New Year, New You or is it?

Happy New Year - or is it too late to say that? Eleven days in and how are the resolutions going? In this, the first blog of 2019, two Fuse experts take a wry look at the healthy change rhetoric around at this time of year.

New year, new backlash?

Amelia Lake, Associate Director of Fuse and Reader in Public Health Nutrition at Teesside University

Annually we have a period of feast (December) followed by a period of resolution and attempted behaviour change. Is it just me, or is there a trend away from the new year new you pressure? While there is the January diet season and 'detox' season (which requires a blog post in itself), there is also the increase in gym membership (in this article in the Independent, one gym claims a 40% increase in web traffic between December and January). Also the Veganuary campaign, encouraging people to try a vegan diet for the month, which passed 225,000 sign-ups in its first week.

I may be stating the obvious here but we go from excess to aspired deprivation. Add into the mix the oh so helpful food environment. Did anyone else notice Easter eggs appearing in supermarkets on Boxing Day? Just as pestered parents (me) breathed a sigh of relief that the queue at our local convenience store (Co-op I’m looking at you) wouldn’t be filled with chocolate after Christmas – no…. we've already moved onto April’s feasting!

Back to the new year new you backlash, there seems to be a movement away from drastic change and a desire to be self accepting, more realistic and thoughtful about food. I have noticed a number of intuitive eating books thrust into the limelight and a trend towards body acceptance.

I appreciate that social media in general can be an echo chamber. In the world of nutrition on twitter and instagram, I try to follow people with qualifications in nutrition, as opposed to the general #nutribollocks which is so abundant at this time of year.

However #nutribollocks or not, intuitive eating or not, detoxing or not… we are surrounded (physical, advertising, online) with unhealthy options, also known as the Obesogenic Environment. Finding the healthy option still remains challenging. With the increase in popularity of vegetarianism and veganism[1], food outlets have a broader range available, for example the now infamous VeganSausageRoll - still not a healthy option, but what an incredible social media team!

So despite the rhetoric at this time of year about healthy changes, until we have systemic changes in our environment that make the healthy option the easy option, that make it easy and safe for us to build exercise into our daily life, that make alcohol less accessible, we are not going to have a healthy population.

Amelia is a dietitian and public health nutritionist.
@Lakenutrition

The benefits of dry January and remembering Scotch & Wry

John Mooney, Fuse Associate and University of Sunderland Senior Public Health Lecturer

The late Scottish Comedian Rikki Fulton’s sketch entitled New Year’s day sums up perfectly the rationale and motivation that many might share for giving up the demon drink, at least for a while, as the New Year dawns. Learning of the events of the previous night’s ‘Hogmanay party’, during which he had gambled away his car in a poker game and set fire to and destroyed his own uninsured house, the revelation that he had won a 5 litre bottle of whisky in the raffle was precious little compensation!

For most people choosing to abstain from alcohol in January however, their reasons are usually less extreme! Indeed one of the criticisms of the concept of “dry January” is that those most likely to successfully abstain are probably already light drinkers in any case and the resulting likely health gains are correspondingly small. At the other extreme of course, for those who are dependent on alcohol (by clinical definition), impersonating the Christmas leftovers by going ‘cold-turkey’ with respect to alcohol, can have serious adverse health consequences such as convulsions etc. and should be avoided. An evaluation by de Vocht and colleagues published in 2016 showed that while ‘dry January’ led to an increase in attempts to cut down, any detectable impact on consumption remained elusive[2]. In an era in which excess alcohol consumption has become normalised and the price of alcohol in real terms has never been cheaper (in the absence as yet of minimum unit pricing for most of the UK), the overwhelming consensus is that most of the population would benefit from reducing their alcohol consumption, particularly if the resolution held all year round!

John is a public health specialist and a part-time public health stand-up comedian.
@StandupforPHlth


References:

1. "In May 2016, the Vegan Society commissioned Ipsos Mori to poll 10,000 people on their dietary habits and found that Britain’s vegan population had increased from 150,000 to 542,000 in the space of a decade (alongside a vegetarian population of 1.14 million".  Hancox, D. (2018).  The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream. The Guardian, [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/01/vegans-are-coming-millennials-health-climate-change-animal-welfare [Accessed 10 Jan. 2019].
2. de Vocht F, Brown J, Beard E, Angus C, Brennan A, Michie S, Campbell R, Hickman M: Temporal patterns of alcohol consumption and attempts to reduce alcohol intake in England. BMC public health 2016, 16(1):917.