Love to eat burgers, chips for lunch? You may fall victim to `food coma`!

London: Almost everyone in this world is a self-confessed foodie and lives to eat. Who are we kidding? Everyone eats – it is a basic element of survival, after all.

There are those who watch what they consume and eat healthy and there are those who like to have a heavy (read: huge) meal to keep themselves full for long. Well, lets just say it's a bad idea.

Why? Researchers have said that eating huge meals like burgers and chips for lunch, are more likely to put you at risk of food coma.

Yes, food coma is a thing! A new study has revealed that eating a meal particularly high in protein and salt can make us feel more fatigued and causes us to fall into a ‘food coma’.

Also called postprandial somnolence, food coma is a condition where all you want to do is lie down and have a snooze.

The findings indicated that protein and salt are the causes of the infamous food coma, the reason being that they are “expensive commodities,” so our bodies have to work harder to digest them and extract the nutrients.

The researchers from from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Florida’s Scripps Research Institute found that carbohydrates did not have the same effect, despite various dieticians having previously claimed carbohydrate-rich foods make us sleepy.

They used fruit-flies to investigate the neurobiological links between eating and sleep.

The study found that sugar actually does not actually contribute to a food coma.

The researchers are yet to discover, however, why sleep helps us digest protein and salt, but it is clear that is what our bodies want to do.

“During the food coma, the flies remain still for a certain amount of time and they are much less responsive to any kind of other cues than they would normally be,” said study’s author Dr. Robert Huber.

“There’s clearly something very potent about sleep itself,” he added.

So, if you want to be on top form this afternoon, it’s perhaps wise to opt for a healthy veggie option for lunch, they concluded.

(With ANI inputs)