Here at DietsInReview, we believe in thoroughly enjoying holiday meals. Many diet plans encourage having a splurge meal once every week, and Thanksgiving is the perfect moment to enjoy rich foods without counting calories. In general, this prevents people who want to lose weight from feeling deprived and helps them avoid ditching a healthy eating plan for the entire holiday season.
However, certain foods seem over-the-top, even for a day of indulgence, and the deep fried turkey is one of these. On one hand, without the skin, deep fried turkey is deceptively moist and doesn’t have a greasy taste. On the other hand, we know quite well how many calories frying anything will add. So, I consulted with Alison Lewis of Ingredients Inc.
“The amount of fat and calories for a deep fried turkey is higher than a regular turkey,” says Lewis. “Three and a half ounces of deep fried turkey has approximately 190 calories and 11 grams of fat. The same portion of a roasted turkey typically has 165 calories and 7 grams of fat.” Eating turkey without the skin will lower the calories even further. “If you eat your roasted turkey skinless, calories drop to only 150 calories and 3.5 grams of fat,” adds Lewis.
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Thanksgiving is hands down my favorite holiday of the year. I mean, as a food person, how can I not love Thanksgiving, as the holiday’s primary focus is a huge meal chock full of tasty dishes.
When I say a huge meal, I mean huge. Even if the dinner itself turns out to be small, my family gobbles up all of those pre-Thanksgiving grocery store sales and cooks up mountains of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts. However, cooking up so much food for Thanksgiving inevitably leaves us with lots of leftovers.
While reheated turkey leftovers are great, sometimes you need to be a little creative in order to use up all of those turkey leftovers. Here are my top 6 ideas for cooking with leftovers.
Soup
This is definitely a classic in my house, as nothing beats a good bowl of soup on a cold day. Simply dice up some leftover roast turkey and add it in instead of chicken in your favorite soups. Here are two great leftover turkey recipes for soup:
More than 250 million turkeys are slaughtered in the industrial system each year in the United States, and about 46 million of those are for Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is a wonderful, warm holiday, full of family time, great traditions and good food. Unfortunately, there are many not-so-good things about the Thanksgiving turkeys most grocery stores offer to their customers.
The status quo for raising turkeys and other meat birds is the industrial, factory farming system. The conditions in which factory farmed turkeys are raised is horrendous. It’s cramped, with each bird given about 3 feet of space to live its life. So that these cramped and stressed turkeys won’t turn to pecking at each other, prior to confinement their beaks and the tips of their toes are cut off (processes some liken to having the tips of a child’s fingers and toes chopped off). These turkeys, raised in gigantic warehouses, are denied their natural instincts and can’t eat their natural diet of seeds, vegetation and insects. They’re also bred to grow so rapidly that it puts an incredible strain on their bodies. Some researchers estimate that factory farmed turkeys spend at least a third of their lives in chronic pain.
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There have been at least two cases of salmonella food poisoning caused by tainted ground turkey in the U.S. so far this summer. Strangely enough, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knew where these tainted meats were coming from two weeks ago, but they did not issue a recall on the poisonous food because they “simply did not have enough information,” according to Fox News.
“There were two cases in the same state, and in two days we were able to confirm that the two cases were related to the [Cargill meat plant in Springdale, Arkansas],” said Dr. David Goldman, an assistant administrator from the USDA-Food Safety and Inspection Service.
That sounds like enough information to issue a recall to me, but Goldman claims that this really isn’t enough to warrant one.
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Hot dogs might not measure up to most gourmet fare, but they are a big part of some of America’s favorite pastimes. National Hot Dog Day falls on July 23, which is conveniently right in the middle of baseball and summer grilling season.
While you often hear that hot dogs are nutritionally unsavory, there are a lot of lighter options out there for anyone who wants keep things on the healthier side.
Whether you’re buying beef, pork, turkey, chicken or veggie hot dogs, you should always pay attention to whether or not the hot dog has added nitrites or nitrates. Once digested, nitrites and nitrates can form compounds that have been known to cause cancer. To make your hot dog meal healthier, you can serve it topped with fiber-rich sauerkraut, in a whole-wheat bun or alongside a full plate of brightly-colored fruits and vegetables.
However, if you want to avoid the nutritional trap of hot dogs entirely, you can look to five of our favorite healthier hot dogs to satisfy your cravings without an added helping of guilt.
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