The Thanksgiving feast and sleepiness: let’s crowdsource some data!

A few years ago, we talked about the role turkey consumption might (or might not) play in post-Thanksgiving-feast fatigue. The oft-heard hypothesis is that the tryptophan in turkey gives you the yawns, but there was the suggestion that carbohydrates from starchy and sweet side dishes were an accomplice — and that eating additional protein might counteract the tryptophan’s soporific effects. Also, the amount you eat may be involved in how your body prioritizes consciousness relative to digestion.

It gets complicated pretty fast when we don’t eat standardized lab chow.

Also, in passing, let me note that for all its association with tryptophan, turkey doesn’t even crack the top 50 in this list of tryptophan-rich foods. (Number one: stellar sea lion kidney.)

Bora has a nice discussion of what tryptophan is up to in your body. Myself, I’m interested in working out observable patterns in Thanksgiving dining-and-yawning experience. Once we know what the patterns are, then we know what we need to explain with a biochemical mechanism.

To this ends, let’s conduct some citizen science (and, come Friday, to collect some reports from the field).

Here is a form for data collection (*.doc format).

Ideally, we’d all want to sit down to the same Thanksgiving meal together (having all gotten a good night’s sleep the day before, etc., etc.). Sadly, that’s not going to happen. However, maybe you can rope those with whom you are dining on Thursday into participating.

Depending on the vibe at your Thanksgiving table, you can either ask the diners to keep track of what kinds of foods they eat, or you can assign your guests particular consumption objectives. Then, before dessert, have everyone do a quick assessment of his or her energy level.

With luck, we’ll get data for the following variations:

• High-tryptophan food (like turkey), high carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: sleepy)
• High-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: not sleepy)
• Skip the high-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: sleepy)
• Skip the high-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: not sleepy)
• High-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: not sleepy)
• High-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: energetic)
• Skip the high-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: not sleepy)
• Skip the high-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: frighteningly energetic)

Of course, if you track participant input a bit more precisely, maybe we’ll stumble upon some other factor that turns out to be important, like vitamin A or sage.

If you use my form, you can return your results to me (as a *.doc or scanned into a PDF) by email: dr – dot – freeride – at – gmail – dot – com. I’ll compile the responses and we’ll see if we can make sense of the data.

See you back here on Friday morning with your results!