After piling your plate filled with Christmas turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes coated in gravy, candy potatoes and a slice of pie or two, you would possibly need to crash on the sofa moderately than be part of the household recreation of contact soccer. Although you could have heard that the turkey is guilty in your drowsiness, that isn’t true.

As a substitute, a carb-heavy meal and an exhausting week of preparation are extra seemingly the trigger, in keeping with medical doctors. Carbs and sugar from our Thanksgiving favourites convert into melatonin and serotonin, giving us that meals coma everyone knows and love.

To separate truth from fiction, we turned to specialists who might shed some mild on why we need to cross out after Thanksgiving dinner.

A meals coma ― that candy, sleepy, barely stuffed feeling you get after a giant meal ― can be recognized by its medical identify, postprandial somnolence. Thanksgiving is the right storm for a meals coma, in keeping with Dr. Deepinder Goyal, a gastroenterologist at Gastro Well being in Orlando, Florida. Goyal defined that consuming sedatives like alcohol, consuming meals wealthy in tryptophan (extra on that later) or chowing down on a big meal can all set off a meals coma.

We really feel sleepy as a result of blood is diverted from the mind to the intestine to course of all that additional meals. Dr. Wealthy Joseph, an attending doctor at Brigham and Girls’s Hospital in Boston, defined, “The larger the meal, the extra of your blood goes to the intestine to assist in digestion. Much less blood within the mind, so you’re feeling sleepier. However your precise sleep high quality could also be impaired by alcohol consumption and indigestion from all of the meals you ate!”

In case you have any co-morbidities, resembling sleep apnea or hypothyroidism, these might additionally contribute to your meals coma.

Regardless of the widespread delusion that claims in any other case, you possibly can cease blaming your meals coma on the turkey. Although the fowl comprises tryptophan, the amino acid concerned in temper and sleep, Dr. Christopher Winter, a neurologist and sleep specialist, argues there isn’t sufficient to make an affect. He stated, “As meals go, turkey isn’t notably excessive in tryptophan. Sleepiness usually comes from excessive carbohydrate consumption and resultant change in blood sugar and insulin ranges.”

What’s tryptophan? It’s a vital amino acid present in many widespread meals we eat, together with oats, bananas, milk, tuna, cheese and hen. Within the physique, tryptophan helps produce melatonin, aka the sleep hormone. It’s also bought as a complement to assist with insomnia and sleep problems, however they comprise about 20 occasions the quantity of tryptophan that’s in your Thanksgiving turkey.

The mashed potatoes, candy potatoes, stuffing, rolls and pie are loaded with carbs, which is probably going wreaking havoc in your blood sugar.

“Meals with a better glycemic index are inclined to trigger extra spikes and subsequent crashes in blood sugar,” Joseph stated. A blood sugar crash would possibly really feel like that afternoon hunch when you possibly can’t give attention to work, or it could possibly simply make you irritable and drained.

Dr. Erica Jansen, a dietary epidemiologist on the College of Michigan, defined, “Easy carbohydrates make it simpler for tryptophan to cross the blood-brain barrier, so it could be that the mix of turkey and carbs causes sleepiness as an alternative of simply turkey alone.”

One other delusion is that carbs will enhance our temper: A meta-analysis in Neuroscience & Behavioural Evaluations discovered that folk who ate easy carbohydrates skilled fatigue and fewer alertness after an hour and confirmed no optimistic impact on temper. Don’t ditch the potatoes simply but.

Including some fibre ― a salad, acorn squash, roasted Brussels sprouts ― and piling the plate with satiating protein will help counteract among the torpid results of the carbs. Joseph instructed HuffPost, “If it’s a huge meal consisting of assorted carbs, fat and proteins, it’s going to seemingly trigger much less of an aggressive spike in blood sugar, particularly in case you eat the proteins and fat (i.e., the turkey and gravy) earlier than the candy carbs (i.e., candied yams).”

A few glasses of Chardonnay together with your meal (or a few beers whereas watching the sport) also can enable you to calm down and induce that sleepy feeling, although Winters cautions that alcohol can have a damaging impact on sleep high quality. Should you select to drink, imbibe earlier within the day or not less than just a few hours earlier than bedtime. Jansen stated. “In an identical method, alcohol consumption could enhance temper within the second however can result in decrease temper in a while, not less than partially by way of the decrements in sleep high quality.”

Stress from flight delays, touring with children or household stress can all contribute to poor sleep main as much as Thanksgiving. As soon as dinner is over, the strain round Thanksgiving tends to ease up, and the tiredness would possibly simply be catching up with you, Jansen defined.