Healthy Thanksgiving: How to Have a Healthy Thanksgiving
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Healthy Thanksgiving Cooking Tips

If you're the Thanksgiving cook, here are some guidelines for preparing a Thanksgiving feast that will be healthy and delicious.

Turkey
Don't rub the turkey with butter before roasting. Use instead a mixture of herbs and olive oil. Salt and pepper the skin lightly and for flavor, stuff some peeled garlic cloves underneath the turkey skin.

When the turkey is done, remove the skin and discard. Save the garlic cloves for the gravy recipe.

Nutritional breakdown:

• white meat has less calories and fat. Skin more than doubles the fat content.
• dark meat has more calories and fat, but contains twice the iron of white meat.

Stuffing
Substitute fat-free chicken broth for the butter in your stuffing. You'll get just as much flavor with no added fat.

Substitute mushrooms for sausage.


Sweet Potatoes
Rich in beta-carotene, vitamins C and E, potassium and fiber, sweet potato is a very healthy component of the Thanksgiving meal.

Sweet potatoes are naturally sweet, so skip the brown sugar and marshmallows. A touch of maple syrup or agave syrup is a good sugar substitute, if you must have added sweetness.

Go light on the butter. Ideally, use olive oil or flax seed oil instead.

A dash of orange juice and cinnamon are excellent flavor enhancers.


Cranberries
Cranberries are another healthy Thanksgiving centerpiece, rich in vitamin C, anti-bacterial compounds, and phytonutrients that nourish the kidneys.

Do not buy canned, sweetened cranberries. If cooking fresh, whole cranberries is too great a task, look for unsweetened, whole canned cranberries.

Sweeten your cranberries with maple syrup, agave syrup, or Truvia. Fresh squeezed orange juice is an excellent flavor companion, along with cinnamon, ginger and clove. (Excellent digestive aids)


Vegetables
Roast or steam your vegetables, or combine the two methods. A short steam will shorten the roasting time in the oven and ensure that the vegetables are cooked through, soft and not tough.

Use an olive oil herb mix to coat the vegetables before roasting.

Skip the buttery or cheesy sauces.

Skip the fried onions on top of the green beans. Toasted chopped walnuts are just as fun.

For salad dressings, offer a vinaigrette dressing or this non-fat creamy salad dressing.


Gravy
Gravy is the bad boy of Thanksgiving dinner, notoriously loaded with fat and calories. Here are tips for making healthier gravy:

Rather than using butter and flour for a roux, thicken your gravy with some pureed mushrooms, onion, and garlic. Use the garlic cloves from your turkey. Roast or olive-oil sautee the onions and mushrooms. Puree these til smooth and creamy and use as your gravy base.

Add to this the turkey drippings with as much of the fat skimmed off as possible. Strain the drippings through a thin sieve or coffee filter if you don't have a fat separator.

If you do want to make your gravy with a roux, use cornstarch in place of flour and olive oil instead of butter.


Dessert
If you are making dessert, go for low-fat versions of your favorites. Substitute sugar with a healthy sweetener such as agave syrup or Truvia.

Offer 3 dessert choices, so that those who can afford the more decadent desserts can enjoy them. Identify the desserts with a card placed in front that downplays the less healthy and makes the more healthy choices most appealing. If your guests have a sense of humor, here are some ideas: "Sugar Coma Cheesecake", "Pumpkin Pie: Rich and Heart Friendly", "Apple Cherry Tart: Fantastic and Guilt-Free"


After dinner
Holiday meals with family and friends can linger into marathon eating sessions of endless nibbling. Do your guests a favor. When the meal is done, put away all the food, out of site. Leave only the desserts and after dinner beverages. Once everyone has had a chance to get dessert, put those away too.

Healthy Thanksgiving Eating Tips

If you are a guest of a Thanksgiving dinner:

Don't skip breakfast. Fasting all day until sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner is not a clever diet trick. You will be hungrier and will tend to eat more. Because your stomach was empty for a long time, your overindulgence will make any gastric distress even worse. Eat a normal breakfast and a light snack if Thanksgiving dinner is in the evening.

Drink plenty of water. Have an 8-oz glass of water every hour. If you are drinking alcohol and coffee, which dehydrate your body, be sure you have at least one 8-oz glass of water for every glass of alcohol and every cup of coffee. This will eliminate next morning hangover and help flush your system of the heavy, rich foods you might be eating. Water also helps curb appetite.

Don't think of Thanksgiving dinner as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Restrain yourself from piling food on your plate. If you really enjoy going back for seconds, fill your plate lightly and eat it slowly. Then you can go back for seconds without assaulting your digestive track with too much food.

Eat slowly. This is worth repeating. Eating slowly has three amazing benefits: 1) You will enhance your digestive process. Saliva in the mouth is the first step of digestion. Fast eaters don't benefit from this enzyme activity of pre-digestion. 2) You will taste your food more fully. In fact, if you focus on tasting the food, your effort at eating slowly will be much easier. 3) You will eat less in the same period of time. You will have had the satisfaction of a long meal without feeling stuffed.


Go for the healthy choices.

• Turkey: Remove the skin and you will slash your fat consumption by half.
  
  
• Gravy: A little really can go a long way. If it's not inappropriate, ask the cook (in private) how the gravy was made. If it doesn't contain a high amount of meat fat and added butter, you can enjoy it. But if it is the fat-calorie disaster that standard gravy usually is, have only a little. Drizzle any liquid from a vegetable dish on your turkey for added flavor.
  
  
• Rolls: Go for whole wheat if it's available. If the rolls are store bought refined white flour artificially flavored, only have one and skip the butter. With all that flavor, the butter just adds unnecessary fat.
  
  
• Vegetables: You can often size up the healthiness of a vegetable dish just by looking at it. Skip on the cheesy, saucy vegetables. Go for steamed and roasted vegetables, and you can be generous with salad. Pass on anything fried. If there are marshmallows in the sweet potatoes, go light. They probably are loaded with brown sugar too.
  
  
• Dessert: Non-creamy fruit pies are generally a good choice. They can be high in sugar but relatively low in fat. Take only a 1/2 or 1/4 slice and eat it slowly, savoring the flavor. Then you can have a second helping of dessert without overwhelming your belly with after-dinner decadence.
  
  

Bring a healthy dish to the meal. One that you can feel good about enjoying in the event that the food being served is not up to your nutritional standards. Others may appreciate having a healthy choice as well.