By Jordan Roberts, Staff Reporter.
The United States is home to a variety of dietary fads to help regulate caloric intake. When it comes to holiday dinners, however, controlling one’s compulsions with food goes right out the window.
Thanksgiving is known for having one of the most celebrated (and largest) meals of the year that allows one to spend time with family, as well as eat like there’s no tomorrow.
This delicious and certainly plentiful meal has been subject to dietary concern due to the large portions sizes people consume, in addition to making the right choice when it comes to meat, how you cook your stuffing and if turkey really does make one sleepy.
“It is normal to occasionally overeat at a holiday dinner”, says Dr. Kara Jimenez, an associate professor and lifelong wellness discipline coordinator at Delta. “While one day of binge eating will not make you fat, you will notice some extra weight gain the following day.”
According to Caloriecontrol.org, “ the average American may consume more than 4,500 calories and a whopping 229 grams of fat during a typical holiday gathering from snacking and eating a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings.”
While almost doubling a person’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) for calories and almost quadrupling the RDA for fat, it’s no wonder there is concern for the Thanksgiving meal.
While binge eating is okay in certain occasions, Jimenez stresses that it should not become a habit because it “ is a compulsion and will most likely repeat itself, first on occasion and then again more regularly until it becomes a habit. This is what will lead to the weight gain.”
Another concern with the Thanksgiving dinner is the white meat vs. dark meat debate and whether one is more nutritious than the other. While this is a mild dietary concern compared to overeating, there is still a skewed representation of dark meat being less nutritious than white meat.
According to Jimenez, “Bottom line is that white meat contains less fat and fewer calories than dark meat, but the differences are small!”
Indeed, According to the Department of Agriculture a turkey breast contains “about 46 calories and 1 gram of fat, compared with roughly 50 calories and 2 grams of fat for an ounce of boneless, skinless thigh”.
In addition to the white meat vs. dark meat myth, turkey is also misrepresented as having enough L-Tryptophan to make one sleepy. While turkey is rich in this essential amino acid, it is not the only food source that has rich amounts of tryptophan.
Jimenez explains that meat, cheese, yogurt, fish and eggs all contain an abundance of tryptophan, and she states that the general knowledge that tryptophan in turkey will make you sleepy is exaggerated. She says, “The key is that turkey contains no more of the amino acid tryptophan than other kinds of poultry. In fact it even has less tryptophan than chicken.”
For many the turkey meat is delicious on its own, but is not quite complete without the use of stuffing. Stuffing has normally been prepared by cooking it inside the turkey, but there are questions as to whether this is sanitary and safe to eat.
While the Center for Disease Control recognizes cooking the stuffing inside the turkey as generally safe, it states that the most ideal method is to “cook the stuffing outside in a casserole dish. But if cooking inside, place stuffing inside turkey just before cooking and use a food thermometer. Make sure the center of the stuffing reaching a safe minimum internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Bacteria can survive in stuffing that has not reached 165 degrees.”