Surveys are the stuff of content for all sorts of public relations and press stories, providing a hook onto which various apparent news stories can be hung. However, one of the latest, on which readers who live and work in the towns involved might wish to comment, is a study by none less than the Royal Society for Public Health who have declared that Preston has the ‘unhealthiest’ high street in Britain. Chosen ahead of Middlesbrough and Coventry, in second and third place respectively, the Lancashire city apparently has a proliferation of fast food shops, tanning salons, bookmakers and payday loan shops in its main retail area.
Businesses were ranked by experts and the public based on whether they encouraged ‘healthy choices’, positive mental well-being and social interaction and also if they offered health advice. The top three healthiest places were Shrewsbury, Ayr and Salisbury. Northern and Midlands towns dominated the list of unhealthiest places with Eastbourne the only southern place in the top 10. Where does your practice rate in any of these towns?
Eroding the pleasure
Writing of studies that highlight extremes of lifestyle, a recent example by the University of Adelaide suggests that wine tasting can be damaging to teeth. No particular surprise there but with so much focus nowadays on tooth wear and the erosive potential of acidic drinks and food, the story gained extra notice.
But don’t panic too much if you are indulging in a glass of the red or white stuff while reading this, or anticipating
doing so soon. While researchers found that 10 one-minute swill-andspit sessions are enough to soften tooth enamel, social drinkers limiting their intake to mealtimes and avoid sipping for long periods should be unaffected.
However, professional wine tasters and winemakers who sample anything from 20 to 150 wines a day should however seek preventive advice from their dental professionals. Cheers!
Tinctures reinvented
Historically there are a great variety of ‘recipes’ for toothache and for toothpastes. These include some bizarre
ingredients such as mouse droppings and many other apparently unrelated substances. In fact the logic is sound even if the science doesn’t support it. So, having observed that rodents benefit from continuously growing incisors, some sort of mouse-associated material was thought to confer similar advantages and presumably droppings were easier to come by than teeth.
However, confounding some of these apparent myths, a thousand-year-old medieval remedy for eye infections which was discovered in a manuscript in the British Library has been found to kill the superbug MRSA. The ‘eyesalve’ recipe calls for two species of Allium (garlic and onion or leek), wine and oxgall (bile from a cow’s stomach). It describes a very specific method of making the topical solution including the use of a brass vessel to brew it, a strainer to purify it and an instruction to leave the mixture for nine days before use. Dentifrice companies take note; what price fluoride and rodent parts?