On Super Bowl Sunday, there is potential for an array of injuries not only on the field, but also in the kitchen — particularly when it comes to slicing up one of America's favorite ingredients, avocados, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Super Bowl Sunday is one of the most avocado-heavy consumption days of the year in the U.S., with 162 million pounds of avocados being consumed during the game in 2019, the Hass Avocado Board reported. The group projects 153 million pounds of avocado will be consumed during the game this year.
With the consumption of avocados comes a spike in the phenomenon of "avocado-hand," wherein people injure themselves when using a knife to remove the pit or flesh of the avocado.
"They're soft and then suddenly very hard and kind of slippery, so it's the perfect set-up for stabbing yourself," Charles Daly, MD, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare, told the Journal.
Dr. Daly co-authored a 2018 study that found that between 1998 and 2017, 50,413 avocado-related knife injuries occurred in the U.S. Around half of those injuries happened after 2013.
Avocado-hand can result in people ending up in the emergency room and, in some cases, in the office of a plastic surgeon. But getting injured does not always mean people change the way they remove the pit and flesh of an avocado
Emiliano Escobedo, executive director of the Hass Avocado Board suggests using a spoon, or at the very least, placing the avocado on the counter before using a knife so your hand doesn't get hurt.