Don't Blame it on the Turkeys!
Not to rain on anyone's Thanksgiving Day Parade or anything, but doesn't it seem a bit strange that every Thanksgiving day, it's the turkey who ends up being the scapegoat for the tired and sluggish feeling that seems the inevitable result of just about every Thanksgiving feast? I've even read the results of alleged scientific studies that make such outlandish claims as turkey meat containing an enzyme or chemical that causes drowsiness in people.

Well, today I'm here to challenge that claim. I mean really! Am I the only person in this country who eats turkey on days other than Thanksgiving? Or are there others out there, like me, who buy up several turkeys during the pre-Thanksgiving turkey sales to stash them away in their deep freeze to use throughout the following months? My family and I eat turkey fairly regularly and none of us end up feeling any sleepier or more sluggish afterward than we would after any meal.

I blame not the turkey, but nearly everything else in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Think about how much and what type of foods are put on the Thanksgiving Day table. The traditional Thanksgiving Day menu laden with mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, candied winter squash or sweet potatoes, breads, sweet pickles, green salad, vegetable medley and pies of just about every imaginable type (pecan pie, mincemeat pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, so on and so forth). In the grand scheme of things, what percentage of all the food eaten should we suppose turkey comprises? Twenty-five percent? I doubt it. That would be a full quarter of the entire meal. Fifteen percent? Perhaps, at least maybe on the first go-round. When people have a second helping, it's been my observation it isn't usually the turkey, but instead either a "bit more of those" potatoes and gravy or "another spoonful of that wonderful" stuffing or perhaps a second and sometimes third dinner roll. Even if a person took a single equal serving of every dish available with just the above menu, discounting the pies, of course, turkey consumption most likely wouldn't go over ten percent of the meal.

Indeed not is the turkey to blame for the after-meal lethargy. Our bodies are in shock from consuming gluttonous amounts of sugar, both the old-fashioned sugar and all the other carbohydrates! The energy used in insulin production alone needed to deal with that much sugar is probably more than enough to justify not just a nap, but a full night's sleep! Unfortunately because of how the human body deals with an over-abundance of carbohydrates, our bodies are practically catatonic while they have to over-produce insulin to reach the quantities needed to store all those carbohydrates as fat!

If a person honestly doesn't mind feeling like they should be rolled away from the dining room table in a wheel barrow and dumped on the nearest recliner, then I don't see any reason to change one's menu, but at the very least, quit laying the blame for the lack of energy on the poor turkey. He's the best thing ever to grace a dining room table.

On the other hand, if a person doesn't want to feel like they need rolled away from the Thanksgiving dinner table there are a few things that can be done about that, and in the long run make for much simpler and less stressful preparation as well as an extremely enjoyable meal. Below is how our family changed our bad Thanksgiving Dinner habits to good ones.

  • Prepare the menu well ahead of time. Don't think you have to serve turkey because it's "Turkey Day." It isn't Turkey Day, it's Thanksgiving and a good excuse to fix some of our favorite foods, including a favorite meat you may not be able to have at other times. Next, choose your top three favorite carbohydrate-laden dinner dishes (In our case these are usually a few potatoes to be mashed and served with gravy, a dish of home-made whole wheat bread stuffing and whole wheat dinner rolls with butter) and the remainder of the meal is comprised of vegetable salad side dishes and of course a can or two of black pitted olives. We will often bake a winter squash as well, to be served with butter and salt. The squash doesn't have nearly as many carbohydrates as other of that type of food and contains an abundance of nutrients.
  • Forget fat free! Yes, ounce per ounce fats contain roughly twice as many calories as other foods, but the body gets more than twice the mileage out of fats which more than makes up the difference. A person doesn't need to go overboard on putting fats into their foods, but fats are way more satiating and not nearly as easy as carbohydrates to over-eat. A bit of the right types of fat in foods can turn ordinary tasting fair into gourmet cuisine.
  • Dairy fats instead of hydrogenated fats. Buy cream and whip it yourself or if you don't have the spare five minutes it takes, at least buy the canned whipped cream. Use real butter instead of margarine. Whipped toppings and margarine are pure hydrogenated oils which means they are chemically altered by adding hydrogen molecules then whipped into a substitute for real food. Hydroganted fats wreck havoc with blood lipids as well as gall bladders. They are bad, bad business for everyone except the manufacturers.
  • Whole wheat instead of white. I still scratch my head over why whole wheat flour costs more than white considering it doesn't go through nearly as much processing, but in the end the cost evens out. Not only is whole wheat flour more filling than its highly-processed white counter-part but it carries a much, much lower glycemic load. The result is way less work for your pancreas when it comes to creating insulin for processing this carbohydrate which means the body might even be able to metabolize all of it instead of converting any excess directly into fat.
  • Think outside the box, so to speak when it comes to desert. Instead of buying heat and serve type deserts, do an internet search and find a recipe for something like sugar-free pumpkin cheesecake, or bake traditional pumpkin-pie custard sweetened with an artificial sweetener in a crust made of chopped walnuts, hazelnuts or a mix of chopped oatmeal and sugar-free coconut. You wouldn't believe how easy these crusts are to make and how good they taste! By the time everyone arrives for dinner we usually have two or three desserts (more than we will ever eat that day) which we set back until the meal has been past for several hours. By that time everyone's ready to eat again so it's a good time to bring them out.