Happy Tryptophan Respiratory Therapists!

Well I have a lot to thank for. Here is a good list:

1. Family

2. Friends

3. School

4. Health

5. Stress (good ones lol)

I will be seeing my family and I will be excited since I have not seen them in a while. I met a lot of GREAT friends this year and I had the most fun in the beginning of 2007. I went to so many parties before the RT program. Speaking of RT program I am so THANKFUL I made it in! Nobody knows how much I thank god and everyone else who made it possible for me to get in this wonderful program.

My health is fine and since I’m still young I am in good shape. However I am overweight haha. But I can fix that pretty fast since I done it before.  (lose weight). All the daily stress I endure, made me a better person. I am able to communicate well with people and set up good meeting times.

Now this is where everyone else can be thankful. Everyday we walk, talk, eat, BREATHE, ETC..ETC.. I’m sure everyone is aware that the patients in the hospital are sick. Specially the ones that are on our ventilators and on the oxygen. We as humans are lucky that we don’t have any illness. The health people should be very thankful they have their lives.

Specially us RTs we are able to talk very well to patients. A patient who cannot talk would wish he or she can talk. We are able to walk for 8-12 hours. A patient who has an amputated knee or a bad leg would wish he or she can walk. We are able to BREATHE. The most important thing to any living thing out there. We as RTs makes sure everyone can breathe.  I am pretty sure an RT out their has saved a life before and that is something the patient and you can be thankful. Just remember that everything you do somebody wishes they can do. Even while reading this blog, somebody out there is blind. We should be thankful for our everyday health.

Turkey…Turkey…What?. Well before any RT goes to work for thanksgiving and you are working a 12 hour shift.. remember not to eat the turkey. I learned this today. Turkeys have high levels of TRYPTOPHAN. Most of you probably will have to review chemistry and A&P. Just to save you time I’ll tell you what it does. Basically it makes you sleepy LOL!!..

According to Wiki

Tryptophan as a component of dietary protein is particularly plentiful in chocolate, oats, bananas, mangoes, dried dates, milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, red meat, eggs, fish, poultry, sesame, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, spirulina, and peanuts. [11] It is also found in turkey at a level typical of poultry in general.[12]

Turkey meat and drowsiness

One widely-held urban myth is that heavy consumption of turkey meat (as for example in a Thanksgiving feast) results in drowsiness, which has been attributed to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey.[43][44][45] While turkey does contain high levels of tryptophan, the amount is comparable to that contained in most other meats.[12] Furthermore, postprandial Thanksgiving sedation may have more to do with what is consumed along with the turkey, in particular carbohydrates, rather than the turkey itself.

It has been demonstrated in both animal models[46] and in humans[47][48][49] 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 (LNAA) but not tryptophan (trp) into muscle, increasing the ratio of trp to LNAA in the blood stream. The resulting increased ratio of tryptophan to large neutral amino acids in the blood reduces competition with other amino acids for the large neutral amino acid transporter protein for uptake of tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system (CNS).[50][51] Once inside the CNS, tryptophan is converted into serotonin in the raphe nuclei by the normal enzymatic pathway.[46][48] The resultant serotonin is further metabolised into melatonin by the pineal gland.[9] Hence, these data suggest that “feast-induced drowsiness,” and in particular, the common American post-Thanksgiving dinner drowsiness, may be the result of a heavy meal rich in carbohydrates which, via an indirect mechanism, increases the production of sleep-promoting serotonin and melatonin in the brain.

Now that I think about it..the time is about 1208 and I just ate turkey…i feel sleepy..so this is all I am going to blog.!

ONCE AGAIN HAPPY THANKSGIVING

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 1:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.