It"s good to hear cycling to work reduces your risk of dying. But that"s not why I do it | Laura Laker

It may not be a surprise to see another study suggesting that cycling to work can drastically reduce your chances of getting cancer and heart disease – those who ride bikes for transport already know how good it makes them feel. However, it’s perhaps yet another motivation for those who don’t, to dust off their bikes – and remember some other reasons cycling to work is so great.

In a five-year study of 263,450 UK commuters, published in the BMJ, researchers at Glasgow University found regular cycling cut the risk of death from any cause by 41%, and the incidence of cancer and heart disease by 45% and 46% respectively.

The cyclists in the study were riding an average of 30 miles per week; that’s three miles each way, five days per week. Cycling at a leisurely 10mph, that would take about 20 minutes each way – a manageable distance for most people.

At present only 3% of the UK population commute by bike, while 36% use a car. If we increased cycling in this country to German levels by 2025, we would save £1.8bn in health benefits and £284m thanks to less congestion.

Ask anyone who cycles to work why they do it, and they’ll have a story to tell, whether it’s about how good it makes them feel, how they saved money, lost weight, or won a battle with depression. Most people will tell you how enjoyable it is.

My commuting story began at university. I remember being astonished one morning when I realised my friend Szilvia had cycled from Finsbury Park in the rain. Getting on a bike and riding five miles in such conditions sounded miserable, but she looked happy and bright, and told me how great it was.

We lived fairly close to one another and she offered to ride with me one day. As I pedalled frantically to keep up with her through Regent’s Park, and Camden, it was like I’d grown wings. Before long, like her, nothing short of a gale force wind with pigeon-sized hailstones was going to stop me from experiencing this feeling every day.

For the first time in my life I started getting fit. I arrived at university feeling awake, alert, and generally in a good mood. I continued to cycle to various temp jobs around London after graduation, carrying my work clothes in a pannier and getting changed in the loos.

On crisp, sunny mornings, I’d cycle through the city feeling like it had rolled out the red carpet just for me. I’d levelled up on urban living: I’d whizz past the stationary traffic and queues for buses and try not to look too smug.

I’d chat to others at the traffic lights. Often I’d get to places quicker than public transport could carry me. Often it was the best part of the day.

Fitting exercise into your daily routine is infinitely easier than trying to carve out a slice of it to go to the gym. Without even trying, you get fitter if you cycle. It is no surprise that levels of physical activity are declining as fewer people cycle or walk to work.

In the cities of cycle friendly countries, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, up to 41% of people commute by bike because it’s easy to do and it feels safe. Decades of investment in cycling infrastructure have made it that way. These countries have learned that most people prefer protected, direct routes on main roads, and low-traffic neighbourhood streets. This means people of any age can cycle, from the very young to the elderly. In the Netherlands, for example, 20% of 80-84 year olds regularly cycle.

Imagine if the UK was like the Netherlands, where 20% of 80-84 year olds regularly cycle. Photograph: Rory Buckland L/Alamy Stock Photo

In the UK, meanwhile, we’ve had decades of car-centric planning, and minuscule levels of funding for cycling. Even though cycling is statistically safe, it doesn’t always feel it, and this fear of sharing road space with motor traffic is the key reason people don’t cycle or stop after trying it.

The government knows that every £1 spent on cycling brings £5.50 of benefits, but at present it spends just 72p per person per year on cycling, compared with £86 per person per year for roads. There is huge potential for more journeys to be cycled if that were to change.

Increased levels of cycling can bring benefits for everyone, whether they cycle or not. Bicycles take up far less road space than cars and emit no toxic fumes. They’re good for our high streets: on New York streets where cycle lanes were introduced average trade rose by a quarter. What’s more, bicycles are great social levellers – according to research, mass cycling could increase mobility of the nation’s poorest families by 25%.

If a magic pill were invented that could generate all of these benefits, we would be falling over ourselves to buy it. As it is, no magic is required, just steady, long-term planning and investment, and a commitment to the humble bicycle, so that more of us can enjoy the simple, life-giving joy of cycling from A to B.

It"s good to hear cycling to work reduces your risk of dying. But that"s not why I do it | Laura Laker

A moment that changed me: I was diagnosed with autism at 45 | Laura James

On a hot late-July day two years ago I made my way out of the consulting rooms of the Anchor Psychiatry Group and paused on the pavement wondering what on earth to do next. I was 45 and had just been diagnosed with autism.

I went to the appointment alone. It hadn’t occurred to me to take my husband or a friend with me. I stood motionless, while others ambled past in groups, off to the pub for a Friday night drink. That moment seemed to encapsulate my whole life.

The diagnosis was both a shock and not a shock. Ever since I could remember I had been longing to find out why I behaved the way I did and why I was so unlike my peers. I find it difficult to recognise and name my emotions, but those I experienced that day seemed different to any I had felt before. Good feelings to me are pink. Bad ones are green. These were made up of all the colours of the rainbow. Not mixing together to make a sludge-brown, but rather like the flashes of colour you see when the washing machine spins a mixed load.

A few months before, I had been diagnosed with a genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. It’s a connective tissue disorder that causes digestive issues, easy bruising, limbs to dislocate easily and many other unpleasant symptoms. It seems many of those with EDS are also autistic. My autism diagnosis was the final piece of the puzzle for me. Having waited more than 40 years, in the space of a few short months I learned why both my body and my mind operate differently to those of most others.

With the sun warming my back, I walked slowly to my car, stopping every few moments to process the news. I thought of how in The Sixth Sense Bruce Willis’s character, Dr Malcolm Crowe, replays scenes from the past and it becomes clear to him that he is in fact dead. In my mind, I played episodes from my childhood, my teens and my later life as a mother of four, aware for the first time how my autism explained so much.

They flashed into my consciousness as individual moments. Standing away from the group of girls giggling in the playground. Sitting in tears in an exam room, unable even to write my name on the paper. Walking past bars watching a group of women on a night out and wondering what it felt like. Staring at a plate of food, knowing that because the burger bun was wet from mayonnaise, I could no more eat it than I could run a marathon. Sitting in an office being so distracted by the buzzing of an overhead strip light that I didn’t notice the phone ringing on my desk. Spending an entire Saturday researching a special interest only to realise it was 7pm and I was still in my pyjamas and hadn’t eaten. With each scene came a feeling of context and understanding.

The diagnosis came as a vindication. All my life I had tried so hard to be neurotypical, but in that one moment it became utterly clear that it was never going to happen. I was never going to fit that mould. I had stepped out of the psychiatrist’s consulting room into a new reality. The colours around me seemed brighter, the noises sharper. Finally I had the answer I had been searching for all my life.

• Odd Girl Out by Laura James, £16.99, published by Bluebird

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A moment that changed me: I was diagnosed with autism at 45 | Laura James

The Mexican "germ invasion" is just the right"s latest anti-immigration myth | Laura Murphy

Late last week, prior to President Obama gave up on pressuring Congress on extensive immigration reform in favor of his acquainted executive actions, media retailers began pressing a familiar non-information item.

The regional CBS station in Dallas/Fort Really worth reported that “four or five [US Border Patrol] agents have examined positive” for illnesses such as chicken pox or tuberculosis, ostensibly contracted at their border posts. With in excess of 18,500 agents stationed along the Mexican border, the headline probably ought to have been some thing like “Border Patrol Agents Unusually Healthful Between Americans”. Matt Drudge favored, as normal, a far more pernicious threat: BORDER PATROL AGENTS Check Constructive FOR Disease CARRIED BY IMMIGRANTS.

Channel eleven in Dallas also reported that one of the young children among the 52,000 who have crossed US borders in the last handful of months has been diagnosed with H1N1 virus (also acknowledged as “swine flu”). Congressman Henry Cuellar blamed the possible issue on “some of these countries the place they don’t have fantastic health care methods.” Perhaps he was speaking about the United States: Now that H1N1 is the predominant flu strain in the US and Canada, the Centers for Illness Manage reviews that two,008 of the two,815 reported instances of the flu in the US this season have been recognized as H1N1. That indicates that if you had the flu in the US in the past 9 months, it is much more than 70% likely that you have been contaminated with the swine flu, just like the sick little one trapped in Texas.

A little informed comparison can be beneficial: a examine of mortality among US school teachers suggests that they contract autoimmune illnesses at a fee disproportionate with the common population. Also: the subway is a significant conduit for the spread of influenza, including swine flu.

Thankfully, we haven’t begun a Typhoid Mary-style campaign against each and every American who employed public transportation, taught a middle-college class and/or sneezed this 12 months. But the myth of diseased hordes of immigrants has a long background in the American imagination, and now it is inflaming anti-immigration sentiment at a time when we need to tackle the genuine humanitarian requirements of the men and women who cross our borders in search of chance.

Even though President Obama said on Monday that he is doing work to “handle the urgent humanitarian challenge on the border”, the conservative radio host Bryan Fischer suggests that the genuine “humanitarian disaster” is the risk the young children pose to US citizens’ health. (He also thinks “children are now dying at the border due to the fact of Obama”.) Dr Marc Siegel preemptively declared on Fox News that the immigrant children had been “a big overall health crisis” – despite the reality that the US Department of Wellness and Human Services vaccinates and screens every recovered kid.

The consequence of this false reporting is widespread public anxiousness that immigrant populations pose a risk to the well being and safety of US citizens. And the normal “not in my neighborhood” cries have gone up on social media, insisting that the girls and kids who have just lately migrated in huge waves need to not be allowed a protected area to dwell in the United States while their situations get sorted out.

The howls are specifically egregious if it means the latest migrants to America reside anyplace close to the apparently complete-blooded Americans who do not recall their very own immigrant heritages or their ancestors who had been wrongfully accused of contaminating the nation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Let’s place this summer’s rhetoric into viewpoint: 1918 noticed a worldwide flu pandemic in the course of which at least 20m men and women died globally and as many as 550,000 died in the US alone. At times known as Spanish influenza simply because the first circumstances have been diagnosed in Spain, tiny was identified about who carried the flu and in which it originated. But the infection knew no age, class, race or ethnic bounds – folks all above the globe succumbed to a simple but deadly flu.

Nonetheless, US reporting on the Spanish flu and other diseases that arose at that time suggested erroneously that a surge in immigration caused the enhanced infections. In Denver, the Ku Klux Klan promoted anti-Italian sentiment by suggesting that the recent immigrants from Europe were responsible for the flu. Germans have been accused of employing the flu as germ warfare. Irish immigrants have been charged with spreading cholera. Tuberculosis was dubbed the “tailor’s disease” since men and women connected it with Jewish immigrants. Italians had been blamed for polio, too, despite the fact that they had been least most likely to contract it.

The terror of immigration-born epidemics was largely imagined, of course, but it fueled extremely real anti-immigrant fears and resulted in discrimination and oppression. These when-racialized groups are now folded into “whiteness” such that their histories of immigration have largely been erased from nationwide memory. Without considerable immigration reform, I concern the stigma connected to immigrants on the Mexican border could not fade so fast.

The Mexican "germ invasion" is just the right"s latest anti-immigration myth | Laura Murphy

Adderall Speaking Points From My Cancelled Laura Ingraham Segment

Several of my colleagues have been aghast. “You’re going on Laura Ingraham?” They warned me I would be created a fool. Didn’t I know about her, shall we say, ideologically vehement interviews, one thing for which she is both revered or shunned based on the place one particular stands? I imagined “yeah, but still…” Soon after all the planned segment was to be on what some have labelled a rise in non-prescription Adderall use among college students. I know this to be genuinely critical, not truly conducive to partisan wrangling, and some thing about which I have something to say. Plus, the producer with whom I spoke was  collegial and intelligent. So I went all in, believing my ‘talking points” would be a match, must the need come up, for anyone’s ideological vehemence.

Sadly, they had been not a match for scheduling. A couple of hours prior to I was to go on the show I obtained an email from the producer canceling the segment, anything about breaking news. And then when it was rescheduled later in the week I was replaced by a person else. I was stunned by how disappointed I felt. Regardless of source, university college students and dad and mom need to have solid details to make great choices and remain safe. Plus, there is an urgent social need to have to talk about psychological-enhancement technologies. What we do with these emerging enhancement technologies will substantially establish what it signifies to be human as we go into the long term. Ms. Ingraham’s radio demonstrate, with its massive engaged audience, would have been a wonderful venue.

But I was bounced. And disappointment aside, I even now had a flawlessly good set of speaking factors. I did not want to toss into the trash. So, I decided to share them right here. I hope you locate them valuable. But please bear in mind, these are speaking factors for a radio interview, somewhat but not substantially embellished (with a couple of links additional in). Any a single of them could be fleshed out into a submit of its very own. But for now I will keep with the brevity of talking factors hoping that here they will still spark  useful conversation.

20mg extended release capsule of Adderall (Photo credit score: Wikipedia)

Talking Factors: Non-prescription Adderall use among school college students

• Adderall  prescribed as a treatment method for ADHD is fundamentally diverse than when it employed as a examine help.

• Calm any hysteria and hype. Stimulant meds are just the initial drips of what will be a tidal wave of meds and procedures for “brain hacking.”

• There is presently no “rise” in non-prescription Adderall use, regardless of what media shops like CNN have explained. They are just as common now as they had been ten many years in the past. Scientific studies range from about 10% to a high of about 40%.  A research completed in 2012 and just reported last week found about twenty% of college students at an Ivy League college reported non-prescription Adderall use. A DeSantis review with data collected 2005 -2006 at a massive, public southeastern research university found “34 % reported the illegal use of ADHD stimulants.”

• Concentrate on distinct message for distinct groups of students. Be clear that these kind a “message pyramid” with the prevention message on the bottom. Every single message applicable to all these above:

— College students who have not used non-prescription Adderall want a prevention message. “Don’t make a negative selection.”

—Students who use when they are in an academic bind require a danger management message. “Don’t allow a bad choice wreck your life.”

— College students who use on the border of extra, normally to compensate for too significantly partying or negative review habits, need an further get aid message. “You’re creating tons of undesirable selections, you need help making much better choices.”

— Students who are psychologically dependent or physically addicted want a clear get treatment method now message. “Your capability to make very good selections has been critically compromised. It’s time go for therapy. Select up the cellphone now and make an appointment at student well being.”

The “prevention message”

• Adderall is not a fad. Every person is not carrying out it. Customers of non-prescription Adderall considerably over-estimate fee of use. Also, users have a tendency to think it is not cheating although non-end users see it as cheating

• Adderall can kill you. It is harmful, just as unsafe and just as addictive as street drugs like coke and crystal meth. The truth that it is a prescription medicine just signifies that for some folks with a distinct issue you don’t have (ADHD), research has proven it to be risk-free and powerful. If you don’t have that issue it is just not protected.

Adderall Speaking Points From My Cancelled Laura Ingraham Segment