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Melatonin is confusing it’s a supplement and you don’t really want to be dependent on a supplement especially with something as natural as sleep right so i want to break down a lot of the literature and i wanted to do this video because it’s sort of a personal thing for me because when i was really overweight when i was like 300 pounds and honestly until i got
Down to like 210 pounds sleep was a very very big problem for me now i spent a lot of my time inside i spent a lot of my time in front of a computer and it was just one of many things that made my life candidly miserable but not being able to sleep the one time that i thought that i could escape a lot of the stresses of my life and a lot of the just things
I didn’t want to deal with i didn’t even have that so i leaned on melatonin quite a bit and then i started to get concerned like well am i using it too much what’s going on so anyhow a couple of years ago i did a video talking about melatonin supplementation and i expressed concern over just the things i’m talking about if you take a supplement for long enough
Like melatonin are you going to create what’s called a negative feedback loop where you no longer produce it naturally and there’s a lot of merit to that because we naturally produce about a quarter milligram of melatonin per day you know when where it’s time to go to bed or when it gets dark out and most melatonin supplements you’re looking anywhere from 1 to 10
Milligrams that’s a huge difference so it seems like you could just like burn out that receptor and create a negative feedback loop pretty quick but since then there’s been some interesting data that’s come out in fact the first systematic review and meta analyses has come out surrounding melatonin supplementation in terms of safety and efficacy so it was published
In the journal of complementary therapies in medicine okay and it was very interesting because it took a look at 50 studies 50 pretty large studies and 26 of them ended up showing no adverse effects no negative outcomes from melatonin supplementation however 24 of them did show at least one adverse outcome however most of these adverse outcomes were very short-term
Nothing standing out as extraordinarily long term but additionally what they found with this is that these issues could be mitigated these adverse events could be mitigated by supplementing melatonin along with your natural circadian rhythms so in other words don’t take melatonin when it’s dark out right before you go to bed take melatonin right when it’s getting
Dark so you’re matching your diurnal rhythms and use melatonin to kind of get your body into a natural sleep weight cycle then there was a 2019 meta-analysis published in cns drugs that took a look at 37 studies and again it generally found melatonin safe and effective the only issues that it found were pretty short-term effects like short-term negative effects so
The next day people were maybe a little sleepy or they had some dizziness or they had headaches and even that was pretty small amounts so it’s kind of interesting do i need to eat my words on melatonin from a couple of years ago possibly but i still stand behind the fact that like interventional use like just to be able to fix a problem melatonin can work and we
Should always lean into natural ways to boost our melatonin which we’re going to talk about as this video goes on and give you some solutions there so as far as efficacy is concerned there was a pretty brand spanking new study in 2022 that was a meta-analysis looking at the efficacy of melatonin supplements and this is what really sold me on the occasional like
Periodic use of melatonin so this meta-analysis was published in the journal neurology okay and it took a look at 23 trials and it found that between 2 and 10 milligrams of melatonin supplementation improved overall sleep quality and sleep duration of adults that had various diseases okay now these diseases range from like metabolic dysfunction anxiety asthma
Things like that but also just good old-fashioned sleep disorders right so there was a significant improvement there that kind of goes without saying but it is very very important if something can legitimately give you improved sleep that is something that we need to lean on okay real sleep not just like having some alcohol and knocking yourself out that’s not
Real sleep that’s just being passed out there was another 2019 minute analysis that found that supplementing melatonin increased total sleep time by 30 minutes not time in bed but actual sleep time so we’ve established that melatonin is good we’re also establishing that people have lower levels of melatonin than they used to and older people have lower levels of
Melatonin than younger people so what are some ways that we can support our natural melatonin levels a little bit more especially as we get older the first one is actually taking care of the gut and consuming more fiber and it sounds totally crazy until you look at a 2021 study that’s published in scientific reports it’s really wild what they found is that when
You had more what are called short chain fatty acids so namely uh butyrate propionate acetate when you had more of these what are called short chain fatty acids in the feces there was basically poorer sleep now these short chain fatty acids this is interesting because short chain fatty acids are a byproduct of fibers being broken down right their byproduct of
Fibers being broken down by bacteria that therefore produce these amazing short chain fatty acids so if you’re listening carefully you heard that i said higher levels of short chain fatty acids were bad well higher levels of short chain fatty acids in the feces are bad because what’s happening there is that indicates that these short chain fatty acids are passing
Through the body these amazing short chain fatty acids that we need to act upon cells act upon receptors as a signaling device are leaving the body we don’t want that so my reason in saying that is when you start looking at how this works it makes sense so when we consume fiber it breaks down into short chain fatty acids generally speaking these short chain fatty
Acids bind to a receptor on very specific cells these cells are called enterochromaffin cells or enterochromaffin cells potato potato okay so when they bind to these cells that actually produces serotonin and you’ve probably heard some like weird blogs years ago i remember when it was surfacing that we produce serotonin in the gut well we produce some of our
Serotonin in the gut which is interesting and they happen as a result of these enterochromatin cells but these enterochromaffin cells need this light switch to get turned on and these short chain fatty acids are essentially the light switch there’s also some interesting evidence that it induces tryptophan hydroxylase expression so expresses activates genes that
Create the enzyme that allows the conversion of tryptophan into serotonin that’s a little bit more mechanistic we need to see more data on that to understand more of how that works but still very interesting so when you look at fiber when you look at the gut one of the first things that comes to mind for people is going to be probiotics should i take a probiotic
Bottom line is eat fiber that’s going to be the best way but if you are looking at probiotics for overall gut diversity i would recommend seed so i put a link down below for them they are what’s called a symbiotic so that means that they have a prebiotic and a probiotic in one capsule really interesting technology it’s a capsule inside of a capsule and that way
You’re getting the proper delivery you’re getting what you’re setting out for because a lot of times the hydrochloric acid in your gut can really just destroy a probiotic so seed is a little bit different they also put their money where their mouth is and do a lot of their own research and fund a lot of microbiome research so that link down below will save you 15
Off of the seed daily synbiotic if you want to try it out that is personally the one that i use and i’ve been using it for a little over a year now and i really am a fan of it so that link for 15 off down below now we have to face facts about us all getting older and some of us actually getting old not just older as we get older melatonin levels tend to decline
Or they definitely decline okay they definitely decline but a number of other things are happening at the same time our cells tend to get more damaged to put it in sort of a colloquial way right mitochondria becomes less efficient basically cells start having damaged particles leak out of them again very simple way of putting it but when that happens the immune
System has to corral those things it has to deal with them that triggers an increase in inflammation as we get older it’s known as inflammation i’ve done topics surrounding that well what’s interesting is that melatonin seems to have a correlating effect with that in terms of improving right improving so if melatonin levels are higher we see a decrease in the
Inflammation this inflammation that’s associated with aging so one of the things that melatonin can do is it helps the mitochondrial efficiency so it helps the mitochondria from an antioxidant perspective so it protects the mitochondria a little bit more so the mitochondria isn’t leaking again for lack of better term those particles into the bloodstream so it
Helps lessen the damage associated molecular patterns associated with aging but that’s a little bit gobbledy goop kind of some greek what else does it do well melatonin also seems to suppress interleukin 1 beta interleukin 1 8 and tumor necrosis factor alpha sounds like more greek basically melatonin potentially modulates the inflammatory response that may happen
As a result of aging too and then lastly melatonin also can prevent excitotoxicity in the brain now that means like let’s say your brain was just super amped up and you were so tilted towards what’s called the glutamate scale that your brain was just firing like crazy it was hard to fall asleep melatonin can neutralize some of the negative effects of that so what
Are some ways that you can boost melatonin naturally aside from consuming fiber so you can get the potential longevity benefits but you can also just flat out sleep okay well first a hot bath believe it or not a hot bath works very very very well there’s a study that was published in the journal sleep medicine that found that just 10 minutes of sitting in a hot
Bath at 104 to 109 degrees was enough to improve sleep significantly this improves subjective sleep quality which always counts for something because those of you that suffer with sleep like i did that subjective sleep quality is important to prevent the sleep anxiety that occurs oh i’m not going to sleep tonight oh i’m not going to sleep tonight if you start
Feeling like you’re sleeping better guess what you’ll probably start sleeping better but there is a mechanism behind this too when you sit in a hot bath and you get out of the bath you have a cooling effect okay when you’re hot a lot of the blood is going to disperse throughout your body triggering this cooling effect the cooling effect itself triggers the release
Of melatonin from the pineal gland so this alone is going to help support melatonin production another one that is really interesting that whenever i talk about i always have naysayers because it just sounds so like biohacky but it’s interesting it’s tart cherry juice now tart cherry juice doesn’t have a lot of carbohydrates so you can have it on a low carb diet
Just in small amounts but where’s the data well the european journal clinical nutrition published a paper took a look at people consuming tart cherry juice along with a placebo or versus a placebo from baseline the group that had the tart cherry ended up having higher levels of melatonin significantly higher yet still within the natural range so they were at the
Top into the natural range so somehow it was helping the production of melatonin or the release of melatonin they also noticed that all the sleep parameters improved sleep onset their overall sleep efficiency sleep duration all of that improved the downside is a lot of this is pretty observational like we don’t really know what’s going on so we have to dig a little
Deeper so there was another study this one was published in the american journal of therapeutics now this one was cool because it used polysomnography now this is like the gold standard when it comes down to sleep it’s like actual sleep studies looking at sleep waves looking at everything this is what you really want to look for not just subjective observational
Stuff that we see all the time so in this case they took placebo group versus a tart cherry juice group and for two weeks the tart cherry juice group consumed 240 milliliters of tart cherry juice two times per day that’s a pretty hefty amount but still interesting data came out of this they found in the tart cherry group overall sleep time increased get this
84 minutes almost an hour and a half more sleep time i know it’s small data but that’s a tremendous outcome that absolutely warrants more investigation especially when you look at the other studies and you see the increases in melatonin something is happening there we just don’t entirely know what one of the things that they looked at is there was an increase
In what are called procyanidin levels so vitamin b2 that was increased quite significantly in the brain and they found that it had modulated inflammatory markers within the brain so potentially there was less inflammation in the brain which may have allowed more of these sleep signals to do their job properly they did also notice that there was more tryptophan
Availability so tryptophan amino acid converts into serotonin with tryptophan hydroxylase which i’ll talk about in a second which therefore turns into melatonin so basically tryptophan to serotonin to melatonin when more tryptophan is available you could potentially have more of that conversion but we only know that first step we don’t know everything else but
We can start connecting dots very very interesting there the next one is getting as much sun as you can during the day it’s not about just fatiguing yourself and getting tired it’s about as much vitamin d in a natural way as you possibly can you can take vitamin d supplementation but it’s kind of ambiguous with the data so there’s a study that was published in
Plos one that definitely correlated low levels of vitamin d with poor sleep but didn’t necessarily give us anything to believe when it came down to vitamin d supplementation above and beyond restoring your natural levels to where they should be improving sleep so sleep vitamin d deficiency affects sleep vitamin d supplementation above and beyond doesn’t seem to
Improve sleep however there was a study published in nutritional neurosciences it was a pretty small data study this study did find that vitamin d supplementation seemed to improve some markers of sleep but not all and it just comes to beg the question that adequate levels of vitamin d which can be very different for each individual are probably important for
Sleep but it’s not a tool that you’re going to use to get better sleep but it’s something to look at so what is the mechanism here this is where it gets very interesting a very interesting potential mechanism so vitamin d binds to a response element on tryptophan hydroxylase genes these are the genes that activate to basically allow for tryptophan hydroxylase
To convert tryptophan into serotonin which later on becomes melatonin if you’re not expressing the gene to create the enzyme that is what’s called a rate limiting step then you can no longer create serotonin from tryptophan so vitamin d binds to this receptor that ultimately allows the creation or the formation or the release of these enzymes now we’ve seen
In some data that vitamin d does do this vitamin d does tend to bind specifically to the tryptophan hydroxylase ii gene so again we have to back the data out and see okay this is definitely doing something but is it the actual cause so when you look at in vitro stuff you see yes in mammalian cells and mammalian brain cells it’s definitely having an effect so
It’s one of those things in science where we look at the observational pieces we see obviously vitamin d is important then we start looking at some of these mechanistic studies we start understanding that and we connect the dots but it’s also common sense we’re supposed to be outside during the day and by contrast that would allow us to sleep a little bit better
At night when the sun goes down simply because those natural circadian rhythms and diurnal rhythms can match up so i know this is a long-winded one but it needed to be said because there’s not a lot of content surrounding the pros and the cons of melatonin so the short take away with this is do everything you possibly can to boost your melatonin levels naturally
Then look at tart cherry juice as sort of an intervention then look at melatonin supplementation as a temporary intervention only taking it when you’re traveling and you need to reset or taking it right when it gets dark out so you’re emulating your body’s natural pineal gland release of melatonin as always i’ll see you tomorrow
Transcribed from video
Truth About MELATONIN – 5 Ways to Increase it WITHOUT Supplements By Thomas DeLauer