In his book How To Prevent Dementia, neurologist Dr Richard Restak wrote: “I strongly suggest that if you are 65 years old or older, that you completely and permanently eliminate alcohol from your diet”.

He said that’s because it’s a “direct neurotoxin” and could increase your risk of falls.

And according to America’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), we should consider striking some foods off the list, too.

But do those stand in the UK?

Here, we asked Dr Giuseppe Aragona, a GP and medical adviser for Prescription Doctor, about whether he agrees with the guidance here.

The CDC said that people aged 65+ are more likely to become hospitalised from bacteria like Salmonella and Listeria.

“Some foods are more likely to spread harmful germs, including undercooked meat and eggs, unpasteurised milk and cheese, and unwashed produce,” they wrote.

Therefore, they suggested people in that age group might want to consider that the following could pose a higher risk to them:

1. Raw or undercooked poultry or meat,
2. Unheated deli meat, cold cuts, hot dogs, and fermented or dry sausages,
3. Refrigerated pâté or meat spreads,
4. Premade deli salads, like potato salad, egg salad, tuna salad, or coleslaw,
5. Raw or undercooked sprouts like alfalfa or bean sprouts,
6. Unwashed fresh fruits and vegetables,
7. Cut melon left out for more than two hours,
8. Unpasteurised juice or cider,
9. Unpasteurised (raw) milk and dairy products made from unpasteurised milk,
10. Soft cheese made from unpasteurised (raw) milk,
11. Unheated cheese sliced at a deli,
12. Raw or undercooked (runny) eggs, and foods that contain raw or undercooked eggs, like cookie dough or eggnog,
13. Raw or undercooked fish or shellfish, including sashimi, sushi, and ceviche,
14. Refrigerated smoked seafood (except in a cooked dish),
15. Raw dough or raw batter made with raw (uncooked) flour.

Dr Aragona said that mostly, the reasoning behind these entries stands.

“I would broadly agree with the principle behind the CDC list,” he said.

“As we get older, changes in the immune system mean that an infection which might cause a relatively short-lived episode of diarrhoea and vomiting in a younger adult can sometimes become much more significant in an older person, with a greater risk of dehydration, hospital admission and, with certain organisms such as Listeria, Salmonella and pathogenic E. coli, invasive or systemic infection”.

The doctor added that this might be especially relevant for people who are frail or have other health conditions, “although I would be careful not to imply that everyone becomes suddenly vulnerable on their 65th birthday, because the degree of risk varies considerably between individuals”.

He said that for him, the foods he’d be most concerned about include:

1. raw or undercooked meat and poultry,
2. raw or lightly cooked eggs,
3. raw shellfish and fish,
4. unpasteurised milk and dairy products,
5. raw sprouts, and
6. certain chilled ready-to-eat foods such as pâté and cold deli meats.

That’s because “these foods can become contaminated with organisms such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli and Listeria, and the important point is that some contamination cannot be detected by looking at, smelling or tasting the food”.

“I would also add an important UK-specific nuance around soft cheeses, because the advice can easily become over-simplified,” Dr Aragona told us.

“It is not accurate to say that someone over 65 needs to avoid all Brie, Camembert, blue cheese or other soft cheeses; the key distinction is whether the product is made from pasteurised milk and, in some circumstances, how it has been stored and handled.”

In the UK, it’s been illegal to sell raw milk in supermarkets since 1985. But it’s not against the law to sell it in other places in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

“Similarly, I would not want the advice to become so restrictive that people are discouraged from eating nutritious foods such as fruit, vegetables, eggs, fish or dairy altogether,” the GP continued.

“The sensible approach is generally to modify how these foods are prepared and stored rather than simply avoiding them; for example, washing produce properly, keeping chilled foods at the correct temperature, observing use-by dates, preventing cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods, and cooking higher-risk foods thoroughly can substantially reduce the risk while allowing people to maintain a healthy and varied diet.”

Lastly, the expert ended, the person eating the food matters, too.

“I would… distinguish between someone who is a healthy, active 65-year-old and someone who is considerably older, frail, immunosuppressed or living with significant medical conditions, because the latter group may reasonably need to take a more cautious approach.

“Overall, I would agree with the CDC’s approach, but I would present it as risk reduction rather than a list of foods that people over 65 are forbidden from eating.

“The aim should be to reduce exposure to foods where the consequences of contamination could be serious while preserving a nutritious, enjoyable and varied diet, and I think that distinction is particularly important because overly restrictive food advice can itself have unintended consequences for nutrition, enjoyment of food and quality of life.”

Back in 1992, Disney’s flick Aladdin brought in $504 million dollars which, in today’s money comes to over a billion US Dollars. A huge part of the success of the film, of course, was Robin Williams’s incredible performance as Genie.

Speaking to Variety, longtime Disney animator and co-director of Aladdin, Ron Clements said: “On the first day of recording [Genie’s intro] we had script pages written in Robin’s improv style and storyboards illustrating some of the visual metamorphosing we were planning. He started out recording the script as written a few times, then took off in a multitude of directions…

“And he was consistently hilarious. At one point, we had to remove the genie’s lead animator, Eric Goldberg, from the recording stage because his uncontrollable laughter was messing up takes”

Despite this, the actor actually agreed to be paid relatively little for his pivotal role.

Robin recorded around 30 hours of written and improvised dialogue for Aladdin and he revealed to New York Magazine that he did this because he wanted to “leave something wonderful behind for the kids.”

Business Insider explains: “Williams took a hefty pay cut and agreed to be paid $75,000 for his work on the Disney film instead of his usual fee of about $8 million — but there was a catch. Williams did not want his voice used to merchandise products.”

“I don’t want to sell stuff,” Williams later told New York magazine. “It’s the one thing I don’t do.”

The execs agreed to this deal, Robin said on the Today Show, adding: “The one thing I said was I will do the voice. I’m doing it basically because I want to be part of this animation tradition. I want something for my children. One deal is, I just don’t want to sell anything — as in Burger King, as in toys, as in stuff.”

“Then all of a sudden,” he added, “they released an advertisement — one part was the movie, the second part was where they used the movie to sell stuff. Not only did they use my voice, they took a character I did and overdubbed it to sell stuff.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Disney apologised in the form of a Picasso painting valued at $1 million (sure why not), a self-portrait of the artist as Vincent Van Gogh.

According to Artnet, the painting clashed with Robin’s interiors and his friend Eric Idle recommended he burn the painting on live TV.

Of course, he didn’t do that but he did return for the third Aladdin film as well as starring in Disney’s movie Jack and Bicentennial Man.

If anybody would like to apologise to me in the form of a very expensive art work, please feel free.

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how different the pitch for Pretty Woman – originally called 3000 – was from the film we know now.

Don’t get me started on the extremely unlikely source material for Dirty Dancing 2, either.

As it turns out, the first version of Pixar’s Monsters Inc was almost unrecognisable from the film that eventually hit cinemas as well.

For instance, the original script didn’t include lovable protagonist Sulley (at least not in his monster form).

Instead, an early plot focused on a 30-year-old accountant.

Speaking about the film’s origins, Pete Docter, the director of 2001’s Monsters Inc, said on Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting podcast: “Well, my idea was that what it was about was about a 30-year-old man who is like an accountant or something.

“He hates his job, and one day he gets a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid from his mum, and he doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them.

“He thinks he’s starting to go crazy; they follow him to his job and on his dates, and all this – and it turns out these monsters are fears that he never dealt with as a kid.”

A bit like fellow Pixar hit Inside Out, which includes personified emotions, each of these monsters would have represented a different one of the office worker’s fears.

As soon as he was healed from one of the fears these monsters symbolised, it would go away. This was actually a little bittersweet, as the original plot’s main character grew close to some of his new companions.

While I have you, here’s another fact about the first movie: Boo actually had a real name all along. Eagle-eyed fans spotted a detail suggesting she was called Mary, like the child actor Mary Gibbs, who voiced her.

Real-life Mary has since voiced characters in Inside Out, though she was only two years old when she starred in Monsters Inc.

Famed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has lamented what he sees as America’s demand for politicians who feel like the average Joe, calling for an end to the “glamorisation of dumbness”.

During a new interview with Esquire, Sorkin was asked if he still felt like the US is dealing with a “huge, huge dumb problem”, as he’d said back in 2019.

The politically-minded Hollywood veteran explained why he thought little has changed, stating: “We need to get over our infatuation with the outsider, with the plainspoken person that you want to have a beer with.”

Citing his own work, Sorkin continued: “The characters I write are all smarter than I am. I did not blaze any trails as a scholar. People who are smarter than I am don’t make me feel bad about myself, they don’t make me feel inferior. And certainly a president – I need the president to be smarter than I am.”

Sorkin added that, in his eyes, “there are millions upon millions of voters who seem to have a mass debilitating inferiority complex and feel like a smart president, Obama for instance, is looking down his nose at everyone else, or he’s a Poindexter, or he’s not a real man”.

“Right. He eats arugula,” interviewer Michael Sebastian cracked, harking back to one of the trifling complaints conservatives had about Barack Obama‘s alleged elitism.

“We got to knock that off,” Sorkin said. “There has been a glamorisation of dumbness.”

While the Oscar winner didn’t mention anyone in particular, his take definitely echoed the way he described US leader Donald Trump in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Explaining why he had no interest in putting a Trump-esque character in the reboot of The West Wing, Sorkin called the Republican president “a really dumb guy with an observable psychiatric disorder”.

Growing up, I always heard the same dietary advice: go for brown rice where possible, and if you can, choose low-fat dairy.

However, speaking to HuffPost UK previously, Melissa Jaeger, a registered dietitian at MyFitnessPal, said: “The nutritional gap between [brown and white rice] isn’t that huge.”

And a new paper has suggested that full-fat options might not be as bad for us as I first thought, either.

Published in the Journal of Nutrition, the study authors found that eating full-fat options seemed to confer benefits without expected negative side effects, like increased “bad” cholesterol and weight gain.

In this study, researchers split 74 participants with overweight or obesity into three groups:

• low-dairy, calorie-restricted diet,
• energy-neutral diet with three daily servings of dairy,
• unrestricted diet with three daily servings of dairy.

They also followed Canada’s food guide. All dairy consumed was full-fat.

After 12 weeks of observation, the scientists didn’t see any difference in weight gain or “bad” cholesterol levels between the low-dairy group and the one that consumed three full-fat servings a day.

In fact, those in the three-serving group had better blood pressure and improved levels of vitamin D, calcium, and protein.

This, despite the fact that full-fat dairy contains saturated fats – lipids which have been linked to higher rates of heart disease.

Another older review published in the European Journal of Nutrition found that those who consume full-fat dairy are no more likely to develop heart disease and type 2 diabetes than those who stick to a low-fat or fat-free dairy diet.

Study author Professor Harvey Anderson said that one answer could lie in the dairy matrix hypothesis, which suggests that the physical structure of the fats in dairy products affects how they’re absorbed.

“With dairy products, it’s got two proteins – casein and whey – that are bound together with fat and with nutrients mixed in,” he said.

The professor added that this structure leads to a slow, steady release of nutrients and could potentially make its health benefits bigger than the sum of its parts.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) said on its site that “the science around milk and dairy foods is more complex than once thought,” adding that the dairy matrix hypothesis seemed to hold in some research.

However, the BHF ended: “The evidence remains mixed, and choosing lower-fat milk can help if you’re cutting calories or trying to reduce saturated fat.”

In a job where a regular day of work might involve bunching your genitals into a drawstring bag or spending 12 hours in a sweaty costume (not all of which allow you to pee easily), actors are pretty used to unusual requests.

Even among the most seasoned pros, however, some scenes are a step too far.

Some actors will never go nude for a role, for instance, while others won’t co-star alongside certain other big names. Often, the reasons are unique to a specific script or storyline.

Here, we rounded up seven scenes actors flat-out refused to film:

Charlotte Rampling stars as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies.

But the actor had previously been pitched the role of Paul Atreides’ mother, Lady Jessica, in director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed ’70s adaptation.

His version lasted 14 hours and was meant to have a star-studded cast including Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger, though it never got released.

Speaking to IndieWire, Frank Pavich, who made an award-winning documentary about the abandoned project, said Jodorowsky had seen Charlotte Rampling in a movie and “thought she would be perfect” for the part.

Charlotte, who met the director without having read the script, later found out about a scene where Harkonnen enemy Rabban the Beast “gets his army, the Algerian army, to pull down their pants in front of the [Atreides’] palace and shit.

“So there’s going to be a scene of 2,000 extras defecating at once,” Pavitch added. “So here’s Charlotte Rampling, she agrees to meet with [Jodorowsky], she gets the script, she reads the script, and she says, ‘I can’t be in a movie where there’s 2,000 extras defecating on screen! I need to be in a movie that people are actually going to see! Who the hell is going to see this movie?’.”

However, Charlotte hasn’t publicly spoken about the scene.

She told IndieWire: “I loved this book, and I loved the character of Jessica. [Jodorowsky] was unable to do it, and the next one was the David Lynch one, which I was not in”.

When Anna Kendrick’s character, Beca, leaves college in Pitch Perfect, she joins a record label where she works under music executive Theo.

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK about the film, she said: “Originally the music executive was supposed to be my romantic interest, but I said no to that, because I thought that would be kind of fucking problematic.”

She added that she also turned down an ending that involved the pair kissing: “I was like, ’Can no one else [see it]?’. Once I said it, everybody was like, ‘I guess so’. And they still wanted to have a version at the end when we kissed, and I still said no.”

He replied, “No. Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested. I said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that Aragorn isn’t in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?’.”

During an episode of Hot Ones, the actor recalled: “For some reason, [the filmmakers] caught a wild tiger shark. And they were like, ‘It’s in this cage, so it’s docile!’ And I’m like, ‘It’s a fucking tiger shark.’ And it was like a seven-foot tiger shark.”

She added: “I was on [dolphin movie] Flipper, we had fucking rubber dolphins. You can do this with a goddamn rubber dolphin; you don’t need a real-ass shark in the middle of the fucking ocean with chum in it. And maybe I lost my mind, and maybe I yelled all of that.”

Even as Nick in Gone Girl – the original book of which was recently voted the best thriller of the 21st century by a New York Times poll – Ben wouldn’t sacrifice his Boston Red Sox fandom.

Speaking to The New York Times, the actor said that he got into “a legitimate fight” over the cap with director David Fincher about the issue.

“I said, ‘David, I love you, I would do anything for you’,” the Oscar winner recalled. “’But I will not wear a Yankees hat. I just can’t. I can’t wear it because it’s going to become a thing… I will never hear the end of it. I can’t do it, and I couldn’t put it on my head’.”

As a compromise, he wore a New York Mets cap, neutral ground he likened to “Switzerland”.

Speaking on Waitrose’s podcast The Dish, Ian’s Ted Lasso co-star, Phil Dunsten, said: “It was in the script that [Ian would say], ‘You know, it’s gonna be a tough game for Richmond because Tottenham are a great side’.

“And [Ian] was like, ‘I can’t say it. I’m just not going to say it. I’m sorry.’ And he was really lovely. He was just like, ’You’re going to have to change it because I can’t say that.”

In an interview with The Daily News, the acting legend said that director Frank Darabont “thought I should be blowing that harmonica that Andy gave me” in jail. He said this was meant to draw his former fellow prisoner’s attention when the pair arrived on the beach of Zihuatanejo.

“And I refused,” he said, adding it was “sort of asinine, sort of cliched, sort of unnecessary and overkill”.

In my line of work, I come across a fair few parenting hacks – some of which occasionally make my eyebrows hit the ceiling (egg sock, looking at you).

And I have to admit, I did let slip a ‘yeah right’ when I came across a video on Instagram months ago suggesting that putting out a board with chopped veggies on could get kids to eat more of the stuff.

In fairness to my kids, they’re not terrible at eating veg. My toddler’s even quite partial to an olive. But they definitely prefer fruit, and if I’d previously offered them a bit of raw carrot or a cucumber stick, they’d look at me like I’d vomited on their favourite pair of Crocs.

But given how many people I’d seen banging on about these veggie boards online, I decided to give it a go.

The first time I tried it, I carefully arranged some cucumber sticks, carrot sticks and sliced peppers on a board like I was competing on MasterChef. My kids took one look at it and carried on playing. The youngest took a cucumber stick to appease me, but the rest went in Tupperware which I ended up grazing on for the next few days.

I left it a good few weeks before I tried it again (mainly because of time constraints and not wanting to waste perfectly good veg), but I know that kids need to have a few exposures to these things – or so I’d read somewhere – so, one day I chopped some cucumber sticks, a bit of cooked chicken and cherry tomatoes, and stuck them casually on a wooden board on our dining table.

It was about 3pm, so hunger levels were rising. And you know what? They cleared the lot. (I think the chicken helped entice them in and then it just became a race to finish the rest…)

Another time, I decided to cook vegetables 10 minutes ahead of dinnertime and left them in a bowl on the table. (We were having homemade pizza so I wasn’t worried about them finding room in their tummies for that.) Within minutes, both kids had inhaled a load of carrots, broccoli and baby corn.

According to baby and child nutritionist, Charlotte Stirling-Reed, popping a plate of chopped veg on the table before dinner or when the kids get in from school is “the easiest way to include more veg” in their diets.

It works for a couple of reasons: firstly, they’re usually hungrier at this time; and secondly, there’s no pressure attached to eating it (so less of a power struggle).

The expert also noted that even if they don’t eat it, seeing these foods regularly builds familiarity. “It’s not about perfection. It’s about making it available and taking off the pressure,” she added on social media.

In a separate video on the viral veggie boards, Dr Karan Rajan, a NHS doctor, explained that cutting up veg and popping it on a platter also works because it taps into something known as “unit bias” or the “tendency to want a portion of something”.

“A whole bell pepper feels like work, but snackable bite-size cuts feels gamified,” he said. “There’s no meal commitment, it becomes finger food and, dare I say it, fun.”

The doctor also pointed to a study that showed children eat more fruit and more vegetables when they’re precut and presented as snacks. “Think of fries versus potatoes: snackification works,” he added.

In the comments on Stirling-Reed’s post, plenty of parents swore it worked for them too.

“This genuinely works for my veggie phobes – must do it more!” said one. “Been using this hack for years! It’s such a win. They always eat more veg and complain less,” added another parent.

I tried it again the other night (I chopped tomatoes, cucumber and avocado, stuck it casually on the table and walked away) and, yet again, the kids ate most of the veg on the board before dinner. I left it out and whatever was left got swiped at the end of dinner, too.

I genuinely can’t believe my eldest, who once would pull a face of disgust over cucumber, now eats sticks of the savoury fruit like she’s munching crisps.

Mission accomplished. This hack gets the thumbs up from me. Just remember to give it time if it doesn’t work straight away.