If eating makes you tired, you’ve got something in common with most people—and, for that matter, with most living things. Researchers have turned up evidence of “postprandial sleepiness,” also known as a food coma, in insects, snakes, worms and rats.
“The conservation of this behavior across species suggests that it’s really important for something,” says William Ja, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida who has studied this food coma phenomenon.
