Thanksgiving Lethargy?
As I sat and watched TV on Thursday night after a fantastic Thanksgiving meal, I contemplated Friday’s blog entry and decided not to do it because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Besides, upon awakening on Friday morning, I found myself in a haze, I presumed due to the amino acid tryptophan, something that our body takes and converts to the serotonin, a brain chemical that our body uses to promote sleepiness and calm. I remember first hearing about this chemical years ago when I was still living at home, when I sat at a long-past Thanksgiving meal with my family and could barely keep my head up. My younger brother looked at me squarely with a smirk and said, “tryptophan,” and then proceeded with a definition for me much like the one I gave above. Not long after, I excused myself from the table and collapsed on a chair for an hour or two.
Today, I felt a little better and did some surfing as my son lay in bed sleeping tonight. I happened to come across an article posted by the Boston.com site about the very chemical I had blamed my sleepiness on all these years. According to experts from the Somerset Medical Center’s Sleep for Life Center in Hillsborough, NJ, it’s much more likely that the drowsiness we feel after this large meal is due to the high concentration of carbohydrates and alcohol during the meal. Additional factors may be a lack of sleep from the shortened work week and travel to wherever you plan to celebrate the holiday. To see the full article, click here.
I personally didn’t completely believe the assertion of the article, because I must say the drowsiness I feel after the turkey dinner is more of a haze. I am tired, that’s true, and I’m sure the haze could be remedied by sleep, but the feeling is vastly different than after almost any other meal I have during the year. I generally don’t drink much if at all during the dinner and I don’t get any less sleep for the Thanksgiving holiday than I would for any other time of the year, so I’m not sure either would have an effect on me that would cause the haze I describe. Carbohydrates, on the other hand, have always been a problem during this meal, and deserts appear in abundance, often causing whatever surface is displaying them to buckle under their weight (and later we are buckling under their weight). An article posted by MSNBC on Turkey day estimated that the average Thanksgiving meal is 3000 calories and 229 grams of fat per person, potentially ballooning up to 4500 calories if they’re not careful.(1) If all that is true, it’s possible the combination of the carbs and calories could contribute to my desire to sleep.
Still, I don’t think we should completely write off tryptophan as a contributor to sleepy people across the country on Thanksgiving day. Whenever I have the meat there is some part of me that feels a little weakened, my mind a little blurry. Do you feel eating turkey could do this to you? Ever experience a particular event where you nearly wanted to collapse after eating a dish full of turkey?
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts and in the meantime, and happy post-Thanksgiving!
(1) See “Turkey Day Stuffings,” MSNBC Web Site, Brock N. Meeks, November 23rd, 2004.
