White Meat or Dark Meat?

20 Funny Turkey Day Pictures, Cartoons, and Memes

For my annual Thanksgiving topic, let's talk about the main course: white meat or dark meat? Or Tofurkey?

What's the difference between white and dark meat? In general, it's talking about muscle color, which is largely dependent on how much myoglobin is in the muscle fibers and for turkeys, this matches up with the muscles they use the most. They don't fly, so unlike most other birds, their pectoral (breast and wing) muscles are largely underdeveloped compared to their lower portions (legs) which do a lot of walking and running around, hence the darker lower portions.

From a nutrition perspective, there is basically no difference in the calories between the two types but dark meat has twice the fat per ounce and also contains a lot more vitamins and minerals. As we've been leaning more towards the philosophy of carbs/refined sugars being the enemy instead of fats, I don't think there's a strong reason to think that it's healthier to eat white instead of dark.

However, we are also moving towards the philosophy of a whole food plant based diet being better for you in the long run than eating meats, especially mass-produced things like turkey so I know some people are subjected to Tofurkey. If you can get past the taste of it, it does have a good amount of protein in it, just like turkey, and also some fiber which turkey lacks. But it has a bunch of artificial flavoring and extra salt in it too. So if you're just trying to stick with the plant based diet, go for it, but I wouldn't call any imitation meats healthy. They're more just part of the ritual and if you're eating well the rest of the time, it shouldn't matter too much what you have for this one meal.

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance. Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child. For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was. Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...

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