"6000 Christmas Calories" Warning

Your Christmas dinner could KILL you...! That's the warning from the NHS today - they say season binges are putting us at risk of a heart attack. Sophie Cairns is a health service dietician and says it's a tinselled time-bomb, "48 percent of people in Leeds report overeating and a conderable amount of people have too much alcohol. We also do less exercise in December than the rest of the year, so quite a ferw people are changing their habits over the holidays. "The average person can acutally consume upto 6000 calories on Christmas Day, that's everything you're eating throughout the whole day. But it's also the types of food we're choosing to treat ourselves with, that are higher in saturated fat, which increases our cholesterol levels." We should be particularly looking to cut out, or cut down on, "pastry, the skin on the turkey, red meat, charcuteries, cheese cream and chocolate." But it's not all doom and gloom, there are suggestions of how we can alter our behaviour, "a season salad, or oily fish like salmon, or herring - which in Sweden where I'm from is a very traditional thing to have on Christmas Day." Though if you want to keep things more traditionally British, there's a few alterations you can make too to cut the calories, "roasting your potatoes in olive oil, skimming the fat off the gravy will save you a lot of calories. But actually half the calories we have on Christmas Day come from snacks and canapes, so it's quite important to think what you're having in between meals."