The Thanksgiving Meal: Turkey, Tryptophan, and Tiredness

Since Thanksgiving is this week, I wanted to write about the Thanksgiving meal, specifically the relationship between turkey, tryptophan, and tiredness. Turkey is a staple of the traditional Thanksgiving meal and you have probably heard that it contains in ingredient that makes you sleepy.

The ingredient is tryptophan and it is an amino acid, which is a component of protein. People often get tired after eating their Thanksgiving meal and tryptophan typically gets blamed. Truthfully, tryptophan gets a bad wrap and the cause of post Thanksgiving meal sleepiness is really something else.

Tryptophan can make you feel sleepy, but it is only really effective when it is ingested without any other protein. Protein is made up of many different amino acids and they compete for the same binding sites. If the amino acid does not bind properly in your body, then it will not be utilized.

The amount of tryptophan in turkey is small (less than 2% of the total amino acid content), so it has a lot of competition from the other amino acids. As a result, there is only a small chance that the tryptophan in turkey will make you tired.

Another reason tryptophan gets a bad wrap is because the amount of tryptophan contained in turkey is not any greater than the amount found in many other foods, such as eggs, lentils, peanuts, pork, and many more.

I am not sure how the myth about people getting tired from the tryptophan in turkey got started, but it is certainly not accurate. It could be that someone was trying to find a reason for why they became tired after eating a Thanksgiving meal, but there are other reasons for the post-meal sleepiness.

The main reason for getting tired after eating a Thanksgiving meal is simply the large amount of food many people eat during the meal. It is not uncommon for people to eat more calories during a Thanksgiving meal than their body needs in two whole days. The body is not designed to handle that many calories at one time any all the unnecessary extra calories have to be stored as fat.

For all these calories to be stored as fat, your body has to release a lot of insulin into your system. Your insulin level will increase drastically at first, but when your insulin level returns to normal, your energy level crashes and you get tired. If fewer calories are consumed during the Thanksgiving meal, less insulin will be released into your system, and you will not be nearly as sleepy after the meal.

Post-Thanksgiving meal tiredness is essentially an issue of portion control. If you avoid eating excessive amounts of food, your body will feel much better and you will not have so many calories to work off after the holiday. Even if you are not able eat a normal amount of food, make an effort not to eat it all in one sitting. Instead, eat a smaller amount during the meal and then you can go back for more in a couple hours if you want.

By not eating everything at one time, it gives you body a chance to process some of the food you ate and less insulin will be produced by your body, so you will not feel as tired. Even if you eat the same total calories on Thanksgiving, if you can spread the calories out over the day, you will feel much better and your body may store significantly fewer of those calories as fat. Do your body a favor this Thanksgiving and make it a priority to minimize the number of calories you eat in one sitting.

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14 years of experience and education in health and fitness