During the party season we Brits are guilty of gobbling up 10 million turkeys, 45 million pounds worth of mince pies and downing over 200 million bottles of wine!
The festive cheer stops here! It?s time for a detox, and straight-talking holistic nutritionist Gillian McKeith is the woman to show you how. Here?s Gillian?s run down on the top 12 toxic terrors to beat the post-Christmas bloat:
Smoking
12 million adults in the UK smoke cigarettes - and every year an alarming 114,000 smokers die as a result of their habit. If you have a 20 a day habit you?ll be burning a £150 hole in your pocket each month. In a year that?s over eighteen hundred pounds up in smoke!
Caffeine
In a lifetime the average British tea and coffee fanatic will drink around 63,000 cups! A latte made with full fat milk could be the same number of calories as an average sized chocolate bar.
Alcohol
We consume 25 billion alcoholic drinks a year in Britain ? enough to fill 6,000 Olympic size swimming pools! British men do a good line in beer bellies and it?s easy to see why: just one pint could contain the same number of calories as a sugary donut? A pint a night could tot up to a thousand calories a week or every year, up to a stone in weight! Bad for your figure, your heart and your liver.
Chocolate and sweet snacks
In the UK we devour over half a million tonnes of chocolate every year. If you chomped a standard size bar every day of the year on top of your normal daily food intake, you could gain anything up to two stone! So chocoholics be warned - it would take about 45 minutes on a bike to burn off a single bar!
Pub snacks: crisps, nuts, pork scratchings
When it comes to the crunch crisps are simply not good for you. They?re a source of transfatty acids, or bad fats, which when eaten in excess can lead to weight gain, clogging of the arteries, high blood pressure, and even type 2 diabetes. Pork scratchings are another unsaintly snack that Gillian wants you to dump, made of fatty pigskin, salt, additives and preservatives. Yuck!
Processed meat
Processed meat is often derived from bone, fat, gristle and all sorts of other nasties. On top of that hair-raising mixture your processed meat may be padded out with anything up to 30% water, plus gelatine, salt, sugar, starch, preservatives and additives. Then finally it?s put through a mincer, shaped into a meat product and eaten by you!
The White Stuff: white bread, white pasta, white rice
70% of the bread we eat in Britain is White! Much to Gillian?s dismay? And on average a British family of four will eat 2345 slices in a year! Processed white bread is full of chemical improvers and double the amount of yeast that you really need, which can lead to vaginal infections and thrush.
Added sugar
As a nation we purchase over 317,000 tonnes of added sugar each year. 1 tin of baked beans can contain up to 4 teaspoons of sugar; a healthy option meal could contain 5 teaspoons; while a pot of fruit yoghurt could contain as many as 7 teaspoons of sugar. All the sugar you need can be found naturally in fruits. There?s no need to add any more! So shake off that sugar habit!
Lazy food: takeaways and ready meals
In the UK we will eat around 2 billion fast food meals in just one year! An average Indian Tikka Masala meal with fried rice and naan bread will contain high levels of sugar, salt, preservatives, colourings, and over 38 grammes of fat : over half your recommended daily allowance? Wafer thin poppadoms are deep-fried. Think overgrown crisps. Just two could contain 11 grams of fat ? you might as well dunk a donut in your curry. And when you scoff one large handful of Chinese prawn crackers you could be feasting on 12 grams of fat ? as much as you might find in a chocolate bar.
Table salt
Too much salt is reckoned to be responsible for about 35,000 heart attacks and strokes every year. Salt is essential for maintaining a healthy life ? but you don?t need to add any more to your diet, it?s found naturally in many foods we eat.
Bad fats ? saturated fats
Too much saturated fat raises cholesterol levels ? high cholesterol levels can clog the arteries leading to coronary disease and heart attacks 1 in 5 men in the UK die of heart disease; half these deaths are linked to high cholesterol. Contributory factors include a diet high in saturated fat, lack of exercise, being overweight and drinking alcohol excessively.
Fizzy drinks
One can of fizzy drink can contain 6-7 teaspoons of sugar. Just one can a day adds up to 24 bags of sugar a year. Fizzy drinks are laced with additives, some of which have been linked to health problems including bloating, headaches, asthma, allergies, and possible hyperactivity and poor concentration in kids. So, it?s a flat ?no? to fizzy drinks and all the other runners-up in Gillian McKeith?s toxic countdown.
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