2011 Streak 41/365: Walk 3.5 miles, Time - 1hr 10min, Weather - Steady rain
Soon I will write a post about graffiti as recently there has been a proliferation of mindless, ugly tagging as if it was suddenly the 1990s. I know not why.
But that is for another time. Today I will only mention it as the subject of today's photo - where I quite like the colour and texture. The graffiti is actually flat on a rail in the local skate park and because it is wet there is a mistiness as well as little craters caused by raindrops.
Today's steady downpour is a complete contrast to two days ago, when I felt happy and content in the sun. Oh well we can't get too used to blue skies and bright light; in our hearts we know February is not like that.
The thing I didn't write about in my blog two days ago, which I should have done, was the reason I had to go to London, which has a relevance to the public health aspect of this blog.
I am part of a an ongoing study (Whitehall II), of 10,308 people who were civil servants in 1985, to investigate the effect on health of class and the work environment. Every few years I have had check-ups, which have looked at things like diet, general health, mental health, fitness, as well as the normal things like heart, weight, blood pressure. On Tuesday I went to UCL to be questioned principally about my frame of mind but I also took a facial-expression recognition test, which showed that I am much more adept at recognising when people are angry or disgusted rather than when they are happy (I think I saw a lot of happy expressions as neutral).
One of the byproducts of this study is I find out some odd things about myself. But there are things they know about me which I don't. The most significant is that they have tested me for an enzyme which might be linked to alzheimer's. Ethically (and quite rightly) they will not tell me if I have that enzyme. However with such a large cohort, which is probably being followed until we die, it will provide good evidence about the strength of the link.
One of the reasons I am very happy to be part of this study because it is providing important information about factors that influence health, which I hope can influence policy.
Sometimes it seems that it merely confirms what was already intuited but it is crucial to have a survey with numbers to give conclusions statistical heft. One of the the things it has established is the clear link between social status and health. It is not just that the poor die earlier than the rich it is the fact that there is a smooth correlation all along the range.
Because they have so much lifestyle information they can highlight major issues like smoking and drinking patterns and associate them with class and see what effect they have. For example higher status members of the study tend to drink more regularly but stick to one or two drinks and don't save the drinking for the weekend and get bladdered. it is thus supporting the hypothesis that alcohol can have a preventative effect in some circumstances.
The study is probably most famous for dispelling one of the great myths about stress - that it primarily effects higher level staff, who have more responsibilities and more weight upon their shoulders. In fact it is the reverse: the people who suffer the most stress are those lower down the hierarchy who have little autonomy over how they do their work and are therefore susceptible to unreasonable demands. It is not the amount of work you do that causes stress but the control you have over it.
In fact the whole study should be used in management schools to show how good practice (like: giving people respect, making sure they feel effort is recognised, making sure they know what is expected, having clear communications and a supportive environment, and providing a secure environment) has a positive effect on the mental and physical health of the workforce.
People ought to be paying attention to these findings but the world seems to be moving in the opposite direction. There is increasing instability in the workplace as everything is constantly being reinvented, downsized, or outsourced, whilst IT is increasingly used to monitor the performance of staff to make sure they stick to the predefined script (think call centres) - precisely the environment to increase stress and illness (which actually has a knock on in demands upon the NHS).
From the point of view of this blog the I suppose the main interest should be in the conclusions about exercise and health but I don't think it has contributed anything new. It has reinforced the message that exercise is beneficial but I don't think it has, as yet, drilled down in as much detail as it has done for other factors.
For protecting heart and circulation problems, though, it seems that vigorous activity has a much greater benefit than moderate level activity, though higher level moderate activity like walking or gardening were associated with a reduced risk of metabolic syndrome.
Bottom line - we have to get the heart rate up. On its own it won't necessarily solve everything and compensate for other risk factors but it surely helps
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