Let's gather to celebrate our awakenings from food coma, football recovery, escape from family, and a holiday.
All cachers are welcome whether you are a cacher or not, escaping from in-laws, the dry turkey, ruined cranberry relish, need to walk off the extra helping of pumpkin pie, or clear your head after your favorite team lost.
Date: Thursday, November 28, 2013
Time: 1900 aka 7:00 pm,
Will last at least 15 minutes, maybe longer.
Location: Silver Lake Park
Picnic Shelter (Coords listed above)
Tryptophan is one of the 22 standard amino acids and an essential amino acid in the human diet. It is encoded in the standard genetic code as the codon UGG. Only the L-stereoisomer of tryptophan is used in structural or enzyme proteins, but the R -stereoisomer is occasionally found in naturally produced peptides. The distinguishing structural characteristic of tryptophan is that it contains an indole functional group. It is an essential amino acid, as demonstrated by its growth effects on rats.
A common assertion is that heavy consumption of turkey meat results in drowsiness, due to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey. However, the amount of tryptophan in turkey is comparable to that contained in most other meats. Furthermore, post-meal drowsiness may have more to do with what else is consumed along with the turkey and, in particular, carbohydrates. It has been demonstrated in both animal models and humans that ingestion of a meal rich in carbohydrates triggers release of insulin. Insulin in turn stimulates the uptake of large neutral branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), but not tryptophan into muscle, increasing the ratio of tryptophan to BCAA in the blood stream. The resulting increased ratio of tryptophan to BCAA in the blood reduces competition at the large neutral amino acid transporter, resulting in the uptake of tryptophan across the blood–brain barrier into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Once in the CSF, tryptophan is converted into serotonin in the raphe nuclei by the normal enzymatic pathway. The resultant serotonin is further metabolised into melatonin by the pineal gland. Hence, this data suggests that "feast-induced drowsiness"— or postprandial somnolence — may be the result of a heavy meal rich in carbohydrates, which, via an indirect mechanism, increases the production of sleep-promoting melatonin in the brain.