A classic Thanksgiving pigout may feel like it’s basically required, but at an average of 3,000 calories a pop, it’s also a diet bust.

The most health-minded among us might load up their plates with the best nutrition intentions — opting for red wine over white, choosing the multigrain roll rather than the white one and piling on tons of white turkey meat instead of dark. And cranberry sauce is healthy, right?

Not so fast — turns out, a lot of our classic Thanksgiving nutrition advice is steeped in misinformation. We asked Robert Davis, Ph.D., author of Coffee Is Good For You and HuffPost blogger, to bust nine of the most common myths about this Thursday’s meal.

We’ve all heard that the trigger for those post-feast naps we can’t seem to resist is the tryptophan found in turkey. The theory goes that tryptophan, an amino acid, is converted in the body to serotonin and then converted into melatonin, which affects the body’s sleep cycles. But the truth is, according to Davis, other foods, such as cheese, eggs and other kinds of meat, contain just as much if not more of the amino acid.

The most likely culprit for the sleepiness is the amount of carbs (and alcohol) we consume at Thanksgiving dinner, he says.

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