3 Favorite Holiday Flavors That Make You Healthier

When you want to: Stay alert — and alive. Try a whiff of cinnamon when you have a long drive ahead of you; research has found that it decreases fatigue on the road. And diabetics who added 3/8 teaspoon of cinnamon to their daily routine had better blood sugar levels after about a month. Sorry; it doesn’t work if you sprinkle the cinnamon on top of a jumbo icing-topped breakfast roll.

Ginger 

When you want to: Soothe a sour stomach. Ginger is also known to help quell motion sickness, reduce lousy LDL cholesterol, thwart artery-clogging clots, kill ovarian cancer cells, quash inflammation and maybe even fend off the common cold. Of course, consuming 50 ginger cookies isn’t the way to get the goodness of this root; better to take it in extract form (which, in fact, has been shown to reduce the stiffness and pain of osteoarthritis if taken every day).

Peppermint 

When you want to: Wake up and focus (putting that tricycle together on Christmas Eve, maybe?). You pay better attention to dull jobs when this scent is in the air. And you might even be able to use peppermint to your waist’s advantage: People who sniff peppermint (or grapefruit, in fact) every couple of hours eat fewer calories and consume less fat and sugar than people who don’t.