Academy

Dry January is actually BAD for your health, an expert has warned. You can understand why people undertake the act of abstinence from booze right after Christmas, where every single person gets to experience what it’s like not having your life in control, but the time span is nonsense. Or so says top health expert Ian Hamilton, who believes instead of shunning the bottle for a whole month, it’s nowhere near as good for you, as say, two to three days sober a week is. Pixabay Talking to the  Daily Star , the academic revealed: People think having done Dry January, that’s it, job done and now for the rest of the year I can just return to my normal habits. I think what would be more beneficial to the vast majority of people is to try and go for two or three sober days a week throughout the year where they abstain from alcohol, rather than trying to fit it all in to one month. Hamilton is a lecturer in mental wellbeing at the Department of Health Sciences at the...

MPs are calling for a 25p charge on takeaway coffee in a move that could see disposable cups banned in five years time. In the UK 2.5bn takeaway coffee cups are used and thrown away each year – enough to stretch around the world five-and-a-half-times. The UK produces 30,000 tonnes of coffee cup waste each year, according to a report published by MPs on the environmental audit committee on Friday. Disposable cups cannot be recycled by the normal systems because they are made from cardboard with a tightly bonded polyethylene liner, which is difficult to remove, and means they are not accepted by paper mills. As a result just one in 400 cups are recycled – less than 0.25%. Half a million coffee cups are littered each day in the UK,  the report said . MPs are calling for: a 25p levy on coffee bought in takeaway cups to be used to reduce the number of cups thrown away and invest in reprocessing facilities the introduction of a ban on throwaway coffee cups if a target that al...