Yahoo Lifestyle Research Shows Food Comas Are Real — and They Do More Than Just Make You Sleepy
Take note before your next holiday dinner.
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Gifts, Christmas carols, seasonal decorations, and mulled wine are all great, but is there really anything better about the holidays than the abundant freedom to nap?
Picture this: you have the day off, you’ve just wrapped up a festive feast with your family, and everyone mutually agrees to go their separate ways so they can sleep for an hour or two — no alarm set, no itinerary for the rest of the day needed. That’s the beauty of the food coma.
Whether you relish the indulgence of a food coma-induced nap or not, you’re likely familiar with the phenomenon. It’s a commonly cited explanation for how people feel after a big meal — but is it real, or are we just reluctant to move when very full?
Food science and history podcast Gastropod dove into the surprisingly complex topic of food comas this week, with co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, alongside expert guests Subha Mani, Justine Hervé, and Nikolay Kukushkin, breaking down everything we need to know about the phenomenon.
What is a food coma?
A food coma is, obviously, not the same thing as a true coma, referenced in medical contexts. A more technical term for it is “postprandial somnolence” which simply means feeling fatigued following a meal.
In the words of Nikolay Kukushkin, a clinical associate professor of life science at New York University, “A food coma is a behavioral response to eating food when the animal, whether it's human or another animal, slows down and relaxes after taking in a meal… Another way to put it is rest and digest.”
Justine Hervé, assistant professor of economics at the Stevens Institute of Technology, gives a more specific definition, saying that “Basically, it's a decrease in alertness that happens within an hour to two hours after ingestion of the meal.”
Are food comas real?
Even after defining what a food coma is, this prompts a few questions. Is it just a placebo effect? And does it simply mean that someone is sleepy, or is it something else? Along with a number of other academics, Hervé and Mani have published research confirming that a food coma isn’t just a funny concept we reference after a large meal, and demonstrating its concrete impact.
Their study had over 4,000 students in India take a number of tests, in a variety of subjects, at different times throughout the day — some were administered tests shortly after eating, others several hours later. Findings revealed that students who took exams within the first hour after eating performed noticeably worse, with Hervé noting on Gastropod that “Testing in the postprandial period reduced their cognitive ability by 5% to 9% across the board for all of these types of tests. It's a substantial reduction in your ability to perform.”
Researchers did consider that students might be exerting less effort on the tests only because they were sleepy after eating. To determine whether or not that was true, they looked at how long students in the postprandial period took to complete an exam, posing the question: Were they not trying as hard because they were tired? But that wasn’t the case, and children who had eaten more recently took, on average, the same amount of time as their peers to finish a test.
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These results indicated that a “food coma” is not only real, but that it is more than a feeling of fatigue — it is also a cognitive impairment. Twilley explains on Gastropod that “Subha and Justine say that the ones who took their test within an hour after their meal, they did try as hard. They just didn't have the juice.”
But it is important to note that the degree to which a food coma affects a child’s ability to think could differ depending on their economic resources. It’s possible that students with less consistent access to enough food might be more drastically impacted by the effects of a food coma.
Or, alternatively, as Hervé and Mani told Food & Wine, “Economic status could make a food coma worse as it allows one to afford bigger and better meals. But at the same time, better knowledge about food comas among higher income households could mitigate its effects, as they may actively choose to eat smaller meals at work or drink coffee/tea to minimize its effect.”
Regardless, it can’t hurt to wait an hour before you take a test or give a big presentation at work.
What causes a food coma?
The short answer to this question is that there is not yet a definitive cause of a food coma. There have historically been a number of explanations for this phenomenon. It was previously believed that food comas were caused by increased blood flow to your digestive system after eating, which might divert blood flow from going to your brain, but Graber and Twilley say this has been disproven.
Around Thanksgiving, the amino acid tryptophan — which turkey is rich in, alongside other poultry and meats — is often credited with making people sleepy. But Kukushkin emphasizes that “it doesn't appear to have that much of an effect.”
While speaking on Gastropod, Nikolay Kukushkin detailed his research on sea slugs, which might begin to point towards the cause of a food coma. Kukushkin and his peers found that one insulin-like hormone, Aplysia, which is produced in a sea slug’s gut when eating, yielded a food coma-like reaction. But it may be too early to determine what this means for the cause of a food coma in humans, since we are, obviously, fairly morphologically different from sea slugs.
Unfortunately for everyone planning to feast in the upcoming weeks, neither the hosts nor researchers featured on this podcast have a solution for food comas. But there’s also nothing to indicate that they’re bad for you. So maybe don’t take a test right after Christmas dinner, but otherwise enjoy the meal to your heart’s content.
Read the original article on Food & Wine
