Josie Ford
Increasing perimeters
Some people are big on holidays – bigger than they were before those holidays. A team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University of Valladolid, Spain, sized up some first-year undergraduate nursing students, then wrote about it in a paper called “Preliminary study of the increase in health science students’ body mass index during the Christmas holidays“.
The researchers assessed changes in the weight and waist circumference of 67 students during the course of Christmas vacation. They asked students to measure themselves on 23 December, the day before the holidays officially started, and again at two specified points during the break, then finally on 13 January, the day general university activities officially resumed.
(Presumably the students were honest and accurate. However, the study includes the careful statement “This was a preliminary pilot study with self-reports. It is known that these reports tend to underestimate weight.”) The self-reported numbers show that, on average, body weight went up by about half a kilogram during the holiday, then came back down by the return to campus.
The study says: “As a whole, the students who weighed more had a greater tendency to gain more weight, in the case of both males and females.” What (not just how much) the students ate may, the study suggests, have played a sizeable role: “The students with a high-fat diet presented with a more pronounced change in weight.”
What new hill of beans does this up-and-down poundage amount to? The study concludes: “Although the weight gain was not alarming, it does point to the possibility of weight gain among young adults during vacation periods.”
What of the student waistline size (the study calls it “abdominal perimeter”)? That increased, on average, by about a centimetre and stayed that way. In other words: post-holiday, people tended to be just a little stouter.
A small holiday bite
Little things that happen during any holiday can, thanks to the timing, be especially memorable.
So it is with the case of the snake that bit the genitals of a defecating man. G. H. Dijkema at Rijnstate hospital in the Netherlands and colleagues lay forth the details in a report called “Scrotal necrosis after cobra (Naja annulifera) envenomation“.
Essentially, this is a simple tale. The team compresses the basic facts into a single sentence: “A 47-year-old otherwise healthy male was on holiday in a South African nature reserve, and while toileting, a snake struck from the toilet and bit his genitals.”
Enough extra detail is added to fill two and a half pages, spiced up with three photos of the injured body part. The authors also add this kindly thought: “Our take home message? Always flush the toilet before sitting down in countries notorious for their snake population!”
A new holiday tradition
Some families like to gather to read aloud holiday stories, » …
Read More rnrn
