There’s a fairy story about Thanksgiving that will get refuted each fall. Does consuming turkey actually make you go to sleep? When science writers test in with the consultants, they all the time get the identical response: No, no, no, and no. Additionally no and no.
These vacation debunkers let you know what the science says: Turkey meat shouldn’t be a sedative. They let you know what the research present: Drumsticks don’t produce fatigue. After which they take one other step, nevertheless ill-advised: They lay out totally different causes Thanksgiving dinner is likely to be sleep inducing. At the same time as these tales bust the turkey-coma fable, they find yourself changing it with different fables.
The difficulty started practically half a century in the past. It began with heat milk—a sleep help that was the topic of its personal frivolously flavored model of science journalism. Was it true {that a} mug of milk may make it easier to fall asleep? Sure, the consultants stated, as a result of milk has tryptophan! This one amino acid labored one thing like a pure “sleeping capsule,” a psychiatry professor advised The New York Occasions in 1983. “As soon as once more,” the Occasions stated, “an outdated wives’ story, the one about heat milk earlier than bedtime, has acquired scientific help.”
Certainly, a tryptophanic fever was about to unfold throughout America. By the top of the last decade, tryptophan was being broadly bought in dietary supplements as a remedy for insomnia; an help for beating jet leg; and in addition a repair for melancholy, PMS, and drug dependence. (Tryptophan was even talked about as a suicide preventive.) To elucidate its wondrous efficiency, scientists famous that when tryptophan made its approach into the mind, it may very well be transformed into the neurotransmitter serotonin. Based on the pondering of the time, serotonin was the molecule of rest and well-being. Early research appeared to point out that it led to sleep.
Turkey, too, accommodates some tryptophan. Thus the sleepy-turkey fable was born. However even from the beginning, consultants knew the speculation had some problems. Within the first place—as each Thanksgiving-myth-debunking article notes—turkey doesn’t have a lot of tryptophan. In reality, virtually each different form of meat has extra. One serving of turkey breast accommodates 244 milligrams of tryptophan; one serving of clams accommodates 243. You’ll get much less tryptophan from turkey, ounce for ounce, than you’ll from octopus or cheddar cheese. And within the second place, even taking high-dose tryptophan dietary supplements doesn’t appear to take action a lot for sleep. (In 2017, the American Academy of Sleep Medication beneficial in opposition to using tryptophan as a remedy for insomnia on account of its “absence of demonstrated efficacy.”)
If solely that may very well be the top of it. The early consultants on the subject had laid out another dietary theories of ensleepification. Tryptophan was soporific, the MIT neuroendocrinologist Richard Wurtman and his colleagues stated, however its results have been restricted by the diploma to which it crossed the blood-brain barrier. Different vitamins from meals may get in its approach. However Wurtman, who died in 2022, discovered that while you ingest a bunch of carbohydrates, the ensuing spike of insulin can shunt away the amino acids that usually compete with tryptophan. As he noticed it, carbs have a “sedating impact” within the human eating regimen, by serving to tryptophan to make its approach from the intestine into the mind. If it appeared as if a mug of heat, protein-rich milk was serving to individuals get to sleep, that’s as a result of they need to even have been consuming cake.
Wurtman was already floating this concept—let’s name it the sleepy-carbs speculation—within the early Nineteen Eighties, and it has been repeated within the press ever since. Virtually all articles concerning the turkey-coma fable now level at carbohydrate-heavy facet dishes, the candy potatoes and the pie, and declare that these Thanksgiving meals, not the turkey, actually knock you out.
This merely swaps one extremely suspect notion for an additional. Research discover that meals with numerous carbohydrates don’t actually make you sleepy. (They might have some small results on how you sleep, comparable to a rise within the time you spend in REM, the dreaming section.) Extra to the purpose, the outdated concept that serotonin is a straightforward, sleep-promoting sign within the mind is totally out of style; later analysis discovered that serotonin can also be a potent supply of wakefulness, and that its operate within the sleep-wake cycle is each sophisticated and various.
Nutritionists might now be extra inclined to have a look at melatonin, a hormone that’s synthesized (like serotonin) from dietary tryptophan. One line of analysis appears to be like at whether or not bitter cherries or beefsteak tomatoes is likely to be helpful as a sleep help, as a result of these meals are identified to be wealthy in naturally occurring melatonin. When taken as a complement, melatonin appears to have a small impact on sleep onset and sleep high quality; when taken as a tomato, it might even have some advantages. That stated, the American Academy of Sleep Medication recommends in opposition to using melatonin as a remedy for insomnia for the same purpose that it recommends in opposition to tryptophan: inadequate proof of clinically significant outcomes.
Briefly, all of the science right here is fairly weak. But the turkey-myth debunkers pile on the speculations. The sleepy-carbs speculation is simply the beginning. What accounts for post-Thanksgiving lethargy? Many consultants blame the truth that we’re consuming a lot meals, and overeating makes you drained by itself. (Some even cite the old style and unlikely notion that heavy digestion deprives your mind of oxygen.) However the proof that persons are extra inclined to go to sleep, for any purpose, after pigging out—that they expertise what’s identified among the many cognoscenti as “postprandial somnolence”—is equivocal, at greatest.
That is science—and that is science journalism—of the type that solely makes you dumber the extra of it you learn. Listed below are another causes you would possibly really feel drained after consuming dinner on Thanksgiving: You’ve got consumed some alcoholic drinks; you may have traveled an extended distance; you may have gotten trapped in some exhausting dialog along with your cousin’s spouse. Additionally possibly this: Supper time is over, and the sky is darkish, and loads of time has handed because the final time you have been sleeping.
And permit me to put out one ultimate chance: What if Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t even make you sleepy within the first place? May the very foundation for the turkey-coma fable, and for all of its debunkings, be a sham? I may discover no information to counsel that the Thanksgiving-meal impact is actual. “No one’s examined this,” Faris Zuraikat, a vitamin and sleep scientist at Columbia College, advised me after I referred to as him for this story. So right here we’re at present, dressing up a folks perception concerning the vacation with pseudoscientific rationales. It’s a pointless and exhausting venture. We must be grateful if it ends.