Post-Christmas dyspepsia - archive, 26 December 1908
EditorialNo doubt a certain number of people are wondering this morning why yesterday, alone of all the days of the year, they should have upset their digestion. After all, there is nothing in the typical Christmas dinner to account for it. Roast turkey, for instance, and plum pudding form a meal rather more digestible than the average, and, as the Lancet points out, a pretty well-balanced one in respect of the proportions of protein and carbohydrate – terms familiar in our mouths as household words in these days of food reform.
The science behind stuffing your face at Christmas
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Why, then, does the Christmas dinner disagree with anyone? A moment’s thought will reveal to everyone that it is because the diners often eat too much. But this leaves unsolved the still more difficult problem – why do they eat too much? It cannot be that to all of them the Christmas dishes are rare festal dainties, only indulged in once a year. Many people have Christmas fare many times in the year without over-eating. Is it possibly because – by a mysterious dispensation which can never, probably, be rationalistically explained, so various are the conditions and yet so invariable the phenomenon, – is it because the Christmas dinner, even in the best-regulated families, is always late, and the diners abnormally hungry in consequence?