Life-extending prostate cancer.

Much of the cancer crisis.

Will you explain how vitamin C kills cancer cells?

Everyone has some connection with cancer.

After all, nearly one in two of us will get cancer in our lifetimes.

Because cancer is seemingly so common, it gets a lot of attention within the media.

And we often get a lot of misinformation, whether it's from family, friends, what we read in the news or what we see on TV.

And that can actually be really detrimental and harmful to someone who has been diagnosed with cancer.

So how do you separate the myths from the reality?

In my work as a nurse, we do sometimes get asked if sugar is a cause of cancer.

Now this is taken from a misunderstanding of something known as the Warburg effect, which is that cancer cells seem to be very hungry for sugar and seem to be very good at breaking it down.

But if you cut sugar out from your diet, it doesn't stop the cancer cells from growing.

But what about artificial sweeteners, things like aspartame that are in diet drinks?

Do they cause cancer?

Well, the answer is probably not, no.

The fact is that they are classed as a class 2B carcinogen, which means there's not enough good evidence, but they might have a health effect.

But in order to get enough to even be close to being dangerous, a person would have to drink 14 cans of fizzy drink a day.

But what we do know is that sugar found in fizzy drinks can cause weight gain, and keeping a healthy weight does impact our risk of cancer.

So some people think that mobile phones can cause cancer, and this is a misunderstanding of the type of radiation a mobile phone causes.

Now, mobile phones have electromagnetic radiation.

And although that might seem like a really scary term, lots of work has been done to understand whether those things can be cancer-causing, and the answer is a real categorical no.

This is a really weak form of radiation, and it isn't able to affect our DNA and lead to cancer.

Ionising radiation is a little bit different.

It's something that we're not exposed to very often.

Things like airport scanners.

Actually, when we're in flight, we're exposed to ionising radiation.

Ionising radiation is also in things like X-rays and scans that we may have.

But those are all very low-level risks, and we're only exposed for very short periods of time.

It isn't a risk to use your mobile phone, and in fact, they can be life-saving devices.

So there's a lot of misconceptions around how we cook food, or food preparations, and links to cancer.

So things like, if I heat up my food in a plastic container in the microwave, is that going to give me cancer?

But I guess I'm kind of here to say, no, we don't have any evidence that any of those things are true.

My granny used to tell me that burning toast could increase your cancer risk.

Well, when you burn food, what you do is you create a chemical called acrylamide, and the good news is that there is no good evidence that acrylamide causes cancer either, so you can really burn your toast on both sides if you want.

Heating food in plastic containers, and indeed heating food in a microwave, both of those are absolutely fine.

In fact, in one experiment, what some scientists did is they heated food in a plastic container for a very long time, and no chemicals transferred into the food.

The real fact remains that actually there are not that many things that cause cancer.

The number one thing that causes cancer, above all else, is ageing.

The older we are, the more likely we are to develop cancer.

So making sure people have the right information is very important.

We want to try and dispel some of the myths around cancer, so that people are not scared, that they will access services and seek help if they need to.

It's so important that if you have any symptoms or signs that you may be potentially worried about, or that are persistent for more than three weeks, that you please go and see your health professional,

because it's so important to get the right tests and investigations done, because we know that early diagnosis saves lives.