Psst: Thanksgiving is Healthier Than You Think
Author: Amanda Schupak
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/well/eat/how-healthy-is-thanksgiving.html
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If there’s one day of the year to slip on something elastic-waisted and ignore your typical eating habits, it’s Thanksgiving. The sides! The pies! The leftovers! The holiday is a celebration of abundance and an excuse to indulge.
But look closer at your holiday table and you’ll see seasonal vegetables and a centerpiece of lean protein. There’s a lot of good nutrition there, even if marshmallow toppings and gravy drizzles complicate things.
Here’s a roundup of the nutritional benefits of the key ingredients — with recipes from New York Times Cooking for inspiration on how to prepare them.
Turkey is low in fat and high in protein.
Turkey is relatively low in saturated fat compared with other meats. Even fatty dark meat with the skin on has less than half the saturated fat of the same size serving of ground beef. Skinless white meat has just half a gram of saturated fat per three ounces — and an impressive 26 grams of protein.
And that thing about turkey making you sleepy? It’s a myth. Yes, the bird contains tryptophan, an amino acid associated with sleep-related hormones, but it’s not enough to induce drowsiness. If you’re yawning after the meal, it probably has more to do with the fact that you ate a whole day’s worth of food in a single sitting.
“there is no more tryptophan in turkey than in other common meats like chicken and beef. Other foods, including nuts and cheeses, contain more.” source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/science/no-the-tryptophan-in-turkey-wont-make-you-sleepy.html
Sweet potatoes don’t spike your blood sugar.
Thanks in large part to the beta-carotene that gives these tubers their telltale color, one medium sweet potato contains more than 100 percent of the recommended daily amount of vitamin A. Necessary for vision, vitamin A also acts as an antioxidant, neutralizing free radicals that can damage cells and DNA. Sweet potatoes are also rich in vitamin C, potassium, copper and manganese.
Their sweetness comes from naturally occurring sugars. But because sweet potatoes have a lot of dietary fiber, which slows the breakdown of sugar in the body, eating them doesn’t cause blood glucose to spike as it would when drinking a can of soda.
no wonder I like my sweet potatoes and yams. Fun fact: even though i confuse the two a lot and they do taste similar to me, I just found out that yams and sweet potatoes are two very different plants. Yams are more closely related to lilies, while sweet potatoes are more closely related to morning glories.
Potatoes are more than filler.
Regular spuds don’t pack the same nutritional punch as their sweet counterparts, but don’t underestimate them. One medium russet contains more potassium than two bananas, and about a quarter of your daily recommended amount of vitamin C. And the pigments in purple and red potatoes add more antioxidants to the mix.
The woman who ran our boarding house would always serve a heaping platter of potatoes every night.
And I remember a professor telling us that the potato has all the nutrients a human needs to live. Hence, that was why the famine hit the country so hard. Teh people were poor and relying just on potatoes for their food … then the food source was all gone.
Also as I’m thinking of Thanksgiving and my forebears, I know that there was enough food around during the famine but that it was being shipped to England instead of feeding the local population
Potatoes are complex carbohydrates, meaning they contain dietary fiber and aren’t broken down as quickly as processed starches like pasta and white rice. That said, some potatoes have a higher glycemic index than others, meaning they can raise blood sugar faster. Russet and Idaho potatoes tend to have a higher G.I. than waxy fingerlings and red potatoes.
Pumpkin is packed with vitamins.
Pumpkin is nutrient dense, meaning it packs a lot of nutrients into relatively few calories. One cup of canned pumpkin purée (137 calories) provides more than 200 percent of the daily recommended amounts of vitamin A, 36 percent of vitamin K, 22 percent of vitamin E and 25 percent (nearly seven grams) of fiber.
If you’re eating pumpkin pie, you’ll get all of these nutrients — along with added sugar and a flaky, buttery crust.
Apples are good for your gut.
An apple on this particular day is likely to come topped with a sugary crumble or encased in pastry. (A noteworthy exception: Dorie Greenspan’s baked apples.) But the nutritional benefits still count.
Apples are one of the biggest dietary sources of polyphenols, plant molecules that can help reduce inflammation and promote cardiovascular health. And they’re high in fiber — which most Americans don’t get enough of. Adequate fiber supports digestion and gut health, and is associated with a lower risk of chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. In particular, apples have high amounts of pectin, a dietary fiber that can help you maintain healthy cholesterol levels.
Just learned that Benjamin Franklin never said this, it’s misattributed to him. I always thought it was in Poor Richard’s Almanack. I do think an apple a day is a good idea though, and this article backs me up.
By the way, Franklin did write, “The rotten apple spoils his companion”
Link to Poor Richard’s Almanack: https://archive.org/stream/poorrichardsalma00franrich/poorrichardsalma00franrich_djvu.txt
And finally, a word on leftovers.
To make sure Thanksgiving leftovers are safe to eat again (and again and again), experts say it’s important to get them into the fridge or freezer as quickly as possible — especially if they’ve already spent two hours sitting out at room temperature, where they’re most susceptible to bacterial growth. The rule of thumb is to consume refrigerated leftovers within three or four days, though some foods — like fruit pies and cranberry sauce — can last a week.
You can’t always tell when a food has gone bad, but mold, sliminess and a funny smell are sure signs that it might be safer to toss a dish than reheat it one last time.
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