I ' m an L-tripto fan

Most Americans know more big words in the medical field than in any other arena of human endeavor -- because it's personal, about their own bodies. Talk to someone who ain't got no good grammar about his health and suddenly he's discussing endocardiograms and platelets and swellings of the bursa. He knows about what ails him. When we talk turkey, we all talk about L-triptophan, the mysterious substance that we all seem to know about which turkey contains, and which makes us drowsy. But does it? In recent years I have heard that most nutritionists think what really makes us drowsy is carbo overload, or the simple diversion of blood flow from the brain to the digestive system because we ate a meal that was twice as big as usual. So I looked it up. I googled for triptophan, and read sources from kiddie nutrition sites to Wikipedia to specialized medical journals, filtering out the bits that weren't mention in the more detailed articles. L-triptophan is the most common kind of triptophan in human food and you might as well leave the 'L' off, so I will. Triptophan may sound like a former Soviet republic but that's okay since turkey sounds like a country, too. Turkey, in this instance, is my favorite food (really) and triptophan is one of its chemical ingredients, one of 20 standard amino acids. It trips off a sequence of chemical reactions in your brain's neurotransmitters, creating a feeling of relaxation. Turkey is not the only food that is rich in triptophan. You can find more per bite in both pork and cheese. Triptophan is also in milk, bread and pasta, and peanut butter and chocolate. Despite the very real effect, the more learned sites I checked confirmed that the Thanksgiving effect is very probably associated more with overeating than with what you're eating. But a meal of pork and cheese, finished off with sweetened milk, probably will give you a mild sense of pleasant relaxation. (I said sweetened because sugar interferes with competing chemicals, thus facilitating the effect.) Happy Thanksgiving!