Is Santa Claus actually fat? Or is that famously round belly actually bloated with gas? Probs a bit of both.

Bloating is as much a part of Christmas as plum pudding.

Why so?

One of the main causes of bloating is eating large portions, especially fatty and salty foods.

Sitting around in a food coma doesn’t help either.

How and why we bloat

An empty stomach, when it’s the size of a clenched fist, holds about 70 grams of residual gunk.

As you eat too much, the stomach fills and stretches like a balloon from food and gas.

By the time you’ve eaten a few pre-lunch snacks (that damn antipasto), a heavy plate of turkey, ham, pork belly, duck-fat potatoes, a few peas, fat-rich gravy, maybe some salad, then gone back for seconds, then hit the puddings … all which you’ve washed down with a sneaky half litre of booze, your stomach is more than full, to the point of being stretched.

This means it now holds about a litre or more of food.

Swollen stomach, gas-filled gut

This stretching leads to pooling of solids and gases in the gut.

Indeed, the more you eat, the more gas you’re likely to produce as the body keeps to a steady pace of digestion.

Fats in particular take longer to digest. They’ll sit there fermenting, furthering that feeling you’ve turned into a balloon.

All of which doesn’t feel good. And your burps will take on a gastric taste and bite.

As the main meal is cooking, a plate of antipasto should get the gases fermenting.

What worsens the situation are those foods with a high salt (ham, crisps, salamis) content. This leads to water retention in the gut, adding to those feelings of bloating.

A problem with the common advice

It can take hours to days for the body to recover from Christmas bloating.

Recover is the key word. This is why the post-lunch scene on Christmas Day looks like a surgical ward.

The obvious advice is to eat smaller portions and limit salt and fat and avoid the bloat.

Some people are sensible that way. Most are not.

Walking, a heat pad or sipping peppermint tea will help with symptoms.

You might think that drinking some fizzy water might get the gases moving. It will just make bloating worse. So does chewing gum and eating quickly.

You might try slowing down. Again, many people can’t do this.

A kind of mania takes hold when people line up to fill their plates, some primal fear perhaps that all the crackling and the crispier roasted potatoes will have disappeared.

And once they start eating, well, it’s like a starter’s gun has gone off.

So … you’re bloated. It was inevitable.

Along with the soreness and tightness of an over-stuffed stomach comes the flatulence, the burping or belching, the gurgling and rumbling.

What to do?

Sip a mug of peppermint tea.

Then get off the floor, if you can.

Get up and go outside and walk away from the scene of the crime. At first, your steps might have a zombie quality, as if a bomb’s just gone off. Keep walking, taking long and deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

When you return, sip another mug of peppermint tea.

My advice is to take a small packet with you, as a kind of first-aid kit. In fact, it has been used a cure for abdominal pains in Asia for thousands of years.

Peppermint tea, in itself, hasn’t been studied clinically. But its active ingredient, peppermint oil, has been investigated.

According to Healthline, animal studies “indicate that peppermint relaxes your digestive system and may ease pain”.

It also prevents “smooth muscles from contracting, which could relieve spasms in your gut”.

A 2014 review of nine studies in 726 people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) treated with peppermint oil for at least two weeks “concluded that peppermint provided significantly better symptom relief than a placebo”.

In a review of 14 clinical trials in nearly 2000 children, “peppermint reduced the frequency, length, and severity of abdominal pain”.

For more on how to cope with problematic farting, see here. And see here for heartburn.

Finally, for more about bloating, see here.