In our first ever live Twitter interview – or Twinterview – we invited people to tweet us with questions on skin cancer – and we were kept busy with a wide range of great queries.
Our health expert Yinka Ebo was on hand to answer people’s queries:
The UK has a growing weight problem
Hardly a week goes by without obesity hitting the headlines. Earlier this month for example, TV chef Jamie Oliver joined a coalition of health experts in calling for global action to tackle the obesity epidemic.
Also in the past couple of weeks, McDonalds announced it’d be calorie-labelling all its products in line with the government’s Responsibility Deal, and the Lancet medical journal published research looking at WeightWatchers’ effectiveness.
You could be forgiven for being fed up of hearing about the weight problem. Does it really matter if the UK’s population is getting bigger?
Unfortunately, when it comes to health, and the personal and societal cost of the diseases linked with being overweight and obesity – including cancer – the answer is definitively yes.
Can alcohol mouthwash increase cancer risk?
The latest cancer scare story to hit the headlines this week was about mouthwash. An Australian researcher claimed to have found ‘sufficient evidence’ of a link between alcohol in mouthwashes and mouth cancer.
He even went on to suggest that ‘it is inadvisable for oral healthcare professionals to recommend the long-term use of alcohol-containing mouthwashes’.
Now, most people reading the story may feel the need to run home and clear their bathroom shelves. But hold on, don’t pour your bottle of mouthwash down the sink just yet. Let’s take a look at what the evidence says.
