There’s amusing statistics that show that if you’re out of shape and a smoker, you get a bigger bang for the buck from getting in shape first than quitting smoking. Disclaimer: not an endorsement of smoking.
There was a ted talk that said bicycle helmet laws would kill more people than save.
The reasoning was preventing people from riding would also prevent increased fitness, and more lives were lost from that than saved from accidents.
EDIT: I think this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07o-TASvIxY
They might be more inclined to cycle because they don’t need to wear a helmet.
After years of cycling with helmet you get so used to it and it doesn’t bother you. But how many skip the bike because they never got used to wearing a helmet?
not riding a bike because a helmet is ??uncomfortable?? is ridiculous and probably self-selecting
There isn’t going to be anyone consciously thinking “I’m not gonna ride because I have to wear a helmet” but instead “eh I can’t be bothered riding” without digging too much in to why.
It was only a week but it was so refreshing. I think about this experience daily when driving because I think of how much time would be saved if people just knew absolutely when to take their turn and took it; instead of processing each decision and deciding based on their current mood. People knew the damn rules and norms.
So, I think it’s a function of having a critical mass, being necessary, and being embedded already as a norm. I don’t believe a city could make riding without a helmet legal and expect any sort of increase in safety …
1. Almost everyone cycles. So all drivers are themselves cyclists. So they treat other cyclists with consideration.
2. The road/cycle infrastructure is set up to separate cars and bikes wherever possible. And where they share routes, cars are often explicitly second class users ("auto te gast" - cars, you're guests).
3. In any collision between a car and a bike, the driver will almost always be the one found at fault.
They do use "change on approach" lights outside of the cities way more, but in cities it's usually only for trams and buses.
I've fallen many times and not once I've hit my head. They are probably useful in high speed impacts, but then you are fucked anyways.
Gloves are much more useful on a daily basis. Saved my hand many times.
I've also seen a friend have a high-speed impact: he was airlifted to hospital, survived and has mostly recovered. Looking at the state of his helmet I have no doubt that he would have died at the scene without it.
Most biking in the US is biking shared with cars. You probably won't have a bike lane. Most likely, you aren't commuting or going to the grocery store - the grocery store might take 15 minutes of driving but 30 minutes of biking - if you can even go the most direct route legally. Longer biking sessions generally means more risk. I'll take the helmet in places that I must defend myself against automobiles on an unsafe path.
Also look at those 'old' basic bikes they use there, you don't need more on those flatlands and everybody is fine with 20-25kmh. Add tech bros or generally young folks with fast ebikes and escooters going 50kmh and things change.
That's why we point to them. The infrastructure didn't exist in Holland either, until they choose to build it.
Even Amsterdam has streets which have 0 room, but generally city center is blocked/too expensive to most car traffic to even enter so they manage.
If it would be a easy problem to solve, it would be done or at least almost done at this point. And something tells me it requires certain type of population where respect to others is way above average, that's not granted.
Many Dutch cities don't either, that's why they disallow cars entirely. Really only Rotterdam has spacious roads thanks to the bombings. Ann I understanding you correctly?
> And something tells me it requires certain type of population where respect to others is way above average, that's not granted.
I'm not sure where you are the casuality here. In my experience it's the more human centred infrastructure design that encourages a higher level of social engagement and respect for others.
But regardless I would find it tragic to condem certain cultures as being inherently incapable of these things.
> If it would be a easy problem to solve, it would be done or at least almost done at this point.
It wasn't begun that long ago in the Netherlands. The vast majority of infrastructure has been built since the turn of the century. It takes a while for other places to really realise that their current models aren't working, and even longer for them to really learn the lessons of the Dutch.
But if you look at cities like London, Leipzig, Barcelona, Paris or further afield to Montreal for example then many cities are actually beginning to successfully integrate Dutch design practices.
Amsterdam’s answer to faster vehicles is to move them to the main road with other faster traffic. Although it is now moving to slow down nearly all traffic inside the city to a 30km/h limit, which will improve cyclist safety a lot.
If you have to ride alongside cars, make sure you practice defensive riding.
https://www.eta.co.uk/2011/04/01/safest-bicycle-helmet-has-b...
In the UK.
https://drianwalker.com/overtaking/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
(I guess it doesn’t work if you don’t have public healthcare)
People who don't use helmets don't do it because they are too expensive. They do it because it's not convenient to carry, because it's not cool, because it messes your hair, because you need somewhere to store it. (Not) Free helmets solve zero of these problems, it's just a bad idea.
People who don't use helmets for whatever reason would be more inclined to do so if they could just go pick one up, and didn't have to pay for them in a store. Even if those reasons are not that they are expensive. It's a great idea.
All the cities maintaining a bunch of locations full of helmets for free pickup would just create more waste. I bet people would pick them up and just discard them when it wouldn't be convenient to use them. And nobody wants to pickup and wear a discarded helmet that is dirty and was in the elements so there would be huge waste. You can have a similar effect without any waste by just having a class that teaches children to ride bycicles at school and tells them the benefits of helmets and keeps helmets there for that one class. This memory would be with you for life, and you'd make your own decision.
If helmets were cost prohibitive I'd be with you, I believe in using tax money for that kind of stuff, but price is not the reason people don't use helmets.
1. Redesign a 2-lane (each direction) highway into a 4-lane highway at the cost of several hundred million tax dollars, over the course of a few years.
2. Leave the highway smaller. Re-zone a city to allow small shops within residential neighborhoods, and up-zone all residential land to allow up to 4-story townhomes and condos. Spend tens of millions of tax dollars building a robust cycling highway, and make it safe for people to accomplish basic errands within a close proximity to their home.
For #2, spending of tax dollars is less and people are healthier. You still have roads, but people need to drive on them much less often.
So when the next city proposes an $840M highway revamp [1], consider how you could spend 10% of that funding to increase mobility around the city for residents ($84M could build a lot of safe separated bike highways). While at the same time allowing private development to make natural improvements to neighborhoods by opening new corner stores and shops along bike routes
People do understand that with government programs, "free" means taxpayer funded. As in, almost everyone understands that. The comment isn't needed. Those comments are the reason I put things like "fare free public transport" - not because it is more realistic, but because arguing with these comments is exhausting.
Society is full of things other people helped pay for - and you most definitely use them. Your health insurance company pools money together to cover everyone's ills, for example. You don't pay individually for your infrastructure use - other people help you pay so that you can get electricity. And so on. You can't have modern society without this.
its a nice idea, but i think adults should pay for their own helmets
however, children... sure. give them one.
There is a reason why life expectancy was dropping in the US years before covid hit.
When it takes 50 years, the statistic probably doesn't hold because you will be dead by then due to the negative influence of smoking on your health.
EDIT: Now that I've seen the replies, I realize that this is from a very low baseline. I'm personally going to the gym four to five days a week already and my own cardiovascular fitness has not seen much of an improvement in many months.
The typical human body is very responsive when pushed.
9 weeks. I have basic fitness but have never been close to completing a 5km run (I think I finally realised I have breathing issues - seeing an ENT soon).
The human body can make incredible cardiovascular leaps when starting from a relatively low point
My VO2 max as reported by my Apple Watch has been making steady gains, though I'm still far below average for my age.
I didn't train hard, just consistently.
If you've never lifted before and you hit the gym consistently and have the proper diet, you will get some serious "newb gains." The first year can be amazing.
But if you've lifted seriously for a decade, it's totally different. Muscle mass is very hard to add now.
Cardio gains from a coach potato introducing a serious routine will be incredible. I went from not being able to run more than 30 seconds to running a 5k in 4-5 months, and that's without pushing myself extremely hard.
The point is about how the body adapts.
The first few weeks, at the end of a 10 minute sprint, my heart would be racing and I would be out of breath for 5 minutes after arrival.
I was amazed after 2 months of doing the same thing I wasn't out of breath, it took maybe 1 minute for my heart rate to slow back down.
Most humans are just incredibly bad at impulse control.
That said, people can make pretty rapid weight loss without eating. skip eating 1 day a week and that is 30 lbs a year for an average obese man. skip 2 days/week and that is 60 lbs/year.
Instead, they are reinforcing that the path is clear, and the the barriers Are entirely psychological. Effort to build habits, effort to exert self control, effort to find solutions when you stumble.
If people are looking and waiting for a strategy that makes weight loss easier than inaction, they are bound for disappointment.
Some rare people find a passion that makes the process of getting healthy and fit more fun and easy than getting fatter, but that is exceedingly rare.
Just eat less and burn more calories.
> people can make pretty rapid weight loss without eating
I think conflating between mental health and eating is at the heart of the obesity epidemic. Nobody will die if they skip a few meals. They will suffer some moderate discomfort depending on how much they fixate on it.
I can go a week without eating and a few days is trivial. The longest a human has gone without food is 381 days and they lost 275 lbs
When we're bombarded with advertisements of highly caloric, processed, sugary foods engineered to flood our taste buds and trigger dopamine, we can't be surprised that people get addicted to it. Combine that with forms of entertainment, transportation, and a work culture that keep us sedentary, and it's no wonder many people struggle with being physically healthy.
People aren't going back to the farms, so we need to adopt new behaviors and norms around self control. There is simply no viable alternative.
There are plenty which are unrelated to self-control or personal discipline. One is a sugar tax (not a huge fan personally but it exists).
One I do like is to regulate the advertising and labeling of food. Frankly I'd like to know how many calories I'm eating or being persuaded to eat, pretty much all the time. This is a work in progress with the FDA gradually expanding the types of restaurants that are required to disclose caloric and nutrition info about their food. Frankly I'd like to see it required in advertisements too, if you're advertising a pizza, the advertisement should disclose that there are 2,000 calories in that pizza, many people actually are not aware.
Not that I ever thought they were serving health food at the Cheesecake Factory, but I recently learned that their peanut butter cheesecake is 1650 calories per slice! Almost a full day's calories in one slice of cake! Nearly everyone I've talked to about it knew it was a gut buster but no one guessed that high.
Those cheesecakes are only for special occasions now and it's because C.F. is required to disclose calories, I'd be fatter if not for this simple government intervention. Nothing to do with self control. Apologies to C.F. but with the nation's obesity rate cresting 50% I consider this a wholly reasonable imposition on their free speech rights or whatever.
There is no amount of labeling that will make a different if there isn't a human expressing agency to read the label and take action.
I think there are tons of helpful strategies, but the critical infrastructure t Needed is more self actualized agency.
This isn't an insult or dismissal, but a hope we can all become better humans.
How is eating a cake from a store "nothing to do with self control". It's not like you were buying vegetables and turns out big sugar made the vegetables be worse for you. You not knowing if the cake was 800 calories or 1.6k calories makes it no less about self control. Even to avoid eating it at 1.6k, it's still all just self control.
I mean this is common sense, the more clearly you understand the negatives of an action, the more likely you are to avoid it. And we have plenty of evidence that this works to alter people's behavior through looking at the effects of e.g. cigarette labeling.
Like up until the 1950s we actually didn't have good evidence that cigarettes were bad for you, and doctors actually got on TV and endorsed specific brands, so a lot of people weren't sure. Eventually the studies were produced and doctors started recommending against smoking and smoking started to decline. It didn't decline because people became Badass Willpower Monks, it declined because they were given access to more and better information.
I don't think it is very sustainable to have 50% of the population on a biologic medication to help self control, but hopefully it will help individuals and societies change norms.
Being fit is not just about low fat. It requires a similar discipline required to control what you eat.
Why it's dropping is still a n mystery though.
Nevertheless, the solution is still the same: eat less.
The study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10445668/
Or make life harder! Quit the elevator. Quit the automatic transmission (and car). Quit the online shopping.
Making some progress with self-checkouts and pointless lineups at airports.
Less jokingly (hard to outrun a bad diet) but more pedanticly: drinking less (alcohol and calorific beverages) might be a better start than eating less.
It seems that a largely sedentary lifestyle free from exertion matches both.
It would be insightful to see the sensitivity analysis for BMR with respect to strength, activity, muscle mass, ect.
I know there is a body of data about environmental hormones and BMR, ect, but my understanding is that the impact is barely measurable with large sample sizes. I expect that it can't hold a candle to activity. In my personal experience, my BMR can easily modulate by 1000 calories based on body composition and behavior. That is a huge impact.
"It is also possible that the long-term reduction in BMR represents methodological artefacts. In the early years, measurements of BMR were often made using mouthpieces to collect respiratory gases, and recently such devices have been shown to elevate BMR by around 6%. A second possibility is that early measurements paid less attention to controlling ambient temperature to ensure individuals were at thermoneutral temperatures."
lower testosterone = lower lean body mass (you gain tens of pounds of muscle on TRT even without exercising)
lower lean body mass = lower BMR. an average doughy 200 pound guy and a 200 pound athlete have vastly different caloric requirements.
The authors suggest that the decreased consumption of saturated fats over the last 30+ years is likely to contribute to the reduction in basal metabolic rate and gains in weight. The mouse model component of the study provides some support.
Well compared to the food industry industry that's nothing. Incidentally they learned their trade from the tobacco industry who invested heavily in the junk food industry in the 60s. [1]
All to say, much of modern food (and the advertising around it) is designed to get people hooked on junk food from a very early age. So saying just eat less is a simplistic solution that requires people to act against a conditioning that has been aggressively imprinted on them from a very early age.
[1] https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-new...
Every solution to every problem involves overcoming ones own detrimental impulses in favor of positive ones.
People are faced with the choice between eating more or living longer, and nearly everyone knows it.