I have long believed that Robert Smith is the single smartest person ever to play football. From his college days, when he quit the Ohio State team for a year because practices conflicted with his biology labs, to his early retirement, when he said he wanted to walk away healthy and pursue other interests like his passion for astronomy, the guy is just brilliant.And now he's used that brain for a very good cause this day after Thanksgiving: He went on ESPN Radio and debunked the myth that tryptophan in turkey makes us sleepy.
Smith was working alongside Erik Kuselias when Kuselias referred to tryptophan as the reason people get tired after their Thanksgiving meals. Smith interrupted him.
"It's a myth," Smith said. "The tryptophan myth. Oh, it's a myth."
That led to this exchange:
Kuselias: "You think it's a myth?"
Smith: "It's not what I think, it's what science has said definitively. ... There's as much tryptophan in chicken and beef and all that. ... It's the ingestion of carbohydrates, and the release of insulin gets."
Kuselias: "I didn't think there were carbohydrates in turkey."
Smith: "It's not the turkey, it's all the carbohydrates you ingest in your Thanksgiving dinner, your 3,000-calorie meal, and you might have a little booze."
Smith has it exactly right: we feel tired after Thanksgiving dinner because of stuffing and mashed potatoes and yams and pumpkin pie and wine and dealing with our relatives, not because of tryptophan. It's good to hear a smart guy using science to debunk myths.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Always loved Robert Smith! (Though I DO wish you'd dropped the ball on the tryptophan myth now and used those smarts instead to NOT to run out of bounds toward the end of regulation in the '98 NFC Championship. *Sigh*)
If you think Robert's smart (which he certainly is), you should interview another Buckeye alum, Craig Krenzel. This guy was taking graduate-level courses in genetics or micro-biology or such, WHILE QBing the team to the national title! Brainiac indeed.