 electric cars and is valued at $ 49bn (£38bn) – $ 3bn more than Ford, founded a century earlier, which produces 6.6m vehicles.

The clean air bill is a route map to reach World Health Organization air quality standards by tackling emissions in our cities, ports and airports. It provides the signals and incentives for consumers and producers to change their behaviour to do so.

Rather than penalising diesel car-owners who bought in good faith, the bill calls for recall and refit of cars, fiscal incentives and scrappage schemes largely funded by manufacturers for drivers to switch to vehicles that produce fewer – or ideally, zero – emissions. It provides for a national electric and hydrogen refuelling network and gives local authorities a responsibility to measure and publicise pollution levels, in particular close to vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly. Councils will have powers to restrict access or introduce pollution charges if communities so wish, based on local evidence.

What’s more, new powers are proposed to combat diesel pollution belching into communities from idling ships in port by requiring a switch to port-provided electric power. The bill also addresses freight transport, pollution at airports and “cheat devices” installed on cars. Overall, the bill aims to make our right to clean air a reality.

Our first duty as parents is to protect our children. Break time, walking to the shops and football in the park shouldn’t be life-or-death decisions beyond our control. They needn’t be. For the sake of all our children, let’s do something about it now.

Pollution is killing our children. Here’s how we can save them | Geraint Davies

Here’s What Will Happen To Your Body When You Add Turmeric To Your Morning Lemon Water

Starting your day with lukewarm lemon water is one of the best things you can do for your body. Lemons are loaded with vitamin C, B, calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, enzymes, antioxidants, and fibers. Next to adding a host of healthy nutrients, it also kick-starts digestion, boosts the immune system, fights inflammation, and hydrates and energizes the body.

For more info, read: 15 Reasons You Should Be Drinking Lemon Water Every Morning

To make this healthy morning habit even better, I recently started to add turmeric too. In addition to getting the amazing benefits of lukewarm lemon water, turmeric will turn it into a nutrient-dense, cleansing energy bomb to fly through your day.

What turmeric-lemon water can do for you:

• Boost anti-inflammatory properties of lemon water. Curcumin, or turmeric’s active compound, is a potent anti-inflammatory compound which matches the effectiveness of many over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs.


• Improve brain power. Lemons are an excellent source of brain-boosting potassium and magnesium, while turmeric has been found to reduce the risk of cognitive disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.


• Antioxidant activity. Both lemon and turmeric possess strong antioxidant activity to keep your skin in perfect condition and keep tumors at bay.


• Improve digestion. Eating or drinking turmeric on a daily basis stimulates the gallbladder, reduces bloating and gas, and prevents inflammation of the digestive tract, while lemon juice helps to loosen and flush out toxins from the digestive system.


• Heart-friendly. Curcumin reduces LDL (or bad) cholesterol, prevents blood clotting, and removes plaque build-ups in the arteries.


• Weight-loss aid. Lemons stoke the metabolic fire, which helps you to burn more calories from the food you eat.


• Cleansing properties. Lemons and turmeric stimulate your liver to produce more enzymes. It enables the liver to work more efficiently in eliminating toxins and waste materials.

Turmeric-lemon water recipe

• 1 glass lukewarm water (nut milk works too)


• ¼ teaspoon turmeric powder


• Juice of ½ lemon (or 1 lime)


• Pinch of black pepper (to increases turmeric’s bioavailability)


• Honey or maple syrup to taste (optional)


• A pinch of cinnamon (optional: for extra anti-diabetic effect)

Add lemon juice, black pepper, turmeric, honey, and cinnamon to a glass of lukewarm water. Drink first thing in the morning on an empty stomach for the best energizing effect. Stir constantly while drinking to avoid all turmeric to sink to the bottom of the glass.

Sources:

http://www.naturalnewsblogs.com/15-reasons-drinking-lemon-water-every-morning/

http://www.naturalnewsblogs.com/happens-body-eat-1-teaspoon-turmeric-every-day/

If you enjoyed reading this post, don’t forget to connect with me on Facebook or Google+ or download my FREE Book “Amy’s Home Kitchen”, packed with my family’s favorite healthy, clean and delicious recipes. 

Looking for a way to live a healthy lifestyle while eating delicious, colorful meals and losing or maintaining weight the healthy way? Click here for more info

Amy is a life and food lover, certified biologist, and holistic health coach. She is the founder of the healthy lifestyle website www.Body-in-Balance.org and creator of the online program, www.ThinForever.me. After successfully changing her family’s health and happiness, she’s on a mission to help other people achieve the life and body they want. You can find here on Facebook or Google+ or get her free clean, whole food recipe eBook here: http://www.body-in-balance.org/amys-home-kitchen-recipe-book/

Here’s What Will Happen To Your Body When You Add Turmeric To Your Morning Lemon Water

Is mental illness real? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jay Watts

When people ask whether mental illness is real or not, my suspicion is that they really mean: does mental illness have a physical, material cause, in the same way as cancer or a broken leg? Can it be tested for, diagnosed and treated with the same certainty as a physical disease? Whatever the answer to that question, it should cast no doubts or aspersions on the very real suffering of people with mental health problems.

When we think of mental illness, we tend to think of categories such as schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, depression and anxiety. These categories cannot be verified with objective tests, in the way as, say, cancer or diabetes can. Neither do they tend to stand up to scientific scrutiny as distinct constructs. For people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, there is no specific treatment or predictable outcome. To take another example, most people with a diagnosis of depression have symptoms of anxiety, and vice versa.

Framing problems as being part of distinct disorders is a powerful thing to do, and loads of the categories that reach our diagnostic bibles appear relatively new, historically. Many can be traced back to the pharmaceutical industry, which has a direct interest in shaping behaviours and emotions into various symptoms, to be sold back to consumers as disorders requiring medication. This has led people to argue that these categories do not represent real illnesses.

Such arguments can come across as diminishing the lived experience of mental anguish, its embodiment, and the potential role of medication. Some mental health problems are less contested than others, and medication does save lives. It would be cruel to suggest a grieving widow unable to cope could not benefit sometimes from anti-anxiety medication, or to deny an option of antipsychotics to quell the intrusive, menacing, persecutory experiences that can accompany an acute psychosis.

In the City: ‘There is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The problem, though, is that the efficacy of such treatments, and the mechanisms by which they work, tend to be oversold and presented as long-term solutions. We are right to be cautious about the overprescription of antidepressants, to take one example. These tend to be prescribed along with a scientifically dodgy idea that the pills are rejigging an imbalance in serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain. Similarly, emerging evidence suggests that the long-term prescription of antipsychotics may actually hinder recovery for many.

Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse, early separation, emotional neglect, chronic invalidation and bullying, and we get a clearer picture of why some people suffer more than others.

Crucially, all of these experiences affect our psychological and physiological makeup. For example, the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies show that childhood trauma, neglect and structural oppressions manifest later not just in mental distress but in chronically inflamed bodies stuck on hyper-alert (this we can pick up through blood tests).

Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkers as opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Sociologists argue that this is because citizens who consider themselves ill are easier to manage than people who consider themselves maddened by toxic families and injustice.

Mental health practitioners often try to sidestep this whole debate by claiming that most sensible professionals subscribe to a biopsychosocial model of mental distress. But unfortunately such a model nearly always ends up privileging the biological, despite the best intentions of many psychiatrists. As a society, we have a somewhat fetishistic relationship to bodies and brains, a moth-to-light-like attraction to shiny brain-imaging scans or a hint at a breakthrough in genetic research. Correlations between experiences and genetic phenotypes are conflated with evidence for molecular pathways that prove the existence of distinct disorders. Studies with only a few participants generate multiple headlines, and remain entrenched in the public imagination. At the same time, treatments that we know work fail to get funding due to the unconscious bias towards biological explanations.

We must shift our focus to one that validates the lived experience of people who are suffering, however they choose to understand their pain

Consider family interventions. Professionals have known for decades that reducing hostility, criticism and emotional over-involvement in families improves how well people recover from a number of serious mental health problems, regardless of how severe patients’ symptoms are. Yet despite the robust evidence base – up there with medication and individual therapy – family work is rarely available through the NHS.

Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic. The idea that mental suffering is a “real” illness residing in individuals, and especially in their genes, can therefore be damaging.

It is also not necessarily what the public wants, despite the current emphasis on the “just like any other illness” narrative. When researchers ask people how they understand mental illness, they tend to prefer psychosocial explanations to medical ones. Simplistic biological explanations tend to increase stigma, not least because they cement a division between ill and well people. Many people have felt silenced and traumatised by such accounts, feeling that the illness model shuts down their truth.

There is an implicit suggestion here that mental health problems have to be viewed as being equivalent to physical illnesses if they are to warrant society’s care and funding. This may inadvertently cement prejudice, given the contested nature of mental illness. Mental health problems are no less real, no less disabling, for occupying a peculiar space between inner and outer, meaning-making and meltdown, the inner world and the environments that shape us.

Rather than clumsily trying to squeeze people’s distress into different boxes, and attempting to convince the public that these reflect illness processes, as with flu or cancer, we must shift our focus to one that validates the lived experience of people who are suffering, however they choose to understand their pain.

Some will choose to conceptualise their distress as an illness, others as a result of trauma, others yet as an embodied response to the mixed messages that are rife in society about who and how we are supposed to be. Our guiding principle should not be whether such forms of accounting are true or false, but whether they are useful for any given individual at any given moment. Acceptance, after all – is the great friend of good mental health just as writing over one another’s truth is the great enemy.

Is mental illness real? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jay Watts

The Chokeables has saved babies" lives – here"s how we made it | St John Ambulance

So far, we know of 54 babies whose parents say wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for The Chokeables, St John Ambulance’s first aid film teaching people how to save a choking baby in just 40 seconds.

We’re delighted our film has won charity film of the year, announced at Bafta on 15 March. So what’s the secret of its success?

Before making the film, we carried out research that revealed parents are the people most interested in first aid and what they worry about most is their baby choking. Over 40% of parents had seen it happen, 58% said it was a serious concern and yet 79% didn’t know what to do.

Our previous campaigns had been aimed at getting people to take first aid seriously but our audiences just weren’t taking the next step and learning it.

We realised we needed to teach directly – beam the advice into parents’ lives in a way they couldn’t ignore. And the tone needed to be spot on. Parents don’t want to be browbeaten and made to feel guilty. It’s hard enough being a parent. What we needed was an upbeat, engaging, shareable lesson.

Enter the geniuses at Bartle Bogle Hegarty. They realised that the lesson would come across best if taught by common household items that could potentially choke babies – the kind of things most parents would find under their sofas, like a toy or a pen lid. They crafted a script around the idea that these characters were so fed up with babies choking on them that they have decided to teach parents what to do.

We used animation to make the topic less scary, and pulled in the big guns with David Walliams and Johnny Vegas voicing the characters.

[embedded content]

This was all quite a feat considering the film needed to be 40 seconds long. Our tip with charity films is the shorter the better, to get as many people as possible watching to the end, but also to air it on TV in a cost-effective way.

I wanted a name for the campaign to help parents connect with the characters, and identify the campaign easily so it could trend on social media. Heaps of chocolate and one brainstorm later, The Chokeables was born.

When it came to sharing and promoting the film, we developed close relationships with key media to help create a buzz before we released the video. We focused in particular on those who could help us reach a high proportion of parents, such as ITV’s Good Morning Britain and Mumsnet, as well as nationals like MailOnline and the Mail on Sunday. Facebook was crucial as mums use it to share parenting tips, and we also worked with the mums who’d saved their babies so that even more parents could find out what to do.

Social media was key and we created a Thunderclap so people could mass share the video, flashmob style, as well as social media competitions to increase further engagement, such as a messy baby photo competition with first aid kit prizes. We also produced a whole suite of baby first aid advice videos to inspire further learning.

We entered The Chokeables into the inaugural Charity Film Awards, when entries opened in 2015. The awards have been set up to recognise the best videos created by or on behalf of UK charities, whether for raising awareness, changing attitudes and behaviours or fundraising.

Over 375 charities entered for the first round of public voting. More than 43,000 people voted and the resulting shortlist went to a panel of judges. They whittled it down to the finalists, including household names such as the RSPCA, Barnardo’s, the RNLI, Alzheimer’s Society and Great Ormond Street children’s hospital.

A second round of public voting for the people’s choice award has seen more than 66,000 people vote for the winner – the Soi Dog Foundation’s film about Cola the dog, who was given custom-made prosthetics after his front legs were amputated.

To win the overall award for film of the year for The Chokeables is just incredible. We’d put everything into this and hoped it would make an impact, but the success has knocked us sideways. Not only have we taught millions of people how to help a choking baby but it’s helped people feel that St John Ambulance is relevant to their lives.

The video continues to receive millions of views whenever it’s re-posted on social media. I love these stats but nothing beats getting a message from a mum who has saved their baby thanks to our video. There’s no greater reward than knowing we’ve reassured parents and helped all those babies.

• Emma Sheppard is head of communications, St John Ambulance. The Chokeables won film of the year at the 2016 Charity Film Awards.

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The Chokeables has saved babies" lives – here"s how we made it | St John Ambulance

What is yoga? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati

The answers you get to this will depend on who formulates the response. The sleek 30-something clad in organic cotton leggings with a healthy glow might answer, while holding “plank pose” for an excruciating length of time, that yoga is about being simultaneously buff and chilled out. Ask a grizzly old Hindu monastic like myself and you’re likely to get a more knotty and byzantine response.

We humans are explorers. As soon as we stood upright we set out to explore the planet, taking fire with us. In the Shanidar cave high on the Bradost mountain of Iraq, rest skeletons respectfully laid in a foetal position, on beds of flowers gathered from the valley below. Each skeleton has artefacts useful for an afterlife carefully placed to hand. They may date back as far as 65,000 years and belonged to Neanderthals. Thus it seems that all branches of humanity were explorers, peering into the veil of death. We have always asked questions such as “What is all this?” and “Where did it all come from?”, and, most maddening of all, “Who am I?” That, we can speculate, is how all religion, philosophy and science were born. That is how yoga was born.

Now, as ever, we live poised at the edge of an abyss, not knowing what the next moment will bring. And in this age of the ascendancy of science, that edge has grown closer – and the abyss deeper – in our consciousness: we are a “biological accident”, so nearly not, and yet here we are, crying out like the poet Rabindranath Tagore: “When should I find myself complete in myself?”

In India, once the ancient hymns and rituals of the Vedas (the cornerstone texts of Hinduism) had been formulated, and once the great Indus Valley civilisation had risen and turned to dust, a group of people, women as well as men, gave up the cities and went into the forests – to become known as the aranyakas (forest dwellers). The core ritual of the Vedas was the sacred fire ceremony. The aranyakas internalised exploration, taking the heat and light of their sacred fire into the darkness within as they sought to understand consciousness. In the forests they contemplated truths that had been handed down for centuries by word of mouth. Their contemplations became the final portion of the Vedas, called the Upanishads. It is the Upanishads that crystallised the teachings of yoga.

The word Upanishad means, roughly, teachings received when you have drawn close: they are for dedicated students, the seekers who hang around asking persistent questions. The Katha Upanishad is one such teaching, in which a young seeker becomes disillusioned with the status quo and as a consequence is condemned to death. In a dialogue with death he is given the very first recorded teaching of yoga as a means of understanding life.

This teaching begins by acknowledging that, “moment by moment”, we are faced with choosing a more meaningful response than our habitual knee-jerk reaction. This, then, is the first definition of yoga: walking through the fire of refusing our first reactions, knowing that while we might not choose our circumstances, we can choose our responses to them.

Many Upanishads continued this exploration of yoga, but around 250 BCE (a date not set in stone) a remarkable philosopher delineated the quest of yoga in what has become known as the Patañjali Yoga Sūtra. This articulation of yoga became established as one of the six orthodox philosophies of Hinduism.

These sutras hold meaning for us when the perennial questions about what we are, what our existence is, whether it has any meaning at all, arise anew. The word sūtra means “thread”: we reach for that thread to navigate the abyss and reach for the deep, in search of our “complete” self. The very first word of these sūtras is “atha”, meaning “now”. It is a word that is also a symbol, something sacred, something pregnant with meaning: it was the now in which the Sage Patañjali delivered its message; it is the now in which I contact that teaching; it is the now of my readiness to be open and receptive to it – and when I am, that is yoga.

The Sage Patañjali defined yoga as “the stilling of the movement of thought in the mind” in order to “know the true self”. He had adopted an even more ancient philosophy that held that while the idea-of “I”, the socially constructed self, was a mirage – behind it, masked by it, was an immanent and universal “self” worth the search. Yoga is a means whereby that search is made.

In the centuries that followed, yoga became the sap nourishing the mighty tree of Hinduism, flowing into every branch of its rich philosophy while always remaining rooted in the Vedas. From the 18th century onwards, as India was colonised, yoga travelled to Europe and academics took to translating its many texts into their own languages.

Then, in 1893, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, a fiery, saffron-clad Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, stood up and began his brief speech with the address: “Brothers and sisters of America … ”, bringing the audience to its feet for a two-minute standing ovation. Vedic philosophy had burst upon the west, bringing yoga with it – and we embraced it. Yoga is now ubiquitous. It appeals because it offers us a means to deal with ancient questions that cannot be suppressed.

What is yoga? Despite its global travel, it remains all that we do to still the mind in order to know the true and universal self. So, is the well-toned figure sweating it out on the yoga mat doing yoga? Yes, by using the body the yogi trains the attention to handle the perennial questions. But the person walking their dog beside the river and contemplating the truth behind self, life and death, is also doing yoga. The beauty of yoga is that it meets us wherever we are and then invites us to continue the exploration – like young Nachiketas, the seeker in the Katha Upanishad, questioning even death.

My own yoga teacher, a Himalayan monk called Swami Venkatesananda, said: “Yoga is all those practices that enable us to discover health – which is not the absence of the symptoms of sickness, but which is wholeness and holiness, an inner state of being in which there is no division at all.”

What is yoga? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati

How often should I wash my hair? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jessica Hopkins

“Should” is a tricky word. And not one I’m generally a fan of. By definition it’s used to indicate “obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticising someone’s actions”. For example: you should wash your hair; it looks awful. But do we have a duty or obligation to wash our hair? And if so, is that for the good of our own health or to appease society’s expectations of personal hygiene and grooming?

While growing up, I vaguely remember instructions to brush my teeth and have a wash but the parental guidance on hair washing specifically escapes recollection. My earliest memory of washing my own hair as a child is my older sister’s mirth that not only did I bypass shampoo and go straight for conditioner, I hadn’t rinsed it out either. Some 25 years of hair-care trial-and-error later and I’ve more or less got it nailed.

My hair is dark, curly and very thick, so can easily withstand a good four or five days before it needs washing. And, to be perfectly honest, it’s not unknown to push this to a full week, providing I’ve been giving it a thorough soaking and comb-through each day. Does that seem gross?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Excessively thick, curly hair can benefit no end from a little natural oil – in fact I’d go as far as to say that natural sebum is the world’s greatest serum – but for someone with thin, straight, blond hair, five days without washing generates an entirely different result.

So how do you determine what’s best for you? Just answer these simple questions. Is your hair long or short? Straight or curly? Thick or thin? Do you exercise (sweat) a lot? Swim? What’s your ethnicity? Do you live or work in a heavily polluted area? Do you use a lot of products? Do you heat style? Colour? Throw in the three sweeping hair “types” of oily, normal or dry and suddenly I feel an instructional matrix coming on. What the hell is normal hair, anyway?

Any one of these, or combination, will provide a different answer, ranging from every day to every other day, to every three days, to once or twice a week to the more obvious “as often as it needs it”. Most hair professionals tend to generalise at twice a week (fine hair excepted) but I know that isn’t applicable to me, at least, so why would you trust that? (As an aside, and just to be clear: whether you usually wash your hair every day or twice a week, using dry shampoo does not count. That’s like spritzing Febreze on your favourite T-shirt and saying you’ve washed it. You haven’t.)

The global shampoo industry will be worth an estimated $ 25bn-plus by 2019, in part thanks to the increase in dry shampoo sales and the increasing demand for natural and organic products. But is shampoo just another thing we’re programmed to buy because we think we need it? Every week my sister and I dutifully went to the supermarket with our dad, maintaining the illusion that we were helping with the weekly shop when in fact we were roaming the beauty aisle (with inexplicable free rein), searching for the new releases in shampoo and conditioner that we had just seen on TV. This was less because we had a keen interest in maintaining scalp health, more because we felt compelled to try the new products that promised us dreamy curls in a catchy way: “Don’t be so mean to your hair! Get hot!” (Yes, hands up if you’re a child of 80s commercialism.)

Given that shampoos can now only advertise how they will affect how hair looks, and not what is actually going on inside each follicle, then how can we trust that we do actually need to use it at all? To be Jen for a moment: “Here comes the science bit, concentrate.” If you usually wash your hair every day and then skip one it’s likely that your hair will become greasy pretty quickly. This is because while shampoo is taking away any dirt build up, it can also be drying out your natural reserves of sebum: the scalp thinks it’s in a drought so overcompensates, you get greasy hair and need to wash it again. Continue ad infinitum. (As another aside: be gentle when you wash, and only do the roots. Excessive scrubbing activates the oil-producing sebaceous glands, thus becoming a self-defeating action.)

When the hair and scalp are healthy, as much sebum as is needed is produced naturally. In theory, once you’ve weaned yourself free, you shouldn’t need to use shampoo at all, just a daily “wash” with water.

Given that I’m halfway to No Poo with my five-day average, I am incredibly tempted to give it a whirl properly. As for you (assuming you aren’t ready to ditch the suds): does it smell bad? Does your scalp itch? Is it stuck together? Does it look dull? Do you want to? Then probably, you already know the answer.

How often should I wash my hair? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jessica Hopkins

The UK’s deadly air pollution can be cured: here"s how

Pollution levels in the UK are soaring. Last year, a committee of MPs in the UK described the state of the air that we breathe as a public health emergency.

London mayor Sadiq Khan has a budget of £875m to try to tackle air pollution – small, compared to the capital’s annual £3.6bn bill arising from its impact.

And while there may be recognition of the problem, there are fewer examples of successful solutions. How can we travel without harming other people’s health? How can businesses deliver paper clips, coffee and food without polluting the air we breathe?

An estimated 40,000 people across the UK (9,500 in London) die early each year from particle pollution and nitrogen dioxide. Three roads in London have already breached UK and EU limits for nitrogen dioxide for 2017. We have a lot to do and simply cleaning exhausts is not enough.

Diesel traffic is a main source of urban exposure and over half the world’s diesel vehicles are sold in Europe. The low emission zone is the weapon of choice. Over 200 cities now ban the most polluting vehicles. German cities with such zones have made faster progress on particle pollution than those without.

Particle pollution on some main roads in London has improved when lorries were upgraded ahead of the low emission zone. France has just launched a national framework for low emission zones, and following the government’s court defeat, new zones look set for many UK cities.

Low emission zones exclude older vehicles, assuming they emit more pollution than the newer ones. But, for many years, new diesels passed ever-tighter exhaust tests in the laboratory only to emit much more nitrogen oxides on roads. This goes beyond the VW scandal. Other vehicle manufacturers might not have a legal case to answer but they certainly have a moral one.

Promisingly, it looks like the newest buses and lorries produce just a few per cent of the nitrogen oxides when compared to pre-2014 vehicles and, astonishingly, less than half that emitted from the average new diesel car. Fitting better exhaust controls to older buses works too; on one London street nitrogen dioxide fell by around 20% when half the buses were upgraded. Petrol exhaust technologies have worked well for more than 10 years. Greater priority also needs to be given to freight in transport planning to reduce lorry and van movements.

Each year’s delay means more health harm. One answer would be a switch to only the very newest buses and lorries, and petrol cars instead of diesel, while alternative fuelled vehicles and their fuel infrastructure are developed longer-term. This requires scrappage and investment schemes. A large cost but the cost of not doing it is massive.

However, simply cleaning exhausts would be a missed opportunity to build better cities. Reducing traffic would reduce air pollution, reduce climate change emissions, tackle the increasing particle pollution from brakes, tyre and road wear and, with more active travel, it would have huge health benefits.

An annual benefit of €1,300 (£1,126) could come from each person who swaps a five km daily car commute to a cycle journey. Above all, we need to monitor to check that policies work and to ensure that all communities benefit from investment to clean our air.

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The UK’s deadly air pollution can be cured: here"s how

Here’s the real recipe for healthy eating: a big fat serving of education | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

We’ve all done it, us serial dieters. Browsing the aisles, bored of our regimens of deprivation, we crave something sweet. And so we grab the low-fat yoghurt, or the 80-calorie chocolate mousse, or the can of diet cola, convincing ourselves that we can have a little bit of what we fancy and that it doesn’t matter, because sugar and fat, not artificial sweeteners, are the real enemies in our constant war against obesity.

But now, scientists think that artificial sweeteners might be fattening us up. Dr Chee Chia, a clinician scientist at the National Institute on Aging at the US Department of Health and Human Services, has conducted research that found that people who broadly ate the same diet – and the same number of calories – became fatter if they consumed low-calorie sweeteners. One possible explanation is that these sweeteners affect our metabolism, triggering it to lay down more abdominal fat. Research from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel suggests that sweeteners disrupt the body’s ability to regulate sugar. And a recent report by researchers at Imperial College London and two Brazilian universities argued that diet drinks might be no better for weight loss than their full-sugar counterparts.

If true, it doesn’t surprise me. Anecdotally, I have friends who have cut out their daily diet drink and have lost half a stone seemingly overnight. The science of nutrition is complex and conflicting – we are constantly being told to cut out whatever dietary scapegoat is currently held responsible for our thickening waistlines – fat, sugar, carbs, gluten, meat. But most of us know in our disobedient guts that eating as naturally as possible in combination with exercise is the healthiest way to stay slim. It’s just that we can’t resist sweetening the bitter pill with a quick artificial fix.

We have a terrible food culture in Britain, an addiction to sweet things and processed foodstuffs; harassed workers lunch “al desko”, slaves to office cake culture, and mainlining biscuits to overcome the 4pm slump; after-work boozehounds guzzle kebabs and chips as they stagger home from the pub; middle-class gout-magnets down red wine with their slices of pâté; and overworked parents feed their kids from Iceland’s freezer cabinet (not knowing they already stopped at the chicken takeaway on their way home).

To browse the supermarket with its aisles and aisles of processed rubbish is to conclude that it’s no wonder so many British people are fat (eight in 10 middle-aged Britons are overweight or exercise too little, according to Public Health England). It’s embarrassing, when you think about it. (I say this as someone who, having decided to get healthy this year, found herself at the weekend devouring an entire chocolate Santa.)

A decade of flat-sharing has taught me that, as humans, our eating habits are incredibly varied and personal. I have observed various flatmates’ diets at close range – the single lads who eat only tortellini, the strictly vegan girl with lists of ingredients as long as her arm, the American with a special pan for his grilled cheese, the friend whose freezer bags of cheap, bloody cuts of meat gave me the chills, the Ottolenghi addict, the Italian who cooked everything from scratch, and the guy whose kippers stank out the whole house. Not to mention my boyfriend, who was once caught in the act of consuming five, yes five, jacket potatoes. It’s sad, but many of my friends and flatmates have spent most of their 20s trying to re-educate themselves about healthy eating, having been taught bad habits at home as they were growing up.

While it’s important to note that junk food is full of crap that keeps us addicted to it, I’m afraid I’m also going to blame the parents. We are all products of our circumstances. I can cook, for example, because as a young carer, I had to, and I eat vegetables because I was raised vegetarian. Parents shape our attitudes to food in ways that we are not even conscious of. Some are overzealous, banning all additives or ruthlessly assessing their children’s weight. Others bring their offspring up on chicken nuggets.

Many fail to teach their children to cook, so that when they are released into the world they head straight to the ready meal aisle. None of these parents are bad people; but they are inadvertently passing on bad habits. It would be useful if health, cookery and nutrition was a fuller part of the school curriculum, but so much of the way we approach our diets begins at home. Yet parents are in denial. Last month the Health Survey for England found that 91% of mothers and 80% of fathers of obese children are blind to the fact their offspring have a weight problem.

The trick to maintaining a healthy weight, as Simon Stevens, the NHS chief, said last month, is simply to “eat less rubbish”. Education is key. The NHS has just announced plans to put 50,000 people at risk of diabetes on a diet. Lifestyle coaching and cookery classes are part of the initiative. But adults also have a duty to educate themselves, and to take a long, hard look at how their bad food habits are affecting their children’s health.

Here’s the real recipe for healthy eating: a big fat serving of education | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

If I have cancer will I die? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Ranjana Srivastava

On a Sunday afternoon, a relative calls. She is at a party and wonders if I can help a friend of a friend.

“Her brother is having cancer treatment and wanted to talk to you.”

“You know I don’t like doing this, especially if there is another oncologist involved.”

“I know,” she says contritely. “But she is so shocked and I thought just your words might help.”

Suppressing a groan, I ask: “What kind of cancer does he have?”

“It’s some form of blood cancer.”

“He needs a haematologist. I can try to suggest one.”

“Oh, that won’t do,” she says. “He lives in Germany.”

“Germany has really good healthcare! He doesn’t need my advice, especially on a disease I don’t even treat.”

“But people like us, we hear the word ‘cancer’ and freak out.”

The friend of a friend is a wreck and I can’t bear to turn down her request. So although there is very little I will say, I patiently hear her out. Her brother indeed has cancer and has met his German oncologist, commenced chemotherapy, and seems to be doing OK. He has young children and the family is anxious about prognosis. The friend asks me many times if he will die from his disease. I tell her as many times as I can that he seems to be in competent hands and that the question about prognosis should be directed towards his treating doctor.

I long to tell her that he has a highly curable disease but without knowing all the details, this wouldn’t be right. I end the call feeling somewhat like a politician, having batted away every meaningful question with a platitude but my hands feel tied.

“If I have cancer, will I die?”

As an oncologist, it’s both interesting and poignant to know that this is one of the most common answers people seek from Google. Dispensing with the obvious, “Everyone must die”, the answer I hope Google would give is: “Tell me more.” Google should ask for not just the type of cancer but the colour of your skin, the language you speak, how much you earn, what country you live in, the distance to the nearest cancer centre, and crucially, if you are married.

‘The disparities in cancer outcomes based on the socioeconomic gradient are significant and sadly familiar to every oncologist.’ Photograph: Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters

In the developed world, cancer survival rates are increasing. An Australian patient diagnosed with cancer today has a 67% chance of being alive in five years. Cancer Research UK states that cancer survival rates in the UK have doubled from 24% to 50% in the past 40 years. A recent American Cancer Society report calculates five-year survival for all cancers as having risen from 49% to 69% in the past 40 years.

If you have survived the first five years, the chance of long-term survival is increasingly optimistic, more than 90% for all cancers combined. These improved outcomes are attributed to early diagnosis and better treatments. Modern chemotherapy and radiotherapy regimens are unrecognisable compared to earlier decades. The march of immunotherapy continues, with new drugs able to delay cancer progression and extend survival in traditionally bleak scenarios including melanoma and lung and bladder cancer.

We now know that cancer is actually many different diseases, cancer cells are extraordinarily smart at outwitting the body’s defences, and a reasonable goal ought to be keeping cancer patients better for longer rather than expecting to banish cancer altogether. Amid the high survival rates for common cancers such as bowel, breast and prostate, detected early, the outcomes for brain, pancreas and stomach cancers remain dismal, with most patients expected to live for only a few years.

But apart from tumour biology, what else affects survival? Being male, an ethnic minority and being non-English speaking confers poorer outcomes as does social disadvantage, illiteracy, poverty and living far away from the full suite of services that modern treatment demands. The disparities in cancer outcomes based on the socioeconomic gradient are significant and sadly familiar to every oncologist, who nonetheless spend most of their time prescribing drugs because this is what they feel best equipped for.

Interestingly, marriage (but not living with a friend or a child) conveys a consistent and substantial impact on cancer detection, outcome and survival. Married people seek earlier attention for concerning symptoms, are more compliant with treatment, and die with greater psychological support. Married men benefit somewhat more than women but in the case of five common cancers, the overall impact is greater than published results of chemotherapy, leading the Journal of Clinical Oncology to state baldly: “Marriage is as protective as chemotherapy.”

It’s fair to say that if you are a cancer patient lucky enough to live in the rich world, you can be increasingly optimistic about your chances all along the continuum of cancer care, from diagnosis to terminal care. But what if a person living in a poorer country asks the same question? Unfortunately, the answer is more likely to be a straightforward: “Yes, you will die.”

Have scientists found the cure for cancer?

There are 14m new diagnoses and 8m cancer deaths each year. A staggering 70% of deaths happen in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. Poverty, poor governance, inadequate infrastructure and scarce specialists all play a role. Many countries have pockets of excellence but there is no comprehensive and easily accessible programme of cancer education, screening, treatment and palliative care.

Globally 20% of cancers are related to tobacco, use of which remains common, cheap and unregulated. Another 20% are attributed to vaccine-preventable infections such as Hepatitis B and C and the human papillomavirus. Patients suffer from the twin curse of living in cancer-promoting environments and lack of access to help when they need it.

But even if one took the sanguine view that everyone must die of something, it is the abject state of palliative care that should jolt us from complacency. While we may be occupied by opioid abuse, access to morphine remains a pipedream for most people around the world. Fully 90% of the world’s morphine is used by patients in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of cancer presentations in developing countries are with advanced disease, where effective palliative care is not only the most practical but also the most compassionate intervention. But oncologists there have stories, such as the dying patient with a bleeding, infected and painful cancer who has travelled hundreds of kilometres in search of pain relief only to be sent home with paracetamol or ibuprofen, or nothing at all. Morphine is arguably the cheapest and most effective drug for palliation and is on the World Health Organisation’s list of essential medications but due to health illiteracy, stigma, misguided fears and misinformed government policy, dying with dignity is no more than an aspiration for most patients around the world.

As an oncologist, I am regularly humbled by patients’ disclosure that they lost track of everything else I said after the word “cancer”. Treatable or not, the very encounter permanently alters the lives of those who suffer and those who must watch on. No one, no matter where in the world, is “lucky” to develop cancer, but the next time you turn to Google and ask “If I have cancer, will I die?”, it may help to know what a loaded question it really is.

If I have cancer will I die? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Ranjana Srivastava

Is Diet Soda Bad for You? Here’s What Happen to Your Body When You Drink It

Diet sodas are carbonated beverages. Diet Coke was the second best selling soft drink in the US last year but sales have actually dropped since more people have become aware of it’s apparent health risks. Instead of sugar, they are sweetened with artificial sweeteners like aspartame, cyclamate, saccharin and sucralose. A diet soda beverage is probably one drink every dieter feels good about drinking. Studies conducted around the country, at places like Harvard and Stanford, have linked diet soda to a host of health problems, including high cholesterol, kidney failure and, yes, weight gain.

What Happens When You Drinking Too Much Diet Soda

Cause Headaches

The synthetic sweetener aspartame that is present in many diet drinks has been found to cause headaches. Many diet drink lovers notice that the number of headaches they are forced to suffer through is in direct correlation to the number of diet drinks they consume.

Allergic Reactions

Chemicals in diet soda have been linked to allergic reactions and to exacerbating allergies in people already prone to them. You may break out in hives, become at higher risk for developing asthma or even feel a slight irritation around your eyes if you drink diet.

Heart Attack

A study over for two decades found that those who had about a can of soda a day had a 20% higher risk of having a heart attack or dying from a heart attack than those who rarely consumed sugary drinks.

Type 2 Diabetes

Many studies link soda consumption with type 2 diabetes, as this disease affecting about 300 million people worldwide. Drinking too much soda drink will decrease the insulin level hence insulin resistance.

Risk of Obesity

Drinking diet sodas are low in calories and part of many a dieter’s reduced calorie plans. Yet, studies have shown drinking just two diet sodas a day can increase the waistline by 500%. Why? Because diet sodas contain article sweeteners which disrupt the body’s natural ability to regulate caloric intake based on the sweetness of foods.

Depression

Drinking more than four cans a day of soda is linked to a 30 percent higher risk of depression. On the flip side, drinking four cups of coffee a day seemed to offer protective effects, lowering depression risk 10 percent. The risk appeared to be greater for people who drank diet soda compared to regular soda.

Kidney Damage

Harvard researchers found long-term diet soda drinking causes a 30 percent greater reduction in kidney function. The study looked at people who regularly consumed diet soda over 20 years.

Anxiety Symptoms

Stress and anxiety are conditions that a large percentage of Americans face. The symptoms of stress and anxiety are worsened when one consumes caffeine, which is present in many diet sodas. Caffeine is a stimulant with addictive properties, and it has been shown to activate stress hormones in the body to trigger stress and anxiety.

Causing Metabolic Syndrome

According to a 2008 study at the University of Minnesota, having just one diet soda a day can cause havoc with one’s metabolism by causing metabolic syndrome. This increases cholesterol and can put one at risk for heart disease.

Homemade Healthy Soda Recipes

Ingredients:

Combine ½ cup hibiscus flowers
¾ cup coconut crystals
¼ cup ginger root
juice from ½ fresh lemon
pinch of salt

Directions:

Put one cup filtered water in small saucepan.
Bring to a boil, stir until all sugar is dissolved, strain into a glass jar, discard the flowers and root, and then mix 3 tablespoons of the resulting syrup with 8 ounces of carbonated water.
Store in the refrigerator and enjoy!

Sources:

1) https://authoritynutrition.com/why-is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/

2) https://draxe.com/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/

3) http://www.body-in-balance.org/blog/nutrition/turmeric-ginger-ale-soda/

4) http://www.haveyourfit.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/fit-society-page-winter-2007.pdf

5) http://www.wisebread.com/22-reasons-to-stop-drinking-soda

More Read:

Is Diet Soda Bad for You? Here’s What Happen to Your Body When You Drink It

Should I exercise if my muscles are sore? You asked Google - here’s the answer | Max Bridger

Muscle soreness is something many people experience for a couple of days after exercising. When the activity has been particularly intense or you’ve been unusually inactive beforehand, it can even last as long as five days. This ache is often referred to as Doms (delayed onset muscle soreness), and this annoying pain can cause people to avoid training and exercise until it has completely subsided, for fear of injury or intensifying the soreness. Luckily – or maybe unluckily – you needn’t wrap yourself in cotton wool or avoid all activity until you feel 100% again.

Before we go further into the creaky, sweary and achy world of aerobic- and weight training-induced Doms, it is important to note that you should be careful with very severe and localised bouts of muscle pain following exercise. Pain emanating from a focused area of the muscle can be a symptom of a muscle tear, which could have been missed if you are very competitive, determined, have a high pain threshold, or were simply aching equally everywhere and nearing the end of some particularly gruelling activity. If the localised pain is accompanied by bruising or swelling or you’re worried, it would be wise to stop and seek medical advice.

‘Muscle ache will be more severe towards the beginning of a new exercise regime; such as a weights workout plan.’ Photograph: Alamy

Sometimes the post-exercise pain encompasses the entire muscle group – as you may have experienced after weights or a challenging class – in which case you should ensure you warm up fully before your next bout of training. The pain may impede your ability to assume correct posture, suitable technique and safe practices, which will increase your risk of injury. So it’s important to take the correct precautions, such as warming up, stretching, cooling down, and extra rest periods.

Most commonly, muscle ache will be more severe towards the beginning of a new exercise regime; such as a weights workout plan or resistance class in the gym, or even the start of a new rugby or football season. This is because your body is not conditioned to the intensity or duration of the activity, and most likely you won’t use a full and proper cool-down period. When time to exercise is scarce, this is the bit we all have a tendency to skip. To reduce the inevitable Doms, increased frequency of training, and even a reduced volume of repetitions in regards to weights specifically, will help. Your fitness and conditioning will improve as you become used to the activity and increase your fitness. Reducing the volume of reps (repetitions) per muscle group, but hitting the muscle two to three times per week across more sessions, will allow for better recovery, less ache and more efficient progress towards your goals.

Muscle soreness can be caused by small micro-tears in the muscles, and/or the build-up of byproducts of intense activity such as lactic acid and calcium, which can be reduced with a proper cool-down period. These tiny tears to the muscle cells are nothing to be worried about; they are what cause your muscles to grow and repair (in combination with good nutrition and sufficient rest), making the muscles stronger and bigger over time. In the majority of cases, muscle soreness should not be a cause for concern and shouldn’t stop you training, rather it simply serves as a reminder that you need to:

• cool down and stretch after intense periods of cardiovascular activity;

• ensure your nutrition (including hydration) is up to scratch;

• increase your fitness, which is likely to improve as the season or regime you’ve started progresses;

• consider training more muscle groups per session, and multiple times per week, rather than a one-muscle group such as a biceps or a chest day – where too much volume is used, resulting in debilitating muscle soreness, and no extra progress for the pain.

Muscle soreness should lessen as you become used to the volume, intensity and duration of exercise, so you should only have to train while aching for the first couple of weeks of a fitness programme. Simply ensure you leave around 48 hours between training the same body part twice with weights to allow the muscles to fully recover before you hit your next session.

‘Cool down and stretch after intense periods of cardiovascular activity.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Equally, in the same way that you shouldn’t stop training because you still have Doms, you shouldn’t label a workout as ineffective because you don’t experience severe muscle aches afterwards. This pain differs in intensity from person to person, and will lessen over time as you get used to the exercise. It does not have a correlation to muscle growth or improved fitness.

The best advice when weighing up whether or not to train with sore muscles is to listen to your body and distinguish between muscle ache, general fatigue (physical and mental) and an actual injury. If there is swelling and bruising around the site of pain or you’re worried, there may be some damage, so cease any activity that aggravates the area and seek medical advice. If your workout is extremely laboured even with a warm-up then consider training another part of your body or performing a non-weight bearing form of exercise instead – swimming, cycling or rowing.

Should I exercise if my muscles are sore? You asked Google - here’s the answer | Max Bridger

Think You’re Going to Relapse? Here’s What to Do

Did you know that 50-90% of people who receive some form of treatment, according to drug and alcohol rehab statistics, go on to relapse?

Sounds discouraging? I agree.

Relapse after all is a stage far too many people in recovery slip through – the high statistics are not surprising at all. But you don’t have to become another statistic. In fact, there are proven, reliable, and straight forward strategies you can use to ensure you don’t fall off the wagon.

Although it’s true that you have a lot of work cut out in front of you, this doesn’t mean that you can’t successfully beat out the relapse statistics.

If you’re worried you might fall victim to relapse, you just have to do a few key things to set yourself on the road to successful recovery.

Start with an inpatient treatment at an inpatient rehab facility

First things first, if you think you might end up relapsing – it’s time you checked yourself into an inpatient treatment at an inpatient rehab facility. Inpatient treatment is without a doubt the best option for those struggling with relapse – it has successfully kept people from relapsing so there’s no reason why it can’t do the same for you.

With that said, however, maybe inpatient rehab won’t work for you – it’s not for everyone.

Although it may not “cure” your addiction, it’s still something you need because what it will do is set you back on the straight and narrow. In other words, it’ll create the right foundation for you by showing you the tools you need to successfully beat your addiction – you’ll need these tools for the rest of your journey.

Address your issues with complacency

What if I told you that your thoughts of relapse are directly correlated to your issues with complacency? Would you believe it or brush it off?

Your reaction to the question above will provide you with a clear indicator of where you stand on the path to recovery. This is the case because if you’re battling with relapse – you’re suffering from issues with complacency. In other words, you’re not taking the pursuit of personal growth seriously.

Those who aren’t actively engaging in the process of personal growth are suffering from complacency issues, meaning they’re more likely to relapse. If you’re not taking positive action to better yourself each and every day, you are by default slipping closer to relapse – there’s no middle territory for you to call home. Either you’re moving towards personal growth or you’re slipping towards relapse.

Pick complacency or pick personal growth – make a decision

There’s only two roads before you – one is full of personal growth and the other road is characterized with complacency and will end with relapse. You can only take one road.

Which one are you going to pick?

You must make the decision now and commit to it.

If you cannot look yourself in the eye and state with conviction that you’re going to follow the road of personal growth – you must actively work to address your complacency issues.

How to overcome complacency and the possibility for relapse

There’s one tried and trued method to overcoming complacency and the possibility for relapse – it involves you taking advice from everyone around you, from your sponsor to your therapist to your counselor to your mentor. You must seek out these individuals and ask them what part(s) of your life you should be aiming to improve.

In other words, the road to overcoming complacency lies in your ability to embrace humility and ask those around you for help. More importantly, once you’ve asked for help – you must follow through and act on the advice you receive.

Avoid becoming just another complacent addict who floats through the realms of sobriety – you’re not going to magically heal yourself nor is overcoming addiction going to be a passive experience for you.

You must actively seek help, form new habits, and take action if you are to beat complacency and overcome the possibility for relapse. It’s going to take hard work and humility. Lots of it.

If you can’t find the courage within to seek advice from those around you, it’s likely that you’re headed towards relapse. The only thing you need to do to stay sober is to show humility by asking for advice and then actually follow it. That’s all it takes to overcoming the possibility for relapse.

The trick, however, isn’t in knowing this information – the trick is in acting on this information. You have to put this tip into action if you are to successfully get clean and stay clean.

Resisting the temptations once and for all

Once you’ve began seeking and implementing the advice of others, you’ll notice that the path of recovery gets easier to bear than ever before. You’ll notice yourself changing for the better and for the first time you notice yourself liking the person you see in the mirror.

As good as this stage feels, it doesn’t mean that your job is done. For beating complacency and the possibly for relapse is an everyday battle.

Each day you will be faced with temptations from all different facets of life. These temptations will aim to suck you back into your addiction and you must actively and consciously resist the temptation to do so. With every temptation you resist, you grow that much stronger and the easier the process becomes.

To help you resist temptation, you should continue seeking advice and help in the form of support groups such as AA and NA meetings.

In addition to these support groups, you should also make it a conscious habit to eliminate the various triggers and temptations around you. Make smarter decisions and you’ll notice majority of the temptations escaping your world.

Although you can eliminate majority of the triggers for relapse with smarter decisions – you won’t be able to eliminate the triggers and temptations altogether. No matter what you do or where you go, some form of temptation will always be around you. Therefore, you need to learn how to face the triggers and temptations head on if you are to resist the threat of relapse.

How do you do that?

You do that by embracing personal growth and making it a central component of your life.

Look at all the different areas of your life, from professional to health to financial to emotional and figure out how you can go about improving these areas. Pick one to start – you can get help identifying the one area you need to be improving by seeking the advice of your sponsor, therapist, or mentor.

Ask these individuals what area of your life requires the greatest need for improvement. Then, do what they say and follow their suggestions. By constantly strengthening and improving the foundation of your life, you’ll notice yourself becoming better and better with each passing day.

The better you become, the less likely you are to slip back into your old ways.

In other words, once you trade complacency for personal growth, you will have successfully shifted the odds of staying clean in your favor and will have successfully avoided the allure of relapse.

Think You’re Going to Relapse? Here’s What to Do

Worried about a child’s mental health? Here’s what you should do | Katie Argent

News that a quarter of a million children are receiving help from NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) won’t be surprising to most teachers, social workers, nursery workers and health visitors. They know that in every school year or geographical area there is a small but significant number of people with emotional difficulties that are entrenched and severe.

These are the children for whom general interventions, such as school mentoring, social skills groups and community support do not help or do not help enough. These are the children parents, carers, professionals and communities are most worried about. But it’s not always easy to tell if there is a problem; and if there is, what can parents, carers and professionals do about it?

All children and young people experience powerful anxiety, confusion, distress and rage. Living in a family, making relationships with peers and making mental connections in order to learn are emotional matters. Experiences of disappointment and frustration, at ordinary levels, are as important as achievement and satisfaction.

Play is one way children explore, and try to make sense of and communicate their emotional life. Talking is another. And children usually show how they are feeling through their behaviour.

It’s puzzling or alarming if a child or young person is behaving oddly, if they seem unusually upset, withdrawn, aggressive, controlling or uninhibited in a way that’s hard to understand. Adults can also find themselves repeatedly responding oddly to a child’s behaviour – becoming irritated in an uncharacteristic way, for example – which can indicate that something is up.

With toddlers, children and young people, trying to talk about things at the child’s level can help. Even with babies, parents often notice that they are wondering out loud what the matter is.

Of course the child may not know why they are upset or cross, and may not want to talk about things. It can be nerve-racking for parents to see that something is wrong and that the usual attention, comfort or strategies are not working. And it can be hard to wait and be ready to talk if things shift. Parents talking to each other, with teachers or other professionals, and putting their own observations and thoughts together can help to build a fuller picture.

If parents and teachers can notice there’s a problem and hold their nerve, they often observe that a child’s temporary behaviours – such as sleeping, toileting or eating difficulties, problems with concentrating at school or with friendships, or low or overexcited mood – can be understood as being connected to where they are developmentally, to events at home or at school or changing circumstances in the family. Seeing the behaviour in context can reduce alarm for the adults, which can help with talking about things.

While recognising that a child may have particular difficulties, it’s always important to bear in mind different aspects of their emotional situation. A child may be showing something about their personal emotional situation or about the emotional situation of the whole family. A child always has a home context and culture, a wider social, cultural and economic environment, their own developmental history, and their own individual way of experiencing and interpreting the world.

Helping children with complex emotional difficulties starts with noticing that something’s the matter

When trauma, including traumatic or repeated loss, dislocation, abuse or neglect is part of the child’s experience, they are more likely to find day-to-day relationships hard to manage.

Some children, families and young people have complex difficulties that persist. Talking at home or at school does not seem to help. Things don’t get better when the pressure is off. For these children, a referral to Camhs, usually through a GP, school or social worker, is the sensible next step. A multidisciplinary specialist team can consider the many factors contributing to a child’s persisting difficulties in partnership with the child, the family and the professional network.

Helping children with complex emotional difficulties starts with noticing that something’s the matter. It’s hard to pay attention to what’s happening in a child’s emotional life because it can put parents and professionals in contact with painful states that they don’t understand, feel they can’t help with, or may feel responsible for.

It’s hard to seek help. The figures published this week suggest that more children who need specialist services are getting noticed.

• To download free leaflets on family life from the early to the teenage years written by child and adolescent psychotherapists, please visit Understanding Childhood

Worried about a child’s mental health? Here’s what you should do | Katie Argent

What is PTSD? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Richard J McNally

The NHS reported last week that 12.6% of women in England aged 16 to 24 screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a national study, compared with just 3.6% of their male peers. These findings were especially alarming as only 4.2% of women in this age bracket were identified as having PTSD in 2007. Although the assessments carried out in the two surveys differed somewhat, the new data seemingly implies a rising epidemic of PTSD among young women in England today.

The principal cause of PTSD is exposure to an extremely stressful, often life-threatening, event. Stressors that are unpredictable, uncontrollable and especially terrifying are those most likely to produce the disorder. Interpersonal violence, such as combat, rape, torture and domestic abuse, usually triggers PTSD more often than accidents, natural disasters, and events not involving deliberate intent to harm.

PTSD is a disorder of vivid memory. Sufferers do not merely remember their trauma; they re-experience it emotionally in the form of involuntary, distressing thoughts; nightmares about the trauma; and sudden sensory “flashbacks” of sights, sounds and odours that produce the illusion that it is happening once again.

‘A psychological debriefing group consisting of firefighters or employees of a recently robbed bank was typical, although it was also used for individual survivors.’ Firefighters in Scotland. Photograph: Alamy

Yet the mind does not operate like a video recorder, infallibly encoding our experiences, traumatic or otherwise. And recollection is not like a replay of one’s experience. Rather, autobiographical recall entails reassembly of encoded elements of the event distributed throughout the brain.

Terror during trauma focuses one’s attention, strengthening memory for the most salient features of the experience, and occasionally at the expense of less salient ones as the phenomenon of “weapon focus” illustrates. Victims of armed robbery often encode and thus can recall details about the weapon, but sometimes fail to encode information such as the clothing worn by the assailant. Likewise, traumatised refugees seeking asylum who provide vivid accounts of an assault sometimes misremember the precise date that it took place. The upshot is that intense emotion at the time of an experience tends to produce robust memories of it. Hence, PTSD sufferers remember their trauma all too well.

Understandably, people with PTSD tend to steer clear of reminders of their trauma as best as they can. Activities, places, people and thoughts associated with the experience are avoided as much as possible lest intrusive memories become triggered. Sufferers are hypervigilant for potential threats, startle easily and are often irritable. Their sleep is disturbed, and their ability to concentrate in everyday life becomes difficult. They often lose interest in previously enjoyed activities, become disconnected from other people, and feel as if their capacity to experience positive emotions has disappeared. Finally, they can develop problematic beliefs, such as losing the capacity to trust other people and believing the world is an unpredictably dangerous place.

Acute symptoms of PTSD are common in the days following a trauma. But these must persist for at least one month before PTSD becomes diagnosable. Short-term stress reactions can be normal responses to an abnormal stressor, but the persistence of symptoms long after the stressor has passed is the hallmark of PTSD. For example, the clinical psychologist Barbara Rothbaum and her associates assessed 95 survivors of rape or attempted rape. They found that 94% of them met symptomatic criteria for PTSD within the first two weeks following the assault. The rate dropped to 65% and then to 47% approximately one and three months, post-assault, respectively. About half recovered naturally, whereas the others failed to remit.

Although exposure to one or more traumatic events is by definition essential for PTSD to develop, most people exposed to such events never develop the disorder. One representative survey of American adults conducted by the epidemiologists Naomi Breslau and Ronald Kessler found that 89.6% of the general population had experienced at least one traumatic stressor such as a serious accident, natural disaster, rape or the unexpected death of a loved one, yet only 9.2% developed PTSD. Such findings indicate that trauma is common, but PTSD is relatively rare, hence implying that risk and resilience variables influence the psychological impact of traumatic events.

Yet for years the study of risk factors for PTSD was de facto taboo for many working in the field of traumatic stress studies. After the diagnosis first appeared in 1980 in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-III, some warned that research on risk factors amounts to blaming victims for their plight. But identifying statistical predictors of PTSD among trauma survivors no more blames victims than identifying predictors of other psychological or medical conditions. Indeed, progress continues as researchers pinpoint risk and resilience variables. For example, having a personal or family history of anxiety or mood disorders increases risk of PTSD, whereas above-average cognitive ability and good social support decreases it.

The evidence suggests many trauma survivors may prefer to rely on family, friends and clergy rather than counsellors

The recent NHS study underscores the urgency of taking steps to prevent PTSD, and to treat it effectively when it does develop. Primary prevention entails decreasing the frequency of events likely to trigger the disorder. Secondary prevention targets people who have recently experienced trauma.

A once-popular approach called “psychological debriefing” involved trained counsellors conducting a single session with trauma-exposed individuals shortly after their horrific experience. For example, a group consisting of firefighters or employees of a recently robbed bank was typical, although it was also used for individual survivors. The purpose was to prevent the emergence of chronic, post-traumatic reactions by having survivors describe aloud their thoughts and feelings during the trauma, reliving it while processing their emotions in the session.

Although debriefed individuals expressed gratitude for the efforts of their counsellors, dissemination of the method was premature. Indeed, most randomised controlled trials (RCTs) indicated that debriefed and non-debriefed trauma survivors did not differ in terms of symptoms at follow-up, whereas in other RCTs debriefing actually impeded natural recovery from trauma; non-debriefed survivors were doing better psychologically at follow-up than the debriefed ones.

Veterans work in the gardens and greenhouses at the charity Gardening Leave in Ayrshire, Scotland. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Taken together, this evidence suggests that many trauma survivors may prefer to rely on family, friends and clergy rather than professional counsellors. Having professional counsellors available is important, but compelling survivors to undergo psychological debriefing is not.

The story of the rise and fall of psychological debriefing makes an essential point. We must not rely on clinical intuition alone when treating survivors of trauma. They deserve better. Furthermore, the methods we devise must undergo rigorous evaluation in RCTs. This is precisely what leading clinical researchers have been doing. There are effective cognitive-behavioural therapies developed and tested by clinicians, such as Edna Foa and Patricia Resick in the US, Metin Başoğlu and Anke Ehlers in the UK, and Richard Bryant in Australia, among others.

An important element of these evidence-based therapies is the gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes. Although most PTSD patients benefit from these treatments, others terminate treatment prematurely or fail to recover. We need to continue to explore and evaluate new interventions to help those who continue to suffer.

What is PTSD? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Richard J McNally