New Year’s Eve gets mixed reviews when it comes to health. Sure it’s a great time for new beginnings and healthful resolutions. But it’s also a time of health risks and accidents. Here are five things you should know about this lively, but often risky, year-end celebration.
Your New Year’s resolution will probably fail, but hey, keep trying. About 45 percent of Americans will make a New Year’s resolution this year. The good news is that more than 70 percent of them will stick to their resolution for the first two weeks of 2015, according to the website StatisticBrain.com. But now the bad news. More than half of people who make New Year’s resolutions will have given up within six months.
Even so, it’s probably worth it to keep trying. In one study by the University of Scranton, researchers found that people who explicitly make a resolution are 10 times as likely to attain their goals as people who don’t make any resolution to change. In the study, 282 people were followed for six months. At the start, nearly half had made a New Year’s resolution to change, while the remaining subjects were “nonresolvers” — they identified a behavior they would like to change, but they had not made a resolution to do so. After six months, 46 percent of the people who had made a resolution to change were still going strong; while only 4 percent of the nonresolvers had changed their behavior.
Not surprisingly, losing weight is the most common resolution. That’s followed by 2) getting organized, 3) spending less and saving more, 4) enjoying life to the fullest, 5) staying fit and healthy and, interestingly, 6) learning something exciting.
New Year’s Day can be a risk factor for death. That depressing statistic stems from an analysis of nearly 60 million hospital death certificates that found people are more likely to die on Christmas and New Year’s Day in emergency rooms than any other time of year. Over a 25-year period between 1979 and 2004, an additional 42,325 more people than expected died during the two weeks beginning with Christmas through New Year’s Day.
The holiday death spikes, reported in 2010 in the journal Social Science & Medicine, found that the excess deaths were not explained by drunken driving or holiday accidents. Instead, the spikes were attributed to a rise in deaths by natural causes. Over all, the average risk of dying on Christmas and New Year’s is 3 percent to 10 percent higher than during other times of year.
A separate study published in Circulation in December 2004 found that heart attacks also spike during Christmas and New Year’s. The authors speculated that delays in seeking treatment due to the holidays may play a role in the increase.
The researchers, from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, also noted that issues like crowded emergency rooms and low hospital staffing could explain some of the rise. Psychological stress could be a factor. People with chronic illness may also focus on staying alive long enough to reach a holiday milestone. However, none of these situations fully explain the pronounced mortality spike around Christmas and New Year’s.
The study authors concluded by saying that more research needs to be done to understand the holiday death spikes, and perhaps uncover other times of year tied to lower death rates. “This nontrivial loss of life is an important public health concern and warrants further research,” they wrote.
For safety, keep that bottle of Champagne chilled! Flying Champagne corks can cause serious eye injuries, ophthalmologists warn, and a warm bottle of Champagne poses a greater risk than a chilled bottle.
Champagne bottles contain more air pressure than that found in a car tire and can launch a cork at 50 miles per hour. The bubbles inside the bottle expand as the temperature rises, and the cork of a warm Champagne bottle is more likely to pop unexpectedly. Sparkling wine and Champagne should be chilled to at least 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Shaking a Champagne bottle is a bad idea as shaking makes the cork shoot out even faster.
Champagne cork injuries are not common, but they can be serious, resulting in permanent blindness in the injured eye, reported the British Journal of Ophthalmology in 2004.
When opening a bottle of champagne, technique matters. Point the bottle at a 45-degree angle away from you and everyone else and hold the cork down while removing the wire hood from the bottle. Use a towel to place over the entire top of the bottle as you grasp the cork and twist the bottle to loosen it. You can watch a video demonstration of proper technique here.
Beware the dangers of drunken walking. New Year’s Day is the deadliest day of the year for pedestrians. A 2005 study in Injury Prevention found that an average of 24 pedestrians are killed on New Year’s Day in the United States, making it the riskiest day of the year for walkers. Alcohol plays a significant role in a pedestrian’s risk. In a review of hundreds of pedestrian deaths over a 15-year period, researchers found that more than half of the pedestrians killed had high blood alcohol levels. The second riskiest day of the year for pedestrians is Halloween.
Pedestrian accidents account for about 10 percent of motor vehicle crash deaths each year, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In 2012, 36 percent of fatally injured pedestrians 16 and older had blood alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent. The percentage of deaths rose to 51 percent for crashes occurring from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Thirteen percent of pedestrian deaths in 2012 involved drivers with blood alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent.
Obviously, walking is a better choice than driving if you or your driver have had too much to drink. But the better choice might be to call a taxi or spend the night rather than hitting the streets on foot.
Black-eyed peas may not bring luck, but they are good for you. A common Southern tradition is to eat black-eyed peas to bring luck and good fortune in the new year. While they may not always bring fortune, black-eyed peas and all beans are good for health. They are a good source of fiber, potassium, protein, iron and other nutrients, and bean-eating is associated with lower cholesterol.
And here’s a bonus. In one study of bean-eating, researchers found that black-eyed peas caused the least amount of flatulence. About half the study subjects who ate pinto bean and baked beans reported a rise in flatulence after eating beans, while only 19 percent of the black-eyed pea eaters reported more gas over the 12 week study period.