5 Surprising Holiday Health Myths

Live Science ^ | 17 December 2008 | Robin Nixon

[CE2949BB]

Many supposed holiday hazards are as innocuous as a tepid mug of apple cider. A review article in the current issue of the British Medical Journal cites five fears that can officially be crossed off the holiday worry list.

[CE2949BB]

Myth 1: Sugar makes kids hyperactive.

Myth 2: Suicides increase over the holidays.

Myth 3: Poinsettias are toxic.

Myth 4: You lose most of your body heat through your head.

Myth 5: Eating at night makes you fat.

[JRandomFreeper]

Myth 3: Poinsettias are toxic.

Well crap! After I spent all that money.

/johnny

[babygene]

“Myth 5: Eating at night makes you fat.”

Actually, this one is true in most cases. If you also sleep at night like most people do, it does make you fat.

[Gigantor]

I’ve found that, with age, it is a big mistake to eat within a couple of hours of going to sleep.

I have nightmares, or wake up with terrific heartburn, or both!

[freekitty]

I sure understand that one.

[JRios1968]

Many supposed holiday hazards are as innocuous as a tepid mug of apple cider.

Depends, is it made by Dickens Fruit Stand?

[devere]

I do not believe that the contents of this article are true.

[aruanan]

Actually, this one is true in most cases. If you also sleep at night like most people do, it does make you fat.

It's true under certain circumstances. Here they are: If you have a fixed amount of food per day that doesn't exceed one's total caloric need, you won't get fat no matter what time you eat it. If you eat something at night, you're likely to end up eating more than your total caloric need.

[pandoraou812]

Sugar always made Nic wild. So I don’t trust that myth that it doesn’t. And I know many depressed people around the holidays. Joe’s brother tried to kill himself on Christmas Eve & so has Renee, so I am not buying that one either.

[capt. norm]

Myth 3: Poinsettias are toxic.

I know for a fact they are not.

I brought home a few, that were about to be trashed, from work, hoping to plant them outdoors. They survive just fine here in Florida and a lady down the street has a huge one the size of a large bush that looks great every year.

Instead of a watch-dog, I have "watch geese".

Anyone familiar with them will tell you that they are very good watch-critters and very aggressive with strangers...nobody seems to be prepared to deal with "watch geese". In my case, I have three, Larry, Moe and Curly. Larry and Curly are ganders (male) and Moe is a goose (hen/female) and they work as a team/ The moment you set foot inside my front gate, you are under goose surveillance and are being sized up for a confrontation and they will not hesitate to attack with beaks and wing-slaps if they don't recognize you.

Late at night, after passing inspection being permitted to enter my property with six discarded poinsettias a couple nights after Christmas, I set the potted plats outside to deal with the next morning.

By the next morning, the geese had eaten them down to stems and I was preparing for the worst. But both the geese and the poinsettias survived the ordeal...neither turned out to be toxic to the other...case closed.

[redhead]

I had Toulouse geese on my farm in Southern Minnesota a few years ago. Some things I learned:

1. You can call the bluff of an aggressive goose by walking toward it waving your arms. But they are actually very easy to catch and hold. Once captured, they calm right down and just hang out. Until they poop on you.

2. The old adage "loose as a goose" is NO JOKE. We wound up fencing in our dooryard and leaving the rest of the place to the geese because they were pooping on the doorstep.

3. Geese poop while they sleep. (See 2 above)

Would I have them again? In a heartbeat, but they would be prey here (foxes, coyotes), and keeping them through a long Alaskan winter without proper shelter is not an option. I'd have to fence in my deck, though...

[TigersEye]

All five of those things are true.

[babygene]

“It’s true under certain circumstances. Here they are: If you have a fixed amount of food per day that doesn’t exceed one’s total caloric need, you won’t get fat no matter what time you eat it. If you eat something at night, you’re likely to end up eating more than your total caloric need.”

It’s more complex than that. If you take identical twins and feed 1/3 more calories to one it’s not going to make him (or her) weigh 1/3 more, though he or she may have more fat. It has to do with metabolism. Your metabolism slows down when you are sleeping. Your body doesn’t need as much when you are sleeping so it stores it as fat, and does not make you less hungry in the morning,

[TrueKnightGalahad]

Their "Myth 4: You lose most of your body heat through your head," is disproven by the subsequent text in the article: "Body heat leaves from any skin surface in proportion to the area exposed." Hmmm, holiday "myths" article written for the (northern hemisphere) winter holidays...well, unless one is a Polar Bear and a nudist, during this season people tend to wear cold-weather clothing that covers all but the hands and head. Hands are often garbed in gloves, or shoved into convenient coat pockets...so the head would, in fact, be the maximum exposed skin area, and most body heat lost would perforce be from the head. Sheesh - what a stupid article!

PS: Poinsettias are poisonous, though not to any worrisome degree for most species - but are HIGHLY poisonous to cats, so keep the felines away from these plants.

[aruanan]

It’s more complex than that. If you take identical twins and feed 1/3 more calories to one it’s not going to make him (or her) weigh 1/3 more, though he or she may have more fat. It has to do with metabolism. Your metabolism slows down when you are sleeping. Your body doesn’t need as much when you are sleeping so it stores it as fat, and does not make you less hungry in the morning,

It's really no more complex than that. Your body has a total caloric need over the space of 24 hours. If you exceed that, you have a net increase in stored energy. Since the prime storage mode is fat, consistently exceed caloric need will result in getting fat. Most people who weigh 30 pounds more when they're 50 than when they were 20 have gained this weight by tiny increments over the decades. The amount is very, very small increase of about 10 kcals/day. Or, put it this way, if you were to reduce your daily caloric intake by 150 kcals (the amount in one small, plain, cake doughnut), over the course of a year you'd lose about 15.5 pounds of body fat. It's all a matter of energy absorbed versus energy expended.

As far as morning hunger goes, if you don't eat anything after 7PM, you'll be a LOT hungrier in the morning than if you had a meal late in the evening.

[pandoraou812]

If you say so ....However I wish I could have sent a 5 yr old Nic to you so you could have seen for yourself what he was like. When we took sugar away he was better. He wasn’t happy but we had some peace of mind. We were told to put him on Ritalin but refused.

[aruanan]

Since the prime storage mode is fat, consistently exceed caloric need will result in getting fat.

Since the prime storage mode is fat, consistently exceeding caloric need will result in getting fat.

[TigersEye]

I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I said all of those so-called myths are true. They are only myths if you parse and fudge and employ lots of sophistry.

[TigersEye]

Oops, I misstated my intention. What I meant is that none of those things are myths. The article is bunkum.

[pandoraou812]

Ha I think I made you confused by wanting to send you Nic. WEFG...Don’t worry he is too old now but there is always Sassy & she would love to visit her Uncle TE!