Healthier holiday eating and smart food swaps with Dr. Federica Amati

Why do we eat differently at Christmas, and how does it affect our health?

For many of us, festive eating means rich food, bigger portions, and indulging in treats we might avoid the rest of the year.

But what actually happens to our bodies when we overeat, drink more, and swap fibre for sugar? And is there a way to enjoy the season’s pleasures without starting January full of regret?

Dr Federica shares practical suggestions for gut-friendly food swaps, festive traditions worth reviving, and the one ingredient she always includes on her own Christmas table. This episode is full of helpful advice on how to care for your body in a season that often asks us to do the opposite.

What does your holiday eating routine say about your habits, and how could you shift your approach without giving up what you love?

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Recipe links:

• Juno's Lasagne

• Roasted Aubergine Traybake

• Lentil Pate

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Transcript

Jonathan: Federica, thank you for joining me today.

Federica: Hi, Jonathan. I'm looking forward to today.

Jonathan: So I don't need to tell you about the rules. We are going to do some quickfire questions. Are you ready to go? 

Federica: Yes. 

Jonathan: Is it bad to have a massive festive meal with all the trimmings?

Federica: No.

Jonathan: Can I indulge for a month and then just fix it with a month's detox afterwards? 

Federica: No.

Jonathan: During the festive season, can you look after your gut and enjoy the fun?

Federica: Absolutely.

Jonathan: Are the extra treats worse than the extra alcohol over this period?

Federica: Ooh, that's a really good one. It depends, but probably not.

Jonathan: Do Brussels sprouts really contain more vitamin C than oranges and orange juice? 

Federica: Yes. 

Jonathan:  And finally, tell us: what have you asked Santa for this year?

Federica: I asked him for more time away with my children who are at that age now, where it's magical to go on holiday with them. So planning a few special trips

Jonathan: And has your boss said yes.

Federica: I'm about to submit that request.

Jonathan: For many of us, the period from late November to Christmas is a time when we cut loose. We eat more sweet treats than we need. 

I overindulge on the mulled wine and tend to graze on snacks all day long. And I think it can feel like we're undoing the good work we put in throughout the rest of the year. 

Federica, I know you've come along to share some recipes, some smart food swaps, but also some strategies for a healthier Christmas this year without having any less fun, which I think is important because I definitely really enjoy this time of year and I want to keep enjoying it. 

But first I want to get an idea of how bad Christmas really is for our health and for those microbes in our gut.

Federica: Yeah, so there is a danger with the overindulgence, especially if you already have an underlying condition, Jonathan. 

So if you're somebody who's already struggling with maybe a heart condition, or perhaps you already have type two diabetes, or you are someone who's living with obesity, then actually overindulging in a really major way can actually pose a health risk. 

So we do see this very clear signal in the data that people tend to have more heart attacks right around Christmas, more heart attacks globally. So it's definitely to do with Christmas itself and these festive periods where we tend to overeat essentially and overeat the wrong kinds of foods. 

So if you are already at risk, you do actually have to be quite mindful not to put that kind of stress on your body. 

If you're somebody who's generally healthy and you are spending three days with your family and you might eat something a bit different and those three days and eat more than usual, then it's likely to be okay. It's 1% of the year. So what's much more important is how consistent you are most of the time. 

But I think we do need to reframe this idea that around Christmas or any kind of festive period, you can go absolutely overboard. There's really no need for it. And I think part of the reason we do it is not for family or friends or for tradition. It's actually commercial. 

So we know and we can see everywhere that the food industry puts out these special Christmas foods, special Christmas snacks that don't exist any other time of the year. And it's this really strong commercial push to make us buy foods that frankly don't have a place in our table at all. 

So I think there is something there.

Jonathan: That's really interesting. I had always thought about Christmas as quite commercial. But really through the lens of presents. I never really thought about it as being important for big food companies. 

Federica: Well, they're a retailer too, and they want you to buy even more food at Christmas. 

Now, of course, the origins of Christmas and of lots of these other religious festivals is actually about giving to the community and sharing special occasions together and coming together as a community. 

So it's less about giving things and more about giving your time and affection and looking out for those who are maybe less fortunate. 

But the food industry is also a retailer. They have this amazing opportunity to sell you products that are uniquely designed to tap into this idea of special holiday moments. And it's, I think it grows year on year. 

So you see more and more bizarre products come to market, which never existed before, and which are designed solely to capitalize on this moment in time in our calendars where we tend to be at home. 

We have more public holidays, so whether you celebrate Christmas or not, you get a couple of days off extra to stay home. So you see this big increase in Christmas-specific, festive-specific foods that are then purchased. 

You can look at household expenditure. It's much higher for food around this time compared to the rest of the year.

Jonathan: So are we talking about just Christmas day or are you talking about buying all of this stuff really from the beginning of December that you start eating?

Federica: Yeah, so it does start sort of mid of December when you have Christmas parties and you start buying for Christmas, for Christmas Day celebrations, and then of course leading up to New Year's Eve

Jonathan: And is this commercialization of the food of Christmas, you know, something very new.

Federica: It's fairly new. It's something that's really grown a lot in the past 20 years or so. And what's bad about it, unfortunately, is that the foods are generally high-risk processed foods that are extremely good for profit margins and don't have any real quality ingredients going into them. 

So unfortunately, a lot of these foods tend to be high in salt. As I said, high risk processed additives that we don't need very high energy intake rate. So one tiny little sweet or confectionary or bite of sausage and something has a lot of calories per bite, and then also they're hyper palatable. 

They have lots of sodium salt, sugar, fat, so that when you eat it, it tastes delicious, but it really isn't doing any favors for your body. 

It's really interesting, Jonathan. There's a whole period of time around August when the major retailers showcase their latest Christmas and festive food offerings. So food scientists spend time in the earlier part of the year, pulling together new concoctions that are even more delicious and even more bizarre to then bring to market, showcase them to retailers in August, and then bring to market for Christmas. It's calculated and it is absolutely one of the ways that big food makes more money.

Jonathan: So I'm a bit shocked by this because I think I naively think about Christmas as being somehow this traditional meal, and I know that people listening tend to have very different traditions about exactly what they eat on Christmas. 

So I think about that as being very traditional. But here you're talking about something incredibly commercial, trying to push something that I'm going to buy, I'm going to spend a lot of money on, but where they've really focused on sort of the worst sort of processed food.

Federica: Christmas does have a very commercial history though. Jonathan Coca-Cola is the best example. Do you remember the Coca-Cola truck advert with the lights and the jingle? I remember it throughout my whole childhood and early adulthood. It marked the start of Christmas and famously it was Coca-Cola. It dressed Santa Claus in red, right?

Jonathan: You are surely pulling my leg. I do not believe that Father Christmas was green before Coca-Cola made him red.

Federica: Father Christmas is based on Santa Claus, who is a traditional German figure, and he wears green. He does not wear red.

Jonathan: And so this was like a hundred years ago or something?

Federica: Yes. About a hundred years ago. Exactly. Turned Santa Claus red and it has stuck.

Jonathan: That is extraordinary. I did not know that. 

How much does it matter if I really indulge myself for a day or two? Because in my mind, somehow there's this big difference between what I might do for a day or two and what I might do if I basically let loose from the end of November. You know, listeners in America are obviously doing Thanksgiving, but you know, for everyone around the world, that's sort of when all the Christmas parties and all the food ads come on. 

So letting loose for really that month, what does that look like for our, our health and indeed our, our gut health? Are they both bad?

Federica: The one or two days, within reason, are likely to be something that we can recover from quite quickly. 

A full month of eating in a way that really doesn't support your health and doesn't look after your gut microbes, you're going to feel the effect of that for longer, obviously, and it will take longer to go back to a baseline where you feel good again. 

Let's just rephrase it. It doesn't have to mean eating so much that you feel sick. It doesn't have to mean drinking so much more alcohol than usual that you have a stinking hangover the next day, right? 

Why don't we focus on really enjoying the flavors, enjoying the foods that we love, being mindful around how much we put on our plates. And then enjoying the company and the actual spirit of Christmas or whatever festival you're celebrating, which is this really awesome opportunity to come together and to share favorite foods.

Jonathan: So can I harm my gut microbiome if I eat all the things that I don't normally eat on Christmas day? And then what about if I do that not just for Christmas day? You know, it's for the whole of December.

Federica: Yeah. So there's a few foods and drinks that really harm our gut microbiome the most at this time. 

So it's things like processed red meats, sausages, salamis, all that sort of thing. Alcohol is so detrimental to our gut microbiome. It's very pro-inflammatory. Now, of course, having a glass of wine with your meal and perhaps a sherry after dinner, that's going to be okay. Your body can recover from that. 

But if you find that you are drinking consistently several glasses for the entire day, that will actually really harm your gut microbiome and you will feel it the next day. 

So those are the things to really watch out for as well as foods that are particularly high in added sugars and fats. So here we're talking about the commercially produced confectionery, the commercial ice creams, commercial cakes, and pastries. 

Our gut microbes really don't like being flooded with these types of fats. So think of your gut microbiome as having layers, right? So the very top layers every time you go to the toilet, they leave your body, right? So they're very superficial. They go with the rest of the waste. 

Then the middle layers are more stable, but they're influenced by the food you eat, the things you drink, the medications you're taking. 

And the very bottom layer is the cornerstone species. They're the ones that you have since childhood. They're very difficult to change. They're the ones right by the gut lining. 

So when you eat or drink for a couple of days, in a way that's not helpful, your top player's going to suffer. So those guys can't make the helpful metabolites, the helpful chemicals that usually help you, and they tend to make things that are more inflammatory. 

So that pro-inflammatory environment does affect the middle layers a bit. But if you do that for a whole month, then the top layer is really suffering. The middle layer starts to also create pro-inflammatory chemicals, and it can actually affect the bottom layer where then you start to see that your intestinal barrier and the mucus that's supposed to protect you starts to separate and break, and then you can really have more serious effects such as inflammation in the gut, symptoms of things like IBS and just discomfort. 

And we do know that this kind of inflammation in the gut doesn't just stay in the gut. When you have inflammation in the gut, it travels to the rest of your body. It's what we call systemic. 

So we need to support our gut health, especially if Christmas for you, is in the winter months, because that's when we have the highest rates of viruses and bacteria.

Jonathan: So is your story therefore, just don't indulge, in order to protect your health?

Federica: You can have delicious foods that are also good for you. You can indulge in foods that support your health.

That's why I want to reframe this idea that you can only have had a proper Christmas if you were drinking Bailey's all day and you know, eating a variety of pastries. 

Jonathan: But what about, let's say I'd really like to have some cake. In the UK we eat these things called mince pies. They're definitely not healthy for me. I know that they score really badly on my ZOE app, but I would like to have some.

Do I have to give them up?

Federica: No. So especially if they're homemade mince pies. They're going to be much healthier for you than ones from a supermarket. 

We look at the dietary pattern altogether, right? So if you're enjoying minced pies, but then you're also having a wholesome roast with lots of root vegetables, delicious seasonal fruits and nuts, that is going to be a really lovely, balanced, healthy day of eating, including the mince pie. Absolutely. 

So I'm Italian and panettone is an absolute staple in my house. Every Christmas I choose to get one that is made by a baker with a sourdough. It's really special, which also means we only get one and we enjoy it so much, only at Christmas. But it's absolutely part of our diet for that time, for that whole week we have Panettone in the house. We love it.

Jonathan: So that's brilliant. So I think you're telling us, which is nice to hear, that we don't need to worry too much about having a delicious meal on Christmas day. Just sort of think a bit about what we actually want to have there. 

So before we go on and get some delicious food tips from you Federica, because I know you're going to give us some actual things that we could do. 

I would like to bust some common Christmas food myths because we had a lot of questions from listeners on this. And let me start with the one that I thought was most fun: does turkey make you tired?

Federica: Yeah. So there's a belief about turkey making you tired and there is a lot of tryptophan in turkey, which is an amino acid, which is involved with the production of serotonin that helps with sleep. 

So that's why people think there's science behind it, but actually there's not enough tryptophan in turkey to induce sleepiness. So it's more to do with how much you ate than the turkey and its chemical properties.

Jonathan: Got it. So I could swap the turkey for beef, I'm going to be just as tired because basically I ate an entire day's food in one meal in two hours in one meal. 

Federica: And a good way to combat this is have portions that feel right for your body. So don't stretch it. And a good Christmas walk has lots of benefits. 

Jonathan: Does sugar make kids hyperactive?

Federica: So this belief is really ingrained in society's sort of psyche, but there's plenty of trials and metaanalysis that show that it doesn't, no. Sugar does not make children hyperactive by itself.

Children in randomized controlled trials, they're fed extra sugar. And interestingly, they've done this sort of study in neurotypical children as well as neurodiverse children. And sugar doesn't make children hyperactive, it doesn't result in hyperactive behavior. 

There's some data that shows that high-risk processed foods with specific additives may increase hyperactivity in neurodivergent children. So there is some evidence, and some clinicians really believe that reducing these kinds of foods in children's diet can make a big difference.

Jonathan: It's not the sugar, but it could be all of these additives in these sort of high-risk processed foods, which you tend to have all wrapped around the children's parties or whatever, that might be what is making children hyperactive.

Federica: Not all children, it's a percentage of children who have neurodiversity really, really do feel hyperactive after consuming these foods. 

You want to be mindful of children's health anyway. We need to teach good dental hygiene from a young age. 

I have to say as well, sugary drinks are a big problem around Christmas. There's much higher consumption of sugary drinks. Generally, people tend to consume more sugar-sweetened beverages, whether it's eggnog or alcoholic drinks like Bailey's that also have sugar and that is problematic. 

Your blood fats go up a lot after Christmas, so you should never have your blood test straight after Christmas, by the way. Because there's this false blip where pretty much everyone has increases in their triglycerides, which are directly related to how much sugar you've consumed.

Jonathan: So we do generally eat so badly around the Christmas period that our bloods are worse in the week or two after Christmas. 

Federica: At a global level, you see this real unusual hyperlipidemia straight after Christmas. 

Jonathan: It's slightly terrifying. Just rather suggest that overall we're not doing very well.

And just finishing on the sugar: so if it doesn't make kids hyperactive, why is it still bad to be giving them lots of sugar?

Federica: So lots of sugar, so bad for their teeth and sugar, itt's not nutritious, so it doesn't have any nutrients with it. And children are very, especially young children, are very good at regulating their appetite. 

So if you're giving them energy in the form of sugar, they will then have less appetite for more nutritious foods. So if you give them loads of candies that are high in sugar but don't have any of the nutrients that you actually want them to get, they'll have less space to then enjoy the foods that are actually nutritious for them. 

Also, you know, children are very resilient in terms of their metabolic responses, but we still don't want to challenge children's metabolism from a young age with loads of sugar. It doesn't set them up for success later in life. 

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This isn't about not letting children ever have sugar, right? We need children to grow up with a healthy relationship with food. So it's about helping them to understand that certain foods, like candies, have a place, but they don't give them the right kind of energy. They don't help their bones grow strong. They don't help their muscles grow strong, and they don't help their brains think quickly. 

So it's all about helping children to understand the role that each food can play in their health, and making sure that throughout the day, most of their food is naturally flavored in the sense that it's a whole food flavor. 

So avoid, for example, always using ketchups or sweeter sauces with children's food so they can enjoy the different flavors in food.

Jonathan: I love this and I know you are extremely impressive with what you get your kids to eat. 

I am always rather embarrassed, as co-founder ZOE here, how hard it is to get my daughter to eat the food that I would like to eat. And we talk all the time about supporting your gut microbes. But she's about as stubborn as her parents, so it's probably not totally surprising.

Federica: Kids love feeding their gut microbes. My children love Ziggy. If you explain to them that you have these trillions of microbes and you can show them pictures, Ziggy is a great example. They will really engage with that.

Jonathan: So I should explain to anybody listening who's not a ZOE member and doesn't have the app that Federica is talking about using the app. And there's this character, Ziggy, and the answer is that my daughter loves it. 

When I snap a photo of my breakfast, she almost always takes it away from me and wants to take a photo of hers. You're absolutely right, and she really likes the idea of feeding Ziggy with what she's eating. So I think that does work.

I'm going to move back to Christmas, however, because I need you to answer this question: is eggnog bad for you? And could you clarify for those of us who don’t know what eggnog is, what's exactly in it?

Federica: So eggnog is a very traditional drink for Christmas, and it's egg yolks whisked with a lot of sugar. A lot of egg yolks, I might add, like eight egg yolks, whisked with a lot of sugar whipping cream or double cream milk, ace and alcohol.

Jonathan: So it's not sounding super healthy at this point.

Federica: No, it's not a healthy drink. It's one of those things that I think when people had very little food and very little access to high-energy foods, this would've been a real treat because it is actually super nutrient-dense from the egg yolks and it has a lot of fat, a lot of sugar and alcohol is optional in some recipes. 

We talked earlier about people who are already at higher risk of things like heart attacks: eggnog would not be a good choice. 

It's kind of a no from me unless it's something that is such a part of your family tradition, having a small amount will be fine.

Jonathan: I went to Montreal in the winter for the first time a couple of years ago, and I don't know if you've ever been there, Federica, but they have a diet where everything is layered in huge amounts of cheese. And enormous deep fried stuff. 

They're saying this is very much the traditional cuisine of their ancestors. And Montreal is in Canada, it's incredibly cold. And they were saying, well look, our grandparents would go out and work all day in the freezing cold winter. So then they burnt off all this energy and so you come back and eat all of this.

Once upon time, this was a treat. You didn't eat anything like this for a month, and you're doing all of this physical activity. Now we're actually surrounded by too much of this sort of food all the time.

Federica: Yes. Now we live sedentary lifestyles in very climate-controlled conditions, and most of us are not doing manual labor and we have an absolute overabundance of fat, especially fat and sugar. It's everywhere.

Jonathan: Should we all do a detox after Christmas?

Federica: This question comes up a lot. There is this belief that if you just hit the reset button with a detox, it might help. 

Now, unfortunately, most commercially available detoxes are things like teas, pills, drinks. Some of them can actually be very dangerous for health. 

We have to remember our lungs, our skin, our guts, our liver and our kidneys do a fantastic function of detoxing for us. So if you feel like you need to hit the reset button because you have gone too hard, just support your body to do its job properly. It will be able to detox for you. 

There are ways of doing this that don't include buying any detox products online. Have a really gut-centric diet, lots of fruits and vegetables, 30 plants a week. Make sure you're getting enough fiber.

Some people might actually consider switching to a plant-based diet for a few days, because that can really help to just give your body a bit of a break if you've had a lot of animal-based fats, like cheese and perhaps turkey or beef. 

And also make sure you're not drinking alcohol. It is a toxin for our bodies, so that will help you feel better. But I would steer clear of any products that sell themselves as a detox solution. 

Jonathan: I think it really clear that any of these detox solutions are just bad and can be positively risky.

Federica: Yeah, so some of the detox teas and detox pills can actually see you end up in hospital. They sometimes contain diuretics or other chemicals that have an actual effect on your body. 

So all these concoctions are pretty unregulated because they tend to fall under supplement and they can actually have very negative effects on health. 

So every year we see reports of people who are maybe drinking five detoxes a day, and then, as I said, end up in hospital, with dehydration or sometimes some of the pills that people buy cause diarrhea to help you flush out. And that can obviously make you feel terrible and lead to complications. So don't do it, just don't buy them. 

So we obviously ran the big IF study, ZOE, the biggest study on time restricted eating. And we do see that people who have a fasting window overnight of between 12 and 14 hours feel better. 

Our snacking study showed that eating after 9:00 PM is detrimental for our metabolic health. So maybe rein it back, 9:00 PM cutoff, a good, 12 to 14 hour overnight fast. 

These are evidence-based ways to help your body get back to feeling better.

The fast-mimicking diet is gaining traction as a well-respected short five, day intervention where you really reduce your food intake for five days. But you have to really do that with the supervision of someone who knows how to do it. Those are the options that are evidence-based. 

Water should be your main drink, so if you've been drinking lots of sodas and sweetened drinks and alcohol at Christmas. Go back to good old water. You can put some cucumber in it and mint if you want it to taste slightly different, but really, re-embrace water as your main drink as well.

Jonathan: Am I still allowed my tea and coffee?

Federica: Of course, Jonathan. So tea and coffee are really good for us. Just be aware whether you are caffeine sensitive or not, which is genetic, so you can't change it. If you are caffeine sensitive, you might opt for decaf. 

Your body will do its job of detoxing for you if you help look after it.

Jonathan: So I think that's incredibly exciting to have a very proactive plan for what you can do.

I think lots of people listening to this are going to be quite surprised though, because I think the vision that most of us have after indulging in this whole Christmas period is sort of this detox and it might not be buying some special detox product, but more the idea of being really restrictive. 

So I think about at the high end, people going off to some sanitorium in the Swiss Alps to be fed one cucumber soup a day for a week and basically be starved and this is going to detox them. 

And you're describing actually eating loads of stuff, so wouldn't it be better for me to just really cut back and hardly eat anything and live on the cucumber soup?

Federica: Those really fancy clinics, I was lucky to try one. And they give you things like the fasting-mimicking diet, which is a well-researched sort of diet, which restricts food right down to 800 calories a day. Don't try that at home. It's incredibly hard to do and you don't need to do it. 

What you need to do at home is not restrict the foods that are going to help your body do its functions. 

So if you restrict fiber, if you restrict plants, if you restrict access to these healthy compounds like the bioactive chemicals in our plants that make them colorful, you are basically not giving your body the tools that it needs to help the detox process. 

Omega-3 fatty acids play a really important role in our liver being able to go to detox and remove excess fats, for example. Now Omega-3 fatty acids are found in oily fish and they're found in seaweeds and in certain types of seeds in different forms, right? 

Try to go back to eating at regular meal times. Leafy greens, colorful fruits and vegetables. Nuts and seeds are essential. Whole grains. Whole grains are the single food group that is missing the most from our diets. Reintroduce those back in and fresh fruits. 

All of these foods, what do they all have in common? They all support your gut health. They all support your gut microbiome. 

You can't really go wrong if you feed your gut microbes, you'll be feeding your body the right foods to maximize its detox potential, let's say. And this also means opting for fats from things like extra virgin olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds. 

And the last piece is fermented foods. So making sure that you're reintroducing some of the good microbes that maybe you haven't been having regularly. Three portions a day of fermented foods really help with restoring good gut health and powering up your immune system to reduce unwanted inflammation.

Jonathan: So what's interesting is you're not describing really detox at all in the way that I think about it. You are talking about eating loads of different things in order to achieve this sort of detox, you know, making myself healthier again and adding all of these things in definitely doesn't sound like restricting all my calories or only eating a few things. 

It feels quite the reverse for a lot of people. It's probably eating a lot of things that they have not been traditionally eating.

Federica: It's exactly that. It's actually bringing back the foods onto your plate that are going to be helping your body. 

This idea is positive nutrition Jonathan, and obviously it's a massive principle at ZOE is that let's focus on what we need to add back to our plates, because that will automatically displace the foods that are not serving us.

If we want to call out specific food groups that we should actively reduce, it's alcohol and high-risk processed foods, and how do we do that? Just don't buy them in the supermarket. 

If you're not sure if a food is high risk, you can use your ZOE app. It will give you that information in three seconds flat as soon as you scan a barcode. If you don't have the ZOE app, you can't access this and you're listening to this podcast, try to buy as many foods in their original form, whether it's frozen, tinned, canned, or fresh, and reduce the amounts of foods that you're buying that are prepackaged and pre-prepared for you. That will really help.

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Jonathan: I was just thinking that personally, probably one of the biggest things that I change in my behavior in this period about Christmas and before is I put a lot more things onto my plate that I sort of know are good for me. 

And one of the interesting things actually, that's a very easy way to shift quite significantly the health of my meal. Because funnily enough, you eat all of this and it tastes nice and you've probably got used to it more over the year. And there's less room for the rest.

Federica: Exactly. So I talk about this in my book, everybody should know this. It's the Build Your Plate principle. If you build it with the vegetables, the legumes, the nuts and seeds first, then about half to three quarters of your plate is full, and so then what you have is some space left for the beef, the turkey, the sausage. 

But it's a much smaller proportion of your overall intake because you've looked after the foods that directly contribute to your health and your gut before you have the fun stuff essentially.

Jonathan: Now Federica, I think you've given us lots of tips for what to do both during the Christmas period and then thinking about what to do afterwards. 

But I think we've teased our listeners because we said that you were going to have some recipes for Christmas. Could we talk about maybe some healthy food swaps that are still delicious that you could have at Christmas that aren't going to score 10 on your app and potentially send you to a and e along with the other people eating worse than they should.

Federica: Sure. So there's a recipe from the Food for Life cookbook, which I love. It's Juno's lasagna. So actually, Tim's mom used to make this recipe, and we've tweaked it with some ZOE tweaks. 

It's got plenty of lentils in there. It's delicious. The béchamel sauce is made with healthier ingredients. I'm Italian, as you know, I've said it already. We have lasagna at Christmas. It's a traditional dish for us. 

So how can we make a delicious traditional dish even healthier and introducing mushrooms and lentils and vegetables is a really simple way to do that. It's an absolute family favorite. Everyone loves it. So that's a really good one. 

Then we've got a delicious recipe for a lentil pate. So people love pate at Christmas, but it is very high in saturated fat and salt, so we can make a delicious version using lentils, lots of fiber, lots of polyphenols. It's got this lovely umami flavor. It's spreads beautifully onto your high fiber crackers. It's really good. 

And the other one, which I absolutely adore, is actually a smoked mackerel. But it's using tinned mackerel and you actually have chickpeas in it, and it's stunning. 

So highly recommend making those great for appetizers and to have in the home. I've also found a really, really delicious, healthy yule log recipe, so especially for our American listeners.

Yule logs are really popular. Some of the commercially available ones are dreadful, and this one is really great. It features raspberries, it's got natural yogurt in it, so a very good recipe. 

And if I was to name one more, there's a very nice recipe for a delicious veg tray bake. Vegetables do absolutely feature at Christmas, so how can we make sure that we celebrate the seasonal vegetables, make the most of them? Get lots of different colored carrots, layer them with delicious peppers, red onions, Brussels sprouts. 

You can make a really beautiful, stunning bake that can be the center of your table.

Jonathan: Sounds delicious. 

Federica: Yeah, and it is. And that's the point. Healthy food, it can be delicious

Jonathan: I think we will be able to put the links to these recipes in the show notes. So if you're listening to this, just go to the show notes and you will find the links there. 

Is there anything we can learn from traditional festive foods around the world that are actually gut friendly? Or is everything at this time of year basically bad for us?

Federica: No, I love this question because there's lots of traditional foods that are already festive and gut friendly. 

Lots of the fermented foods, lots of the ferments are traditional around the world, whether it's kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, using miso in your dishes. They will all support your gut health and they are all very traditional and festive. 

Some of the countries in Eastern Europe actually make soup for Christmas, and they use kefir as the creamy base for the soup. 

There's also dishes that include it. We've created a really gorgeous kefir dressing, which we can put in the show notes as well. It tastes amazing and you can add it to your veg.

Jonathan: Why would this be better for my health?

Federica: So if we're using kefir instead of using double cream, for example, which is quite a good swap by the way, if you're cooking in general, you are using a food that has helpful microbes and even if you cook it, yes you will kill the microbes, but there's actually still benefit to those dead microbes. 

It's got a much better saturated fatty acid profile. So everyone's like, well, they both come from milk. Why is it different? The structure, the food matrix of kefir is different to something like a double cream. So the saturated fatty acids are absorbed in a different way, so they don't have the same negative impact on our blood lipids when you get your blood test after Christmas.

Jonathan: So I could swap out the double cream for kefir. It's still going to taste great, but suddenly I've just made this much healthier.

Federica: So much healthier. And if you are planning to use a whipping cream as a filling for your log, you swap it out to a Greek yogurt, like a nice thick Greek yogurt, much better for you, and still gives that lovely creamy consistency that you're looking for. 

Sauerkraut is extremely popular in lots of countries, especially around Christmas, especially the red cabbage kind with cloves in it. Very good side dish. Great to incorporate into your dishes. 

Then of course, the Mediterranean diet is a brilliant way to think about healthy eating. And if we look to traditional dishes in the Mediterranean, they're often full of vegetables. 

In Italy, we eat a lot of fish around Christmas time, so Omega-3 rich foods are part of our traditional festive fayre. We eat smoked salmon, some sort of seafood salad. Use extra virgin olive oil where you can, if extra virgin olive oil is a bit pricey, olive oil is still good for you. 

Then my last tip is to really try it and think about different drinks. So look to lots of cultures where they make delicious mixtures for herbal infusions or water kefir. Of course, I'm not saying we should completely cut out alcohol. 

If you do drink have a really lovely glass of red with your Christmas dinner, that is a classic example of when you would drink. But for the rest of the day and for the weeks surrounding Christmas, let's try to introduce some more interesting drinks from around the world that are actually not alcoholic.

Jonathan: I love it. You've given us so many tips. 

Just before we wrap up, we've really focused on food and drink all the way through this. What else can our listeners do to support their gut health sort of during this holiday period?

Federica: So if you're staying at your parents or grandparents, or sisters or brother's house, if you're moving house, the home biome changes.

So our homes have a specific biome that reflects partly our gut microbiome. So you'll be sort of moving to a different home biome, which will actually impact your gut microbiome composition, which is really interesting. 

So be aware that moving to a different environment and sleeping there actually changes your gut microbiome. There are other things you can do to help support it and try to keep your gut microbiome healthy. 

Exercise is really important, so moving, getting outside for some fresh air. Of course, it can be absolutely freezing around Christmas. Wrap up, warm, get outside as much as you can. Go for walks after your meals, especially those that are slightly larger. Really helps the digestion, helps with your metabolism. Helps your body to shift around the glucose stores and use some of them up and make space for the new sugars and also activates your circulation. Really helps you feel better. 

Sleep is super important, so a lot of us have disrupted sleep at this time. Try to prioritize sleep. Try not to get to bed too late on too many consecutive nights. If you're having one late night, of course that's fine. But then really look after yourself. 

Make sure you're resting. Make sure that you're then prioritizing having a regular sleep schedule because our sleep study showed that social jet lag affects us for a week. So one night where you don't get your regular sleep cycle impacts your metabolism for the week after.

And then we talked a little bit about this, but look after your emotional health. If your family really stresses you out, if you find Christmas a really stressful period...

Jonathan: Surely no one finds Christmas stressful.

Federica: I think I am lucky because my family gets on at the moment. So far, so good. But I know a lot of people that suffer at Christmas because they are sort of forced into these social situations. 

If that's you: look after yourself, put boundaries in place. If you need to spend some more time at home without everybody, do that. It’s just really actually understanding where your limits are.

Jonathan: You're making me laugh about this because I think about my mom's mother, who I love very much and died a long time ago now. 

But famously, at Christmas when we went to stay with her, at some point, my mom, her sister, and her mom were going to have a row, right? It was just going to happen because they're all in the place and it's not quite clear really who's just in charge. Whereas normally it's someone's house and they're in charge. 

Then maybe you have this very high expectation for how the day is, family and very special. And so then everybody's very worked up because it didn't quite live up to their idea of it being perfect.

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Federica: The dream, right? So again, if you are hosting, don't put so much pressure on yourself as well. Just try to enjoy being together. 

The getting outside for a nice walk. Being active also helps to avoid too much time spent together. So do some activities, get outside and spend some time in nature. 

And then last but not least, Jonathan, because we're spending so much time together in rooms and in places: ventilate. It's important to open windows and ventilate rooms and areas where we're spending a lot of time together, all in one place. 

If someone does have a virus they're not aware of, you're just a bit less likely to catch it. So ventilation is your friend. Even in winter, I know it's cold out there, but just an hour of ventilation, open windows, and getting some fresh air into the room is a good idea.

Jonathan: I love it. I'm going to try and do a quick summary. 

So the thing that immediately springs to mind is Christmas was created by Coca-Cola.

Federica: No, Christmas is created by Christianity as a religious festival to come together and give back to our community, and Coca-Cola hijacked it.

Jonathan: But the idea that we have now, even Father Christmas being red, basically these big food companies are a deep part of how we think about Christmas for a really long time. 

And that today, actually, this is this huge commercial opportunity for them to sell lots of food, and I just had never thought about it. So we are basically being marketed to all these foods and these tend to be the worst high-risk processed food. So that I think I'm really shocked by. 

The second thing is sugar doesn't make kids hyperactive. Who knew? But it's still not very good for them. 

Detox online drinks and pills can be really dangerous, so just don't touch them. 

I think we talked a lot about the trade off between Christmas day or a whole month of poor eating. I think what's clear is that if you're eating badly across the whole of December, you're going to really feel the effect. 

You said that there's also higher risks of ending up in A&E [accident and emergency]. 

When you go and get your bloods tested, your blood fats will actually be worse. So this is not good.

And so the big part of this is how it's impacting your gut sort of through this month. And it's the worst time to do this, because actually you want the best immune system that you can have, and actually you're damaging your microbiome and hurting it. 

When we think about what we're eating though, not everything is equally bad. So I think my takeaway was really say, can I reduce these processed red meats? So this is the bacons and the sausages, and things like this. 

Alcohol as well. So not to say that you can't drink, but if you're drinking a lot through this period, it's a real problem. 

Highly processed foods. So all this stuff that is being made by big food companies with additives we don't understand that's designed for the eating rate and the bliss point and all these sorts of things. 

So cakes, and pastries, and biscuits that have been made by these big food companies, and that is significantly worse than something that a friend or neighbor baked at home. 

So what can you do? Well, actually there's quite a lot that you can do during this period. So one is try and have more handmade cakes and things that are not processed foods.

Eat a lot of veg, actually. There tends to be quite a lot there. So how could you sort of prioritize that? 

There are some really interesting swaps you talked about. So you could swap double cream for kefir. It's going to taste very similar, but suddenly you've made this meal much healthier. 

Try other drinks that aren't alcohol. So you're not sort of having that all the time, but you're having maybe some alcohol, but you're mixing it with other things. 

A bunch of things outside of food: go for walks after you have a meal. Try and make sure you're getting enough sleep because this is really going to impact how you metabolize the food later.

And something I never heard before: ventilate. So if you can have all these people round, some of whom are probably sick, make sure you're opening the window. 

And then I think we talked about what do you do after Christmas? I think the message is really clear. Do not detox, that is not going to work. And unless you're going to some Swiss sanitorium, do not try and do some weird fasting thing, which in my experience, nobody can stick with anyway. 

Instead, think about a gut-centric diet. Try to hit 30 plants a week, try to increase more fiber, which is coming from those plants. Try a plant-based diet for a few days. Doesn't mean you need to give up meat and dairy forever, but try that for a few days. 

Try having no alcohol for a few days. Try and do an easy, intermittent fast, meaning just take 12 to 14 hours overnight, not eating. 

Because you're cutting back or hopefully removing the alcohol for a bit, drink lots of water instead. But actually lots of tea and coffee is also good as long as it's not too late in the day. 

And interestingly, all of these things that you're adding in, it's the opposite of what I would think about as detox is basically to repair your microbiome, make it better, and then it's going to do all of these magical things for you.

Federica: Yeah.

Jonathan: And hopefully we do all of that, we can still have a fun Christmas day and fun Christmas period, but not sort of wake up, you know, the day after Christmas day or New Year's Day feeling miserable about ourselves. And therefore be in a better place to hopefully embrace a healthy January.

Federica: Exactly. And to actually enjoy time with your family and come back to January. And actually you feel great, you'll feel ready for the new year.