Do amino acids make you sleepy?

So here's a fun fact: there's a story, ages old, that turkey contains tryptophan (it does), which causes drowsiness (also true - tryptophan does cause drowsiness). What is not so true is that eating turkey causes one to fall helplessly asleep and thus skip out on the cleanup. I have always been skeptical of this assertion, but I would be plagarizing a large amount of research if I simply declared it false. Instead, check out this link from the Food Detectives, where they test the premise about as scientifically as you could hope The Food Network could manage. Spoiler alert: the turkey element of a Thanksgiving dinner does not cause the drowsiness. What makes people so tired is because they eat too damn much! But watch the video. It's pretty fun.