Healthy Thanksgiving recipes and food

What are the healthiest foods to eat for Thanksgiving? The answer is the foods that are best tailored, customized, and easy-to-digest for your individual body. You know what foods work best metabolically for you and your family. See OrganizedWisdom’s slide show on 20 heart healthy foods for more tips.

In nutrition as in the rest of the science specialties, the simplest explanation is almost always the best.

The first place to get started is to check out the sites for the healthiest foods. Keep in mind that it's not so much what you eat but what time of day you eat. Nightime consumption of fatty meals is the worse for your heart, digestion, and kidneys.

Here are some sites touting the healthiest foods for Thanksgiving. The traditional Thanksgiving meal can be served for other holidays, or you can keep your meals vegan, vegetarian, or lacto-ovo, seafood based, or focus on vegetables, noodles, and fermented soy products. See the article on Nov. 23, 2009, MSNBC news site, "Pass the cholesterol, please Thanksgiving is coming. Here are some fattening dishes you may want to skip."

You may want to keep an ethnic theme, or follow the traditional Thanksgiving meal menu, substituting healthier ingredients for traditional family themes. For example, if an ancestor prepared a Thanksgiving meal using animal fat, you might substitute rice bran oil, grapeseed oil, macademia nut oil, or extra virgin olive oil instead.

What you want to avoid are trans-fats and too many deep-fried foods. Just substitute healthier ingredients for traditional, familiar ingredients your great grandparents used.

Choose ingredients that don't raise your LDL cholesterol, aggravate the risk of high blood pressure, promote any cancer risk, or put a strain on your kidneys, if you're genetically at risk with a family history of any of those conditions. How do you know what foods are healthiest?

Plant-based foods are a good place to start, but if you're eating meat, keep it lean and serve four ounce portions. It's portion-size, glycemic index, and the time of day or night you eat that packs on the pounds or keeps them balanced. Try eating low on the glycemic index at holiday times.

Eating low on the glycemic index simply means eating foods that don't quickly turn to sugar and spike your blood with too much insulin. If you have metabolic syndrome ( a set of syptoms starting with insulin resistance, too much insulin in the blood causing low blood sugar, or high blood sugar in a pre-type 2 diabetest state, high blood pressure, and gain weight in the abdominal area) eating low on the glycemic index could be of help.

So eating simple carbs would be eating high on the glycemic index, but complex carbs are lower. If you want to see the glycemic index of foods, it's at the The Glycemic Index official site. Here are the top healthy holiday eating sites.

Top 5 Healthy Holiday Foods

Healthy Recipes and Meal Ideas : Food Network

Thanksgiving Recipes & Menus: How to Cook a Turkey, Stuffing ...

Food Network

Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes, Menus and Cooking Tips | Eating Well

Thanksgiving recipes: Delicious options for healthy eating ...

Planning your Thanksgiving menu? Here are some healthy ideas ...

Adding healthy alternatives to the Thanksgiving menu | Napa Valley ...

Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes

Nutrition Education, Free - Fun Healthy Kids' Games, Healthy ...

What to Eat on Thanksgiving - Thanksgiving and IBS

According to the website, OrganizedWisdom, here’s how to eat healthier for Thanksgiving or any other holiday season meals. Instead of pouring a teaspoon of salt into a dish, try herbs, spices, minced garlic, chopped onion, parsley, and lemon juice or apple cider vinegar instead.

1. Find out which foods are healthiest. Don’t skip meals, or you’ll binge later. The first foods you should put in your mouth at parties are the raw vegetables. If you are at a buffet, take tiny samples of each dish for variety.

2. Bank your calories. Limit yourself to the food you want most. Instead of stuffing yourself with a variety of foods, choose the one or two foods you want to eat more than the others, for example, eat the salad of parsley and cracked wheat and the fish first, and don’t begin a meal by snacking on the bread, sugary fruit, yams, starchy veggies, or pie.

3. Eat a small meal of vegetables and brown rice as long as the veggies are not carmelized carrots, sweet potatoes, or other sugary and starchy vegetables. The idea is to mix a small amount of complex carbs or proteins as a snack before you go out to dinner.

4. Don’t eat sugary fruits that will cause a sugar crash at dinner time when you’ll binge to feel less shaky. Eat just enough so that you have room for the dinner, but are not hungry enough to binge at the main meal as the insulin pours out and you feel a hunger crash and the tremors coming on from low blood sugar. Don’t fast all day before the Thanksgiving dinner. It’s best to have a Thanksgiving lunch around 1-2 PM after a small but balanced protein and/or complex carbs breakfast.

5. Drink enough water to stay hydrated and keep you from feeling too hungry. Don’t eat too late in the evening because it’s not so much what you eat but when—what time of day or night that you eat that piles on the pounds. Some people can gain up to 20 pounds just eating holiday meals between Halloween, Ramadan, Thanksgiving, and Xmas/Hanukkah, Dewali, Kwanza, or any other festive time of the autumn/winter seasons. Keep the portions small and balanced.

Best Thanksgiving Health Recipes Sites

EatingWell: Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes eatingwell.com - Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes

Epicurious: Heart Healthy Recipes for Thanksgiving epicurious.com - Heart Healthy Recipes for Thanksgiving

Food Network: "Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes" foodnetwork.com - "Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes"

Mayo Clinic: Thanksgiving Recipes: Delicious Options for Healthy Eating mayoclinic.com - Thanksgiving Recipes: Delicious Options for Healthy Eating

Discovery Health: Holiday Recipes Healthy Alternatives for the Traditional Holiday Dinner health.discovery.com - Holiday Recipes Healthy Alternatives for the Traditional Holiday Dinner

All Recipes: Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes allrecipes.com - Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes

About.com: Low Fat Cooking - Thanksgiving lowfatcooking.about.com - Low Fat Cooking - Thanksgiving

EverydayHealth: Thanksgiving With Style everydayhealth.com - Thanksgiving With Style

CBCNews: Healthy Thanksgiving Tips and Recipes cbc.ca - Healthy Thanksgiving Tips and Recipes

YouTube: Healthy Focus: Thanksgiving youtube.com - Healthy Focus: Thanksgiving

Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes, according to OrganizedWisdom's site

· Avoid eating dark turkey meat, turkey skin, and gravy, all of which are high in fat content.³

· Fresh herbs can be substituted for salt to lower the sodium in your diet.⁴

· Foods such as sweet potatoes, barley, quinoa, olive oil, and almonds are beneficial in reducing heart disease.⁵

· Omega-3 fatty acids, which can be found in many foods such as salmon and walnuts, help to lower blood pressure, decrease triglyceride levels, and decrease the risk of arrhythmias.⁶