A Christmas message from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities
Seasons’s greetings! Christmas is a time for eating, drinking and merriment, and is therefore a serious threat to public health. Banning it is not yet politically feasible, but there are a number of precautions you can take over the festive period to avoid being too much of a burden on our precious NHS.
The greatest peril comes on Christmas Day when many people behave as if the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines do not apply to them. Even some doctors have been known to succumb to temptation, but with a few simple heuristics, it is easier to have a compliant and abstemious Christmas than you might think. The key is to never allow “fun” and “merriment” to push thoughts of death and disease out of your mind. Our glorious former Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies once advised women to “do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine and think, ‘Do I want my glass of wine or do I want to raise my risk of breast cancer?’” This might seem morbid, but it is not as morbid as actually dying, which you will if you don’t follow public health advice.
We at OHID might not have the common touch of Sally Davies or the joie de vivre of Chris Whitty, but we have come up with a simple rhyme to help you get through the holidays: “If you want to avoid heart disease, go easy on the festivities”.
The best advice is to stay safe and just eat sprouts
Over-eating is the biggest hazard. Turkey is a lean meat and can be eaten safely in small portions so long as it is flayed skinless like a heretic, but the “trimmings” are fraught with danger. Gravy is salty and high in animal fat and should always be avoided. Parsnips are acceptable unless they are glazed in honey. Potatoes are starchy carbohydrates and therefore good for you (or possibly bad for you) but roast potatoes are often covered in goose fat which is bad for you (or possibly good for you). Pigs in blankets consist entirely of processed meat which the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified as a Group 1 carcinogen. Frankly, you might as well smoke a packet of cigarettes. (Do not smoke a packet of cigarettes).
The best advice is to stay safe and just eat sprouts, especially since you will want to use up some of your daily allocation of 2,000 calories on dessert. A small dessert is tolerable, but for the infant Christ’s sake, keep it small. The daily limit for sugar consumption is 30 grams, or one mince pie. It used to be 60 grams but the guideline was halved ten years ago because the average British adult was within spitting distance of complying with it. Did you know that the average British adult now consumes twice as much sugar as is recommended? It is a shocking statistic and a damning indictment of our obesogenic food environment.
If you use the health campaigner Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Christmas pudding, it will contain 5,000 calories and 400 grams of sugar, and that’s before you add the brandy butter, so you will want to have only the thinnest slice. Alternatively, you can buy one from Tesco which will have less sugar and half as many calories, but that will be “ultra-processed” and therefore worse for you in ways that we can’t quite explain.
By this point, you might be thinking about having a drink. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the World Health Organisation has decided that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. In Britain, the limit for “low risk drinking” is 14 units of alcohol per week, equivalent to a pint of beer per day, and while that seems recklessly hedonistic to us, you could treat yourself to a small glass of sherry or a medium glass of eggnog, preferably spaced out over the day to allow your liver time to recover from the last sip. It is Christmas after all.
After dinner, your companions — if you have any – will doubtless slump on the sofa with a box of Quality Street. This is your opportunity to go outside and burn off those sprouts. Those 10,000 steps won’t walk themselves. Treat yourself to a satsuma and an early night when you return.
Some people will say that this is a joyless regime, but you’ll have the last laugh when you’re in the nursing home.
As told to Christopher Snowdon
