Christmastime Is Here! Let's Talk About Pigging Out

At long last, Christmas is once again here! There's a lot of different traditions around the office, but the one thing that it seems everyone can agree with is that Christmastime is a good excuse for a feast. We don't really call them "feasts" anymore, not like in thee olden days, but that's what they are — a vast quantity of food and often an equally vast quantity of desserts waiting to be consumed by people enjoying the holiday.

The question on everyone's mind, because you know this is a dentist's blog, is "I can pig out this one time, right? It's not going to really hurt me in the long run, right?"

To everyone's relief, the answer is yes, you can pig out — if you're already healthy. You can, in fact, 'pig out' on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day without doing too much to harm your teeth (or the rest of your body.) Now, if you decide to start pigging out on the 24th and you don't let up until Epiphany, there may be some consequences, but let's look at a single night of pigging out from an overarching scientific perspective.

The human body is kept in equilibrium by a complicated network of counterbalancing forces that are collectively called homeostasis. Homeostasis keeps you at the right temperature, it keeps you at roughly the same weight week-to-week, it makes you sleep when you're tired, and so on.

Homeostatic balance is crucial to the very concept of health, because if your balance is off, you get things like weight gain, sleeplessness, and a weak immune system that can't fight off colds and sickness. Fortunately, homeostatic balance is very good at snapping back from single big pushes. For example, those crazy polar bear swimmers that jump into polar water for a moment or two and then wrap up and get next to a fire.

On the other hand, homeostatic balance is not that good at snapping back from a prolonged imbalance, like getting less than six hours of sleep every night for a week or smoking for years on end.

What this means for you holiday feasters is that, unless your long-term health is already suffering for some other reason, there's absolutely nothing about a single meal — or even 24 consecutive hours — of pigging out that will do any lasting damage to you.

Just be sure that when you're done, you go back to your normal healthy diet-and-exercise routine and give your body oh, say, six days to recover. Then go have a New Years party and do it all over again.

See you next year!