Is Thanksgiving Turkey Healthy?

The centerpiece of your holiday meal is more nutritious than you might think — even slathered in butter

Thanksgiving turkey may very well be the one guilt-free thing on the table that you can gobble, gobble — without worrying about over-indulging.

“I would say it's very healthy. It’s actually really hard to make it unhealthy, because the only thing that's really loaded in fat or loaded in anything is going to be the skin,” Dietician Kylie Bensley, founder of the of the women’s nutrition company, Sulinu, tells PEOPLE.

“The majority of turkey is extremely healthy, especially the darker meat, which has more nutrient density,” she says. “It's higher in iron, zinc, B vitamins than white meat and contains more myoglobin, which provides oxygen to muscles."

However, she says, beware of brine. While brined turkey "tends to be the juiciest, [it] also tends to be the highest in sodium,” Bensley says. "It is loaded with salt, leaving you swollen and puffy."

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In general, though, Bensley recommends turkey “to all my patients, all the time, because it's also really high in arginine, which is an amino acid necessary for muscle rebuilding.”

She suggests minimizing or skipping store-bought gravy and instead using the bird's natural juices with herbs or other healthy ways to add flavor.

For example, to keep it moist, “You can do more of the broth — using its own juices to flavor it versus using the butter,” she says. "I use a cheese cloth over my turkey and I baste it like that so it maintains the moisture without as much fat."

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But even if you do slather the turkey in butter, you still don’t need to worry too much about added fat and calories, she says.

“If you think about the amount of butter you're using in proportion to the turkey, you're not going to be getting a lot of that saturated fat,” she tells PEOPLE. “Even if you use two or three sticks, it's spread over the entire turkey and a lot of it will be just in the juices."

Ultimately, she says, turkey is a "great protein that is really hard to mess up."

But, "If you want to eat the healthiest turkey, I would say you can skip the skin.”

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