Obesity is a major cause of thyroid cancer, responsible for up to 40% of cases in men and 10% in women.
Although being overweight has long been recognized as a cause of the cancer, researchers have recently been able to calculate the risk and how it differs between the sexes.
The figure is far higher than earlier research had suggested, and it highlights the importance of losing weight and eating a healthier diet, say researchers from the University of New South Wales.
They discovered that two in five thyroid cancers in men, and one in 10 cases in women, were the direct result of obesity and being overweight, although they were unable to explain the differences between men and women.
Thyroid cancer is usually two to three times more common in women, but rising obesity levels could explain why more men are developing the cancer. Around 75% of men in Australia are overweight or obese, compared to 60% of women. "Our findings add evidence to the urgent need to halt and reverse the current global trend in weight gain, especially obesity and especially in men," said lead researcher Maarit Laaksonen.
Their research also failed to understand the cause of the majority of the cancers, although ionizing radiation, iodine deficiency and genetic factors are recognized causes that could be responsible.
The researchers had reviewed seven studies that had included more than 370,000 participants whose BMI (body mass index) had been logged.
Reference:
Laaksonen MA, MacInnis RJ, Canfell K, Shaw JE, Magliano DJ, Banks E, Giles GG, Byles JE, Gill TK, Mitchell P, Hirani V, Cumming RG, Vajdic CM. Thyroid cancers potentially preventable by reducing overweight and obesity in Australia: A pooled cohort study. Int J Cancer. 2022 Apr 15;150(8):1281-1290. doi: 10.1002/ijc.33889. Epub 2021 Dec 13. PMID: 34847246.
As far as chemical reactions go, none are quite as altogether beautiful, useful, and dangerous as fire. Fires require three things to come together: a fuel source, heat, and oxygen. While you’re probably familiar with most things that can catch fire, like wood or gas, there are some everyday materials with unexpectedly fiery properties. And since a lot of them are found in our homes, knowing about them might even keep you safe! So here are 5 weirdly flammable things. To create fire, you need a lot of heat to gain enough kinetic energy for molecules from the fuel source to break their interactions and transition to the gas phase. Those molecules can then react with oxygen in the surrounding air in a process called oxidation. The oxidation process then releases even more heat, which helps free more molecules from the fuel to react with oxygen in a self-sustaining chain reaction we call fire. The heat and light released from that process make up the familiar, visible flames we see in burning objects. The minimum temperature at which all this can happen is called the flash point. And different materials have different flash points. Anything that has a flash point of 37.8°C and upwards is considered “combustible,” such as wood and paper. That’s because they take some work to light on fire since their flash point is way above room temperature. On the other hand, things with flash points closer to room temperature, like alcohols, are called “flammable.” Because they can evaporate quickly and their fumes can catch fire. So, in general, the lower the flash point, the more easily something can be set on fire.
Flour
Something that can catch fire easily, although it has a pretty high flash point, is flour like the kind used to make bread. While it seems simple and harmless, as far as cooking ingredients go, in the right circumstances, flour is pretty explosive. The main component of flour is starch, which is a carbohydrate. The molecules in a carbohydrate contain lots of energetic bonds between atoms of carbon and hydrogen. Oxidation can release the energy in those bonds, making them easy to burn. When it’s all lumped together in a pile, flour isn’t especially likely to catch fire, but when it’s dispersed in the air, like a cloud of dust, that’s a whole different story. That’s because the individual grains of flour are small, giving them a high surface area relative to their size. So when they’re suspended in the air, they have access to lots of oxygen surrounding them, making it even easier to burn. What’s more, because those grains are so small, they burn up really fast and light up nearby grains in the process, spreading the fire way quicker than it would in a single, lumpy fuel source. So if a spark or nearby flame catches part of a floury dust cloud, it can set the whole thing alight! In 2015, that exact scenario happened at a water park in Northern Taiwan. A celebration involving bursts of colored corn flour turned into a fireball that injured hundreds of people. Thankfully, most cooking recipes that include flour involve getting it wet with water, making it much less dangerous in the kitchen. But even so, it pays to be careful when throwing bags of flour around any flames, like a stove! The same goes for other powdery foods like powdered coffee creamers too. And fire risks aren’t limited to the stuff in the kitchen, either.
2. Acetone
Many nail polish removers, and other household stain removers, contain a key ingredient: acetone. Acetone is great at dissolving things like nail polish and can be easily washed away with water. That combination naturally makes it great at removing stains, but unfortunately, acetone, as you’ve probably guessed, has another property: it’s really flammable! Its flash point is at -18°C, making it easy to set alight. And like flour, its molecules have similar carbon-hydrogen bonds that release lots of energy during oxidation. Finally, acetone molecules don’t interact as strongly with each other in liquid form, so they have a tendency to evaporate from the surface. In other words, it's pretty “volatile.” That’s why nail polish remover has such a strong and distinct smell since the acetone floats easily into the air as a vapor. And as we saw for flour, when small, tiny bits of material float around, it makes them much easier to set on fire. In fact, people have gotten seriously hurt applying nail polish remover near open sources of flames like candles, since acetone vapor can set alight very quickly. So if you’re going to use nail polish remover on a quiet night in, safety officials recommend you don’t have any candles nearby.
3. Glass
In other cases, certain materials themselves might not be combustible or flammable, but can still cause a fire. Glass doesn’t burn very well at all. But it can still turn into a secret arsonist, under the right conditions. This time the culprit is the physics of glass, rather than its chemistry. When light interacts with dense but transparent material, like glass, it effectively gets slowed down. And because of that, if a ray of light approaches that material at an angle to its surface, the path of that ray is also bent away from the surface as it travels through it. Physicists describe this as Snell’s law. So, if you have a curved piece of glass, like a lens, it can focus lots of incoming rays of light to a small spot called a focal point. That’s how magnifying glasses work, using Snell’s law. The light comes from a wide field of view but narrows down to a spot where we can see it all if we align it with our eyes. Magnifying glasses can also focus a distant, bright light source like the sun to a spot where a lot of the heat and light gets concentrated to a single point. And much like a lens, curved pieces of glass-like snow globes, flower vases, mirrors, and even some windows can produce a similar kind of effect. It can also just so happen that a combustible or flammable material might happen to align with the effective focal point of that glass and be set on fire. Fires have been caused by objects like mirrors sitting near window sills in people’s homes. On a large scale, the effect can be even more dramatic. In 2013, a curvy building in London made of glass melted part of a car on a nearby street as it reflected the sun’s rays! Which happened for around two hours a day, so the building had to be retrofitted with sunshades so it could stop melting things. So it might be a good idea to keep crystal flower vases, bottles of water, and mirrors away from the windowsill.
4. Linseed Oil
So far, we’ve talked about things catching fire when they receive heat from some other source. But there are strange instances where the fuel itself can generate enough heat to basically set itself on fire. Linseed oil is made from flax seeds, and it’s often used on wooden furniture to protect it and make grain patterns in the wood more visible. At first, it might not be all that surprising that linseed oil can catch fire, since, well, lots of oils can be burned. But in the right conditions, linseed oil can basically set itself on fire because of the way it dries. Most liquids dry by evaporating off water or some other solvent in the mixture and leaving the rest behind. But linseed oil dries through oxidation, basically the same process through which you create fire. That doesn’t mean that it bursts into flames immediately since there’s normally not enough heat to make the reaction self-sustaining. But, as linseed oil dries through oxidation, it generates heat, and if it gets hot enough, it can set itself on fire. That’s especially problematic since people apply linseed oil to furniture by rubbing it in with pieces of cloth. And then when they’re done with the clothes, they often throw them into a pile. As the oil in the pile of cloth dries, the cloths heat up, and their collective heat can increase until the oil and clothes catch fire. In 2014, a pile of linseed-soaked cloths was identified as the source of a fire in a home in Maryland. In fact, in 1991, a whole high-rise tower in Philadelphia caught on fire for the same reason. So if you do use linseed oil to spruce up the furniture, safety officials recommend you wash the rags you use and hang them out where there’s lots of airflow before storing.
5. Ping Pong Balls
Finally, there’s an object that really doesn't seem like it should be flammable but burns incredibly easily: ping pong balls! Specifically, older ping pong balls are surprisingly flammable. A few people have noticed this and speculated that it’s because there was a gas put into the balls during the manufacturing process that burns really well, but, to be clear, it’s just ordinary air in there. It’s the actual material of the balls, which is called celluloid, that burns really well. Until about 2020, ping pong balls were still being made of that stuff since it’s a light and durable plastic that gave the balls the right properties for being whacked about. Although it has a high flash point of over 175°C, once celluloid hits that point, it can start burning without needing a spark or flame to get started, and it burns really easily. Celluloid gets its ignitable properties from a substance called nitrocellulose, which was used as a replacement for gunpowder in weapons during the 1800s. By the middle of the century, American entrepreneurs discovered that dipping nitrocellulose in wax turned it into a hard, enduring substance, and patented it as celluloid. Which was one of the first manufactured plastics. Celluloid enjoyed a long stint in lots of applications, famously including rolls of film like the kind used in projectors. Unfortunately, when the lamp in the projectors got hot, they had the tendency to make the celluloid film dramatically burst into flames. Because of its flammable tendencies, celluloid fell out of use in most cases, though ping pong balls were the exception until 2014 when they started to be phased out because of the fire risks of transporting lots of balls around. But older ping pong balls are still made of celluloid, so you probably want to keep them away from any sources of flame. And celluloid hasn’t totally disappeared either. It’s still used to make, amongst other things, guitar picks! But thankfully, as far as we know, there haven’t been any unintentional fires caused by guitar picks, so for now, there’s nothing to fret about.
Allium vegetables—garlic, leeks and onions—have a powerful protective effect on bowel (colorectal) cancer, the world’s third most common cancer.
People who regularly eat the vegetables lower their risk of developing the cancer by 79%, a new study has discovered.
Around 1.4 million people around the world develop colorectal cancer every year, and it’s usually associated with growing older and eating a poor diet.
Researchers from the First Hospital of China Medical University say there is a direct link between the amount of allium vegetables in the diet and their protective effect—in other words, the more you eat, the lower your chances of developing the cancer.
They matched 833 colorectal cancer patients against 833 healthy controls and assessed the diets of both groups.
Mushrooms can reduce the risk of breast cancer by 64% and they can also keep you mentally sharp as you get older.
Just two servings a week reduce the risk of mild cognitive decline (MCI)—such as occasional memory loss or lapses in concentration by around 50 percent. MCI is generally seen as early-stage dementia.
Although nobody is quite sure why mushrooms have such a therapeutic effect, researchers think it has to do with a compound called ergothioneine, which is found in most types of mushroom.
Researchers from the National University of Singapore studied the effects of various mushrooms—such as golden, oyster, shiitake and white button—on a group of 663 people aged 60 and older for six years.
The researchers tested the group on a range of cognitive, language and visuospatial skills as well as recording how much and what types of mushrooms the participants were eating.
They discovered the optimum amount for MCI protection was one serving, which equates to three-quarters of a cup of cooked mushrooms or 150 g, twice a week.
The mushrooms’ protective effects were “surprising and encouraging,” the researchers said.
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