Christmas time

Article Type: Food facts From: Nutrition & Food Science, Volume 39, Issue 1

The majority of people in the UK admit that they eat too much rich food and drink too much festive booze over Christmas and New Year. And unfortunately all that over-indulgence takes its toll. One survey, for instance, discovered that the festive season costs this country no less than 38 billion pounds in reduced output, thanks to the all-too-familiar hangover that follows all those office Christmas parties.

Bingeing on fatty, sugary foods does not help either. According to the National Obesity Forum, we eat three to four times more food than we actually need during the festive season, leading to digestive discomfort and usually more than several unwanted extra pounds by the time January comes around.

There are, however, ways of preventing all that festive digestive discomfort which, let’s face it, is not likely to feature highly on anyone’s Christmas list. You could of course eat more healthily, cutting down on fatty,sugary foods and limiting your alcohol intake, while making sure you get plenty of exercise to burn off all those excess calories.

But if, like most people, you cannot resist second helpings of roast turkey and all the trimmings or an extra dollop of brandy butter or double cream on your Christmas pudding, supporting your digestive system from the inside could be the most realistic solution. One simple approach is to supplement your diet with aloe vera, a vitamin- and mineral-rich plant that helps soothe the gastrointestinal system.

Aloe vera has been linked to improved gastrointestinal health in numerous research papers and contains several medically active ingredients. The gel, for instance, contains a mucilage a sticky mass that lines the mucous membranes of the digestive tract, protecting them against irritation and over-acidity. Substances in aloe vera leaves also encourage the release of pepsin, a digestive enzyme.

For details, see: www.aloeride.eu/swf/research_papers.asp