Healthy Living

Tryptophan in milk as a sleep aid? Total nonsense!!! The amount of Tryptophan in milk is so small that, to have any effect on inducing sleep, you would needs to drink a few hundred GALLONS of the stuff - inducing the "big sleep"! The same is true of the amount of Tryptophan in foods such as turkey, chicken, and so on - but the myths persist. L-Tryptophan used to be sold over-the-counter in some pharmacies and most health-food stores in bottles with 40-80 mg tablets. It is an naturally-occurring "amino acid" essential to humnas and other animals. If you ingested about 800 mg a hour or two before heading off to bed, you would have no trouble falling and staying asleep - esppecially if you took that dose every evening (building up a "steady state" level in your blood and nervous system). Most neurologists and psychiatrists knew of these properties of L-Tryptophan, as well as it ability to reduce or eliminate anxiety (when used along with MAO inhibitors [phenelzine or Parnate; tranylcypromine or Parnate] and alloupurinal [Zyloprim - normally used to treat Gout], and other medications that block the breakdown pathways of Tryptophan). However, the L-Tryptophan causes the liver to adapt and break down L-Tryptophan at an ever-increasing rate, requiring higher doses of L-Tryptophan, so the anti-anxiety effects do not last more than a year or two. However, the sleep-inducing/maintenance effects of L-Tryptophan continue. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to find L-Tryptophan anywhere now. The factory in Korea, that made about 95% of L-Tryptophan, put out a bad batch and a number of people got ill - nothing serious. This was the excuse that the pharmaceutical companies had long sought: they pressured Congress to ban the sale of L-Tryptophan without a prescription. So now you must buy their highly addictive variant of Valium, instead of the much cheaper L-Tryptophan. Yes, I am an M.D. (researcher in neurochemistry/psychiatry)