Does T-Day Turkey Put You Into a Narcoleptic Coma?
Posted On November 25, 2014
I’ve honestly had someone ask me whether they should be concerned.
“I’m going over to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving. I’ll have a lot of turkey, but then I have to drive home. Won’t this make me go to sleep? Should I just plan to stay there for the night?”, as if they’d had 6 drinks, or were just worried that they’d lapse into spontaneous unconsciousness on I-95.
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Like every pearl of a myth, there’s an irritating single grain of truth that starts it all.
Turkey does contain tryptophan, tryptophan is an amino acid that gets converted into melatonin, and melatonin is a sleep-inducing hormone [grain of truth … check]. So there is a series of logical stepping stones that can take you from your T-Day feast straight to sleep in no time.
But.
First of all, turkey isn’t the only food with tryptophan, and it’s not even the food with the most tryptophan. Pork chops and cheddar cheese both have more than turkey, and when’s the last time you face planted into your pork-o-melt sandwich before even getting half way through it? Don’t answer that. Regardless of the true cause, you’ll never convince your date that it was the “tryptophan” that made you pass out.
The point is that oral consumption of tryptophan must get into the brain before getting converted into anything that can influence your likelihood of going to sleep. And before it gets through the blood-brain gate keeper at all, some of it gets lost to the production of the vitamin niacin in your liver.
With the remaining tryptophan, the blood-brain barrier gate keeper only lets certain amino acids across, and all of the many amino acids have to compete for just a few seats on the bus. Tryptophan is the red headed step child that is the last to go (gets out-competed for the receptors of the amino acids transporters).
But.
When you have a meal high in carbohydrates, your body produces insulin which helps poor stuck-at-the-station tryptophan out. It does this because insulin escorts all the competitor amino acids from the blood stream into muscles and organs. All of them except tryptophan!!
This leaves more tryptophan in the blood and allows some of it to get across and into the brain while the other amino acids are off messing around in the muscles.
So. Carbohydrates. You mean like potatoes and stuffing and yams and my amazing pumpkin pie? Yeah, like that.
No worries though, because the impact of that little bit of tryptophan on your ability to stay awake on the college football recovery couch is minimal. Think about it this way. When people dose up on tryptophan supplements (as a sleep aid), they’re instructed that it must be taken on an empty stomach to have any effect – but in this case you’re eating turkey so you’re safe!
That’s not to say that you won’t need a recovery-nap after the Thanksgiving turkey-palooza, but you’re sleepiness will be coming from the volume of food and libation you consumed rather than the biochemical blahbiddy blah percolating around in your cerebrovascular whatnot.
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Will Clower
2 Comments
It amuses me that people will be enough carbs for a week — rolls, cranberry sauce (loaded with sugar), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, pie and maybe some alcohol — and they blame feeling comatose on the turkey! I did some research into what was served at the first Thanksgiving and it was quite eye-opening. Few records exist but accounts show they ate deer, wild fowl (possibly wild turkey), cod, bass, wheat, corn, and barley. There was no specific mention of fruits or vegetables. Other items native to the area that may have been on the menu include clams, mussels, lobster, eel, acorns, walnuts, chestnuts, squash, and beans.There were no alcoholic beverages.
Hi Dean, great comments! Native American veg included corn, barley, and gourde-type squash such as butternut and acorn and possibly pumpkin. And you're right that the presence of wild game was absolutely central to their table!