If you’re in good enough shape to read this post then I’m sure you’re just fine, but…well, it’s worth a look to see what the latest research says about all that refined sugar and/or alcohol you just consumed.

1. You might not remember stuff. You would think that this is because of the alcohol, but actually, this one’s about the candy. New research in Behavioral Neuroscience shows that when people are on a high fat and refined sugar diet, they have significantly impaired hippocampal memory. This means that the people in the study had trouble forming new memories about their experiences…like what they had even eaten. Depending on how many Skittles you’ve been popping, there’s a chance you might not recall as much as you would have if you’d opted for tricks instead of treats.

2. You might have ended up in the hospital. I don’t mean from alcohol poisoning, although that’s certainly the case for some, but I’m referring to alcohol-related injuries. A recent data analysis exercise estimates that a whopping 21% of hospitalized injuries are attributable to alcohol. A heavy drinker with alcohol in his/her system is anywhere between 4 and 7 times as likely to end up in the hospital with an injury when compared to someone who hasn’t hit the bottle. “But I’m not a heavy drinker!” you say. Turns out, moderate drinkers suffer more injuries per hour with alcohol in their systems than heavy drinkers do, and the occasional binge definitely raises hospital injury risk.

3. You might have had a fight with your significant other. A study in New Zealand found that alcohol was involved in more than 25% of altercations between intimate partners. Women were more likely to report anger, fear, and severity of aggression while feeling victimized, and the perceived severity was significantly greater if the male partner had been drinking. However, men and women claimed approximately equal rates of being the victim or the perpetrator of the aggression. You see, when alcohol’s involved in lovers’ spats, nobody wins.

4. You might have kick-started your heart disease. I hate to scare you, but a science journal called Atherosclerosis probably knows what it’s talking about. Researchers in New York took mice and divided them into three groups: group 1 had two drinks per day, seven days a week (“daily-moderate” drinkers; blood alcohol content 0.07%); group 2 had seven drinks per day, two days a week (“weekend-binge” drinkers; blood alcohol content 0.23%); group 3 had no alcohol (same number of calories, though). While good and bad cholesterol levels rose in both drinking groups, bad cholesterol went up significantly more in the binge-drinking mice. And although the researchers induced atherosclerosis (clogging of the arteries of the heart) in all groups, the moderate-drinking mice actually had smaller atherosclerotic plaques than the no alcohol group; plaque volume was significantly greater in the weekend-binging mice.

Don’t kill the messenger, folks! But do be safe the next time you’re out having your candy- and alcohol-fueled party nights. Your memory/uninjured body/significant other/arteries will thank you.

Stay nerdy! And look way over to the right hand side of the site – you can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our RSS. Everybody wins!

Francis HM, & Stevenson RJ (2011). Higher reported saturated fat and refined sugar intake is associated with reduced hippocampal-dependent memory and sensitivity to interoceptive signals. Behavioral neuroscience PMID: 22023100

Miller TR, & Spicer RS (2011). Hospital-Admitted Injury Attributable to Alcohol. Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research PMID: 22004026

Connor JL, Kypri K, Bell ML, & Cousins K (2011). Alcohol involvement in aggression between intimate partners in New Zealand: a national cross-sectional study. BMJ open, 1 (1) PMID: 22021745

Liu W, Redmond EM, Morrow D, & Cullen JP (2011). Differential effects of daily-moderate versus weekend-binge alcohol consumption on atherosclerotic plaque development in mice. Atherosclerosis PMID: 21930274

Nerdy AND cute...as long as he wasn't actually born on Oct. 31.

So, it’s October and Halloween is just a few weeks away! You’re thinking about costume ideas, maybe planning a party and, oh yeah, you’re doing your darndest not to give birth on the creepiest day of the year, a holiday that some say celebrates paganism.

“But wait, what does Halloween Day have to do with giving birth? Or any day, for that matter? Don’t women just have babies when the time comes?” Well, apparently not, because, according to researchers at Yale, women can and do choose to avoid bringing their babies into the world concurrently with the “Festival of the Dead.”

I’m not just talking C-sections — the phenomenon inexplicably holds true for C-sections and spontaneous births. And Halloween isn’t the only holiday that has women strongly influencing their birth timing, either. This research ultimately leaves me with more questions than answers, but sometimes that’s the best kind of science.

Cute

Ah, Valentine’s Day, a sweet day of love, right? Even if you’re woefully single, you can at least imagine the love that a mother has for her child, which certainly has a positive connotation. Flowers, cards, and candy also don’t hurt this day’s reputation.

But Halloween? Sure, it’s fun from ages 3-13 (and then again after 21…), but on some level, you can’t help but worry about whether your house is going to get egged or toilet papered. And despite the candy, let’s be honest — witches and death are not inherently warm and fuzzy concepts.

Sinister...?

So, going on the logic that Valentine’s Day has a positive cultural representation and   Halloween has a negative one, these scientists set out to see whether the perceptions of these days could influence births — even spontaneous births, which have been considered beyond a pregnant woman’s control. [The benefit of studying these days is that they have strong cultural participation, but doctors are generally present at work; this is in contrast to, say, Christmas, where the connotations might be positive, but doctors are on vacation.]

Using 10-years’ worth of U.S. birth certificate data provided by the National Center for Health Statistics, the researchers focused on the two-week period spanning Valentine’s Day and Halloween. The results are straight-forward and don’t need much preamble:

Natural and C-section births jumped significantly on Valentine’s Day, with the overall increased likelihood of giving birth being calculated at 5% for the day of love.

Halloween, on the other hand? Different story:

All types of births — natural, C-section, induced — decreased significantly on All Hallows’ Eve. Overall, a whopping 11.3% decrease in births was seen on this day across the years. That’s a pretty clear indicator that women don’t want their babies associated with hauntings and horror.

Okay, so the numbers are definitive. But how could women exert control over when they give birth?! The short answer is that no one has any idea. The closest that these authors come to suggesting a psychophysiological mechanism is to say that wanting to give birth on Valentine’s Day and resisting giving birth on Halloween could, for a short time, alter the hormonal mechanisms responsible for determining birth timing.

More work needs to be done to understand the biology of how this is happening and I, for one, can’t wait to see what comes of this area of study.

Levy BR, Chung PH, & Slade MD (2011). Influence of Valentine’s Day and Halloween on Birth Timing. Social science & medicine (1982), 73 (8), 1246-8 PMID: 21880409