Happy Thanksgiving week! While the focus of Thanksgiving may be gathering together with family and friends, food will certainly be a part of the holiday. Many of our favorite dishes, including those that are not the healthiest choices, will make an appearance on our table this year. For many of us, Thanksgiving dinner is a day marked by overindulgence and poor nutrition choices.
In an effort to make Thanksgiving dinner healthier, recommendations for modifying or replacing traditional dishes are a common theme in magazines, on the morning TV news shows and on social media. While these suggestions are meant to be helpful, I’m not sure they actually serve to make a significant impact on health. In fact, the foods we eat and the way we eat them may be the healthiest part of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
Trying new foods and cooking techniques is always good, but replacing the butter in your mashed potatoes with fat-free sour cream or removing the marshmallow topping from Granny’s famous sweet potato dish for one day isn’t realistically going to make you any healthier in the long run.
The truth is that if you eat a healthy diet every day, or even most days, and you have an active lifestyle you can get away with a day — or a few days — of overeating. (Obviously, you should always follow dietary restrictions for any medical conditions you have.) The problem comes when Thanksgiving dinner is yet another unhealthy meal in addition to the others that week or month.
Some of these recommendations are worth trying, for sure. Making an alternative to a traditional dish can get your family to try new foods they might not otherwise consider. And cooking using different ingredients or techniques on Thanksgiving can give you ideas for other meals, too.
However, focusing on modifying your Thanksgiving dinner may distract you from appreciating the greatest potential health benefit of this meal. Given the current confusion about how much and what type of carbohydrates and fats we should eat, there is an increased push to get us to eat less processed food and more real food.
For many of us, Thanksgiving dinner is one of the rare times we cook and eat real food. A real turkey, vegetables and home-made dessert are a huge improvement over the processed foods most of us eat regularly. While we eat turkey at other times, it is almost always in a processed form such as ground turkey or deli meat, which frequently includes other additives. Cooking and eating a whole turkey is, for most families, relatively rare. So is eating a meal that doesn’t come from a restaurant or isn’t heated in a microwave.
Additionally, Thanksgiving dinner is shared around a common table. All too often, meals are consumed away from the family table, frequently at different times. The benefits of eating together as a family are well-known, and can have a positive impact on nutrition, psychological well-being, and health in general. Maybe Thanksgiving dinner isn’t about the food as much as it is the company. Why not make this a habit at other meals?
This week let’s all give thanks for family, friends, and a good meal, even if we can’t be together. Let’s also take a lesson from the day and try to prepare and eat more real food as a family. This may be the best part of Thanksgiving. And, after all, Thanksgiving is one day. If there was ever a time to give yourself license to indulge, this is it!
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