The Healthy Side of Holiday Food

The specter of the holiday meal is one that dieters and healthy eaters face with a barely-concealed dread. No one wants to be the party pooper: Mom has spent hours preparing all your childhood favorite side dishes--dips, gravies and veggies slathered in butter--while Dad is out on the porch brining the turkey within an inch of its life. It would be churlish to turn one's nose up at such efforts. But you've spent the rest of the year turning yourself from a couch potato into an Ironman! All is not lost: these books prove Thanksgiving dinner is potentially one of the healthiest meals you'll eat all year--or at least one with enough health benefits to forgive the one-time calorific freefall. 

Turkey
Let's start with the centerpiece of any self-respecting Thanksgiving dinner, the humble turkey. Filled with tryptophan (an essential amino acid and thought to be helpful in treating depression), let's not cavil that most other poultry has similar amounts of the chemical to turkey: you eat a lot of turkey at Thanksgiving, naturally upping your tryptophan intake (which may be why you fall asleep . . . but at least while you're sleeping you're not depressed). But that's not all: a regular plate of turkey provides almost half of the recommended daily dose of folic acid. As "What to Expect When You're Expecting" points out, "not only does folic acid appear to boost fertility, but [it can] dramatically reduce the risk of neural tube defects (such as spina bifida) and preterm birth." Heidi Murkoff goes on to extol green leafy vegetables as the best natural source of folic acid, but lets' stick to the gameplan, folks: EAT A BUNCH OF TURKEY.

Cranberry sauce
What's a Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce? Sadly, the received wisdom that drinking cranberry juice helps alleviate the symptoms of UTI's has recently been mostly debunked. All is not lost, however--Web MD reports that cranberries outdo nearly every fruit and vegetable in their anti-oxidant attributes. Upping your antioxidants is now all the rage in healthy living plans, and as Dr. Mark Hyman points out in his bestselling "The Blood Sugar Solution," when it comes to fruits, "the deeper the color, the more the antioxidants." So heap that cranberry sauce all over your folic acid-stuffed turkey.

Sage stuffing
Many Thanksgiving cooks turn to sage as a base for a delicious bird stuffing, and not only was sage awarded "Herb of the Year" in 2001 by the International Herb Association (no word on what prize it received), but two teaspoons of sage provides the equivalent of 30% of your daily vitamin K needs. So if you want your blood to clot (that's K's main benefit), then we suggest you heap up the sage stuffing.

Potatoes
We can thank our holiday fare-setting forebears for an array of potatoes, be they mashed, smashed, boiled, baked, plain or sweet. In recent times, however, potatoes have become the angry grizzly bear of foods--you should avoid them like the plague, according to most diet gurus. With that in mind, we have a couple of suggestions: first, Agricultural Research Service plant geneticist Roy Navarre claims that "Red and Norkotah potatoes have a similar phenolic content to that of broccoli, spinach and Brussels sprouts." (Phenolic content being an antioxidant silver bullet.) But if that doesn't convince you that certain potatoes can be good for you, you could always follow the French lead. There are 26 mentions of potatoes in the "French Women Don't Get Fat" cookbook--even their 'Carrot and Orange Soup,' an otherwise healthy (and tasty) encas, has a potato in it.

Gravy
Apart from high deliciousness engendering a sense of pleasure and well-being, leading to feelings of joy mixed with nostalgia for a happy childhood of beefy and/or chicken-y goodness, there are no health benefits to gravy.

Wine
Feel free to indulge in white, bubbly, rose, or red--most research suggests wine in moderation is good for you. "The South Beach Diet" bans alcohol for the first two weeks, but after that, "you'll be free to drink wine. It's beneficial for a number of reasons," says author Arthur Agaston. (So if you start the South Beach Diet in late October, you'll be in good shape by the time the third Thursday in November rolls around.)

Pumpkin pie
What else will serve for Thanksgiving desert save a delicious pumpkin pie? Pumpkins are bright orange, which is a very good thing: this means they are filled with carotenoids, which are good foot soldiers in the fight against nasty free radicals, evil chemicals that age you. Ellen Marmur's "Simple Skin Beauty" extols pumpkin enzymes as they help exfoliate the skin, too--what can't pumpkin do?

Look at it this way: Thanksgiving can be a stressful time, as one is forced back into the family drama, sibling and fathers and mothers and in-laws all cooped up together--what better way to lower feelings of tension and claustrophobia than with a darned good feed? And maybe that's the best argument of all for Thanksgiving dinner: redolent of happier times, the flavors meld to bring people together, grateful for their blessings . . . oh, hey, pass the gravy, will ya?