5 Little Known Facts About Your Thanksgiving Dinner

Make your Thanksgiving dinner this year a bit more interesting by educating yourself on some facts about this American holiday that not many really know about.

Photo Op Turkeys Are Not the Kind You Eat

"The turkeys typically depicted in Thanksgiving pictures are not the same as the domestic turkeys most people eat at Thanksgiving," Random Facts pointed out. "Domestic turkeys usually weigh twice as much and are too large to fly."

Eating Turkey Makes Your Pee Purple

Still about this holiday's bird of choice, turkey actually makes you pee in purple, if you didn't notice that already. That is, if you have a bacterial infection, which is not good.

"It starts with tryptophan, which is found in turkey," io9 explained. "The chemical does no harm, and as it goes through the digestive system is naturally broken down into indoxyl sulfate."

This chemical, should it linger in the digestive system, will be dealt with by bacteria, which break it down to just indoxyl. As bacteria can make urine alkalinic, the indoxyl then makes your pee the color of indirubin and indigo.

'When the urine comes out, especially if it comes out of a patient in a hospital who is catheterized, it can turn green, blue, or sometimes a deep purple," the trivia source went on. "The condition has come to be known as Purple Urine Bag Syndrome."

Modern Stuffing Is a Scientific Triumph

Count your blessings, wellness advocates say. And if you do, add stove top stuffing to your list of things to be thankful about, as a group of people had taken on the trouble of figuring out how to make dried stuffing perfectly soft and fluffy.

Ruth Siems and her team figured the right size for breadcrumbs so they don't get soggy when rehydrated but turn into an appealing mass instead.

Gravy Adds a Nutrition Boost to Your Roast

"A lot of nutrition seeps away with the juices of roasted meat, including proteins, folic acid, and vitamins B1 and B6," io9 said. "Gravy, made from those juices, is a tasty way to get them back into the system."

We don't need to tell you, from this point forward, to pile on the gravy come Thanksgiving day.

"Jingle Bells" Wasn't Meant for Christmas

It was originally created for Thanksgiving, according to Mental Floss. The song's composer, James Lord Pierpoint, was inspired by the Medford, Massachusetts sleigh races back in 1850 or 1851, and thus "picked out the song on the piano belonging to the owner of the boarding house attached to the tavern because he wanted something to play for Thanksgiving at his Sunday school class in Boston."

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