This Thanksgiving, it’s time to answer the question on everyone’s mind. Can spending time with your family over the holidays kill you?
Much is written every year regarding the health risks around holidays. Thanksgiving, for example, has the highest number of automobile fatalities of any day in the year, whereas Christmas sees the most cardiac death. And websites high and low have chronicled the risks of eating undercooked turkey, contaminated stuffing, pesticide-riddled cranberries, and all the rest.
But that’s all standard braying. Let’s get to the medical literature about the true main event. Does old-fashioned aggravation—emotional wear and tear, agita, tsuris, call it what you will—really take years off your life? And if so, can it cause you to literally drop dead from that ominous condition called “sudden death”? In other words, can spending time with your family be lethal?