Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- Americans kill around 45 million turkeys every year in preparation for the Thanksgiving meal, only to blame our favorite centerpiece for the following food comas.
- Rumor has it our after-dinner sleepiness results from the tryptophan found in turkey.
- However, it is the meal’s overall nutritional imbalance, not just the tryptophan, that make us want to leave the dishes for tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.
The turkey is one of the closest living relatives to avian dinosaurs, but recent evolutionary turns has taken it from peak predator to meek entrée. Americans kill about 45 to 46 million turkeys in preparation for Thanksgiving, and to really rub it in, our nation’s leader pardons one every year as a lark.
But ignominy doesn’t stop there. Through selective breeding, we’ve dramatically increased the size of turkeys, particularly in the breast for more of that coveted white meat. This has led to all sorts of health issues, including skeletal problems, cardiac morbidity, and reduced immune response. Thanks to those robust breasts, domestic turkeys can’t mate anymore and rely on us for artificial insemination.
If that wasn’t bad enough, every year after we’ve feasted on millions of these birds, we then blame them for making us miserably tired. We’ve even developed a term for it: the turkey coma, the “inevitable and unavoidable nap that occurs about 45 minutes after gorging one’s self on a Thanksgiving Day turkey,” as one Urban Dictionary user defined it.
But are turkeys really to blame for the turkey coma? And if so, how do they manage this posthumous revenge?
Tryptophan-tasitc meal
(Photo from NBCUniversal)
Jerry and George use a turkey’s tryptophan to make Celia fall asleep in the episode “The Merv Griffin Show.”
As any Seinfeld fan can tell you, that makes you sleepy is tryptophan. Specifically, L-tryptophan, an essential amino acid that our livers synthesize into niacin. Niacin, in turn, helps create the neurotransmitter serotonin.
Our brains and bodies use serotonin for many functions. It plays a role in appetite, emotional stability, motor skills, and cognitive processes, but it’s most famous for regulating our body’s sleep-wake cycles. This common knowledge serves as the basis for the belief that turkey makes you sleepy.
Thing is, a lot of foods contain tryptophan. Nuts, soy, eggs, milk, salmon, chicken, spinach, yogurt, and chocolate are all dietary sources of tryptophan, with many of them containing more tryptophan than our favorite holiday fowl.
According to My Food Data, turkey has 404 milligrams of tryptophan per 100 gram serving. But in the same serving size, pumpkin and squash seeds have 576 milligrams, soybeans have 575, and reduced fat mozzarella has 571. None of…
The post Why does turkey make you sleepy? appeared first on FeedBox.