Melatonin as a treatment for food waste | Hacker News Reader

Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

anthropocenemagazine.org

152 pointsWallyFunk207 comments

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web archive link here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230804183727/https://www.anthr...

I'm not sure we should cover our food in melatonin. People would recoil at the thought of pretty much any other hormone being added to our food supply.

It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone.

The article suggests it's safer than current food additives, but I find that statement questionable. We don't understand the full effect of Melatonin on the human body, so I don't know how you can make that conclusion.

There are many many studies on melatonin, it's not like we know nothing.

And those studies suggest that melatonin plays a critical part in your circadian rhythm, which kind of implies that adding it to your food would also screw with your circadian rhythm. That alone seems like a good enough reason to caution against adding it into the food supply.

Additionally, there are receptors for melatonin in a number of systems in the body, and we don't have much knowledge on what those receptors do.

Once I took melatonin to get a better afternoon nap.

I never felt so groggy in my life. Completely screwed up my internal clock.

I’m very careful with it since then.

Taking it at night time doesn’t quite show how powerful it is - since you’re sleepy anyway.

The point is taking it in the night if you're not able to get sleepy, especially if you fucked up your circadian rhythm. Taking it in the afternoon is going to fuck up the circadian rhythm if it wasn't already. For that you're better off taking chamomile and valerian.

many people misunderstand melatonin, it isn't a sleeping pill, it's a tool for adjusting your circadian rhythm, taking it before a nap is crazy

My understanding is that melatonin is useful for adjusting one’s internal clock. As an example, if you were to change time zones you could use it to more quickly adjust to a new bed time.

That’s how I try to use it now, only when I want to adjust what time I get sleepy. For the same reason, I only take it for one or two nights. It doesn’t make sense to take it continuously to me.

Melatonin supplements are not good for napping. If it's having the proper effect, it should get your body into full sleep mode, and you'll want to get a full 8 hours or whatever. Forcing yourself up early will have the exact effect you describe.

> Taking it at night time doesn’t quite show how powerful it is - since you’re sleepy anyway.

If you're already sleepy enough to fall asleep at what you deem to be a reasonable time, and you're able to sleep deeply enough for the length of time you want, then you probably don't need melatonin supplements.

> And those studies suggest that melatonin plays a critical part in your circadian rhythm, which kind of implies that adding it to your food would also screw with your circadian rhythm. That alone seems like a good enough reason to caution against adding it into the food supply.

I think you're correct. But electric light also screws with your circadian rhythm, and that's a concern almost nobody takes seriously. Years back I built my own automated lighting system [1] and the biggest thing I learned from it is that I'm not a responsible lightswitch user. My sleep schedule used to be very chaotic. But once I set up my screens and my house to dim and redshift in line with a regular day-night cycle, I not only started sleeping very regularly, but my mood and focus improved.

When electric lighting was introduced it notably changed sleep schedules. [2] But we got used to that and just kinda went with it, even though surveys show massive problems with sleep. For me now it's a cautionary tale about how little we understand the impact of technologies we adopt.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise

[2] E.g., the "'Til Morning is Nigh" segement here: https://backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/

Then again, my circadian rhythm has been pretty broken since I was a child. Not only does my body drift toward a 28-hour day (20 awake, 8 asleep) if I'm not careful, but I tend not to get tired enough to sleep until 3am or 4am.

Melatonin supplements fix my circadian rhythm. I don't take it every night, but when I do, I get tired and fall asleep within 3-5 hours, sleep for a solid 8 or 9, and then feel pretty good for the next day. And if I take it again that night at the appropriate time, I can keep myself much closer to a 24-hour wake/sleep cycle.

Are you sure about the recoil? After all, "vitamin" D is a hormone and it's also added to a lot of different foods. And it's also uncontrolled in usage and dosage...

It's a precursor to a hormone. And whether it's a vitamin depends on your sun exposure.

I don't think that is entirely correct (and mostly semantics). Vitamin D has multiple forms [1]

Vitamin D from the diet, or from skin synthesis, is biologically inactive. It is activated by two protein enzyme hydroxylation steps, the first in the liver and the second in the kidneys. Because vitamin D can be synthesized in adequate amounts by most mammals if they get enough sunlight, it is not essential and therefore is technically not a vitamin. Instead it can be considered a hormone, with activation of the vitamin D pro-hormone resulting in the active form, calcitriol, which then produces effects via a nuclear receptor in multiple locations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D

It may be uncontrolled in the US but not everywhere. It’s not allowed to be sold without a prescription where I live, and even then it’s only prescribed for chronic sleep disorders. I always ask anyone travelling to the US to bring back a bottle.

> chronic sleep disorders

Wow. It's been a long time but I've definitely taken melatonin and if I felt any effects at all they definitely weren't strong if even noticable.

Here (USA) Ambien is prescribed often for chronic sleep issues and that drug absolutely terrifies me. I've had friends addicted to it who wound up in a lot of criminal trouble for trespassing and wandering around beaches naked and things like that because they'd sleep-walk hallucinate. I had one friend get arrested for sleeping in someones (random) attic on an ambien kick. A pilot, no less.

My mom gave me a bottle of it when I was in high school and it made me hallucinate in an unpleasant way. I do plenty of mycology stuff but the ambien was weird. I think I took it twice or three times and just stopped.

And what to think of this book, where the author literally persuades people to megadose on the hormone:

https://www.amazon.com/Melatonin-Transform-Melatonin-resilie...

It's mindboggling that this is freely available.

Yes, the absolute mind boggling horror of free people being able to decide for themselves what to ingest.

> Yes, the absolute mind boggling horror of free people being able to decide for themselves what to ingest.

Absolute horror that people ingest things based on a lie. It's on level of this powder doesn't contain asbestos. Just because he isn't a big corp doesn't mean he is free to lie and profit on his lies.

To me that’s less of a horror and more of needing not to believe everything you read.

And how I'm supposed to decide what to believe? Because I don't have infinite amount of time to become expert at everything.

Perhaps you could defer to whatever group of experts you prefer to believe.

Now, my group of preferred experts might be different from yours.

The problem is that capitalism drives people to push lies as fact, and manipulate people into believing those lies. "Well maybe people just shouldn't be so gullible" clearly isn't a solution, or the problem would be solved already.

I don't think that's an excuse to start banning books (and other media), but products like this -- especially anything that advocates a particular approach to health, nutrition, or medicine -- should be vetted by actual experts (more than one), and stores should be required to post disclaimers when the product doesn't pass muster.

Yes, there's the potential for abuse and shady dealings there, but I'd like to believe that the end result would still be better than what we have now.

Now, some people are just raised to believe in complete nonsense, so you're not going to save everyone by trying to educate them. But I think it'd help many people not get drawn in by (potentially dangerous) pseudoscience.

I think your proposed cure is far worse than the disease. It would have a profound chilling effect on free speech.

Agreed.

Eh?

"and stores should be required to post disclaimers when the product doesn't pass muster."

What about this is restrictive of free speech? If anything, YOU want to restrict the speech of the store to not allow them to say things they sell might be nonsense.

I think for medical things, oversight and general blurbs are fine. Its also fine if the store in question wants to post a blurb where they disagree with the "vetted" version. But this tramples on nobodies free speech, only on your personal sensibilities.

It creates a huge transaction cost on content "that advocates a particular approach to health, nutrition, or medicine". First, some unspecified actor will need to make sure that such content is vetted by experts, however that status is to be determined. Secondly, stores will need to make sure that each item containing such content provides a suitable disclaimer. Thirdly, some bureaucracy will be tasked with enforcing these rules.

It would simply be much easier to not produce any content "that advocates a particular approach to health, nutrition, or medicine."

Uh, capitalism does that?

Capitalism is responsible for a lot of evils in the world but it is not the root cause of people lying.

>especially anything that advocates a particular approach to health, nutrition, or medicine -- should be vetted by actual experts (more than one), and stores should be required to post disclaimers when the product doesn't pass muster.

No thanks to the nanny warning. I've reading plenty of books on alternative medicine and without exception they all have a warning along these lines:

"The medical information contained within is provided as an information resource only, and is not to be used or relied on for any diagnostic or treatment purposes. This information does not create any patient-physician relationship, and should not be used as a substitute for professional diagnosis and treatment. Please consult your health care provider before making any health care decisions or for guidance about a specific medical condition."

An additional sign is not necessary IMO. We're grown adults.

"No thanks to the nanny warning."

This isn't directed at you then - if you actually have experience and done some real research (not read some news articles), great. Make informed decisions.

"We're grown adults."

A non sequitor. Grown adults are often unknowledgeable, incorrect, strapped for time, etc.

I've frequently seen nonsense pushed as fact, and known that I don't actually know everything. I welcome better (human agency, crowd-source mix) vetting in general.

I'm not so arrogant that I think I can always "do my own research" and get it right.

That book screams things such as conspiracy, pseudoscience, crazy guy, cult leader and anything in between, to me.

Well, you read the random summary and not the actual book so you're the expert here.

Any eye catching news headlines you would like to share?

> Dr John Lieurance is a Chiropractic Neurologist and Naturopathic Physician

I had never heard of a Chiropractic Neurologist. Interesting.

Welp reading about him was a wild ride. To save people a click -

> After becoming severely ill with Lyme, EBV and Mold illness, Dr John Lieurance began to explore ways to improve health at the deepest cellular level. His journey brought him to discover Melatonin as the core anti-oxidant that supports all systems in the body. His book on Melatonin takes a deep dive into healing naturally and using high dose melatonin, along with various other practical healing methods to heal the body and live a longer and more vital life.

His life focus is on vitality, longevity and enhanced consciousness. His interest is in connecting what he calls, "The 3 legs of a stool": Vitality of the body, Mind Mastery & a Direct experience of God. Using science and ancient wisdom, he aims to connect these dots in his own journey to becoming the best version of himself in this life. Diving deeply into many healing methods, to discover the deepest and most profound means to activate cellular energy, such as with Melatonin, Methylene Blue, NAD+, as well as fasting with various nutrients to activate responses. Dr. John explores many new paths in the health care world, with his unique & fresh ideas using various delivery systems, such as suppositories and nasal sprays and various protocols he has created. He attended Parker College of Chiropractic & received his Naturopathic degree in 2001 from St. Luke's School of Medicine. He has practiced Functional Neurology, Naturopathic medicine and Regenerative Medicine, using stem cell therapy in Sarasota for 25 years. Founder of the Advanced Rejuvenation Center in Sarasota, Florida, and founder of Functional Cranial Release – which is an Endo-Nasal Cranial Treatment with the ability to unlock the spinal fluid to allow profound healing of the nervous system. See his next book "It's All in Your Head: Endo-Nasal Cranial Therapy". He has been involved in multiple clinical trials, including investigation into the use of stem cells for Parkinson's Disease, COPD, OA of the knee and hip from 2012-2014. He has a clinical focus on mold illness, Lyme disease and chronic viral infections.

You haven’t heard of it because it’s unfortunately pseudo science.

A chiropractor flirting with pseudoscience is disappointing. He should have stuck with evidence based things like treating fever with spinal alignments.

As with a lot of medicine the dosage matters a lot. I will take .5 mg of melatonin when going to bed earlier than usual and the effect is fairly subtle. But it's commonly sold in 10mg doses which seems very high.

I have to go out of my way to find doses under 1mg, almost everything they sell in US retail stores is 5mg or 10mg. Inevitably I end up with something marketed for babies.

My understanding is that melatonin has an inverse correlation between dosage and effect. 10mg won't make you as sleepy as 1mg.

I take 1mg of melatonin every night, and it does immediately make me sleepy. I used to buy 10mg at the drugstore and it just makes me feel like shit for the next day.

The optimal dose is 0.3mg, so I would cut the 1mg tablet in half to get close. You’re still doing better than most people who are essentially taking a horse-sized dose at 10mg.

The 10mg makes you feel bad because it’s still in your system the next day. At the recommended (lower) doses, your body fully clears it out by morning, so you feel alert and also have much lower risk of long term effects.

Huh, I had somehow remembered it as 0.9. I expect it varies per person, though.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

>inverse correlation between dosage and effect

That sounds quite magical. Wouldn't it be more likely that the uptake characteristics were very different for the two variants? Not sure if possible but maybe the 10mg variant were still being digested the day after so it would make you sleepy then instead of during the night?

I hadn't heard of this before!

After some digging here are some interesting discoveries related to melatonin and doxylamine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/insomnia/comments/spoaec/anyone_hav...

Fun fact, both ambien (zolpidem) and muscimol (in amanita muscaria mushrooms) act as a GABA-A agonists.

Ethanol is also a GABA-A agonist if I recall correctly

Ambien makes me wake up screaming at the top of my lungs. Every time. I never remember but it scares the shit out of my wife. No Ambien for me. Lol

Are you waking up from a nightmare? Do you have any recollection?

Interesting; I didn't realize Ambien was addictive. It was prescribed to me years ago after laser eye surgery (but only a week or so of pills). It was great for the first two or three days (I generally do have trouble sleeping and staying asleep, and Ambien knocked me right out and kept me that way for a solid 8 hours), but then I guess I developed a tolerance and it stopped being effective.

I wonder if that's why people get addicted? Maybe the normal dose is fine, but many some start developing a tolerance, and then self-raise their dosage in order to get it to work again, but a higher dose triggers addiction?

I'm not sure about its actual addictive power but I do know that a sad amount of people like to get ambien drunk.

> According to a report by the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), in 2010, about 57% of ER visits and hospitalizations caused by taking too much Ambien also involved other drugs. Ambien combined with alcohol accounted for 14% of those visits, or 2,851 people total. Combining alcohol and Ambien increased the person’s likelihood of requiring transfer to an intensive care unit (ICU) due to overdose.6

That could be because insomnia and alcohol dependence often go hand in hand. Additionally, alcohol works on the same GABA receptors in the brain as Ambien, increasing the effects of both Ambien and alcohol. Reported rates of sleep problems among people with alcohol use disorders (AUDs) in

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/30/615421269...

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-treatment/mi...

Melatonin, as any hormone/supplement, helps if you have deficiency, and hurts if you have normal or high level already. If your natural melatonin production is good enough, you are not going to feel effects, or even will get negative effects (I.e. people reporting hallucinations)

Here in Canada it is not controlled either and one can freely buy it at places like Walmart or anywhere with a pharmacy section.

In Germany freely available OTC.

NL as well, a whole section of drug stores (that also sell things like shampoos, hair dyes, makeup, toys, ramen noodles, candy... they diversified) dedicated to melatonin, CBD oils and products, probably some others too.

I want to believe it's because they've been thoroughly tested to not be harmful, since they don't even have the leaflet that's mandatory with drugs / medication listing all the side effects and whatnot.

Is the OTC dosage limited? I recall in a prior life, my partner would bring melatonin back from the states to Germany for her brother.

I asked a pharmacy in Reykjavik if they sold it, or Tylenol PM, and the pharmacist reacted like I'd asked to buy a brick of cocaine.

Never take Tylenol PM to sleep, unless you also have a reason to need a painkiller (acetaminophen). Acetaminophen is toxic to the liver and can cause liver failure if overdosed. A regular diphenhydramine (Benadryl) is the just the PM part without the extra risk (except that has its own risks).

Perhaps never is a bit extreme here? You make a good point but if it's all you've got and you haven't been drinking it isn't going to hurt you. It's got a normal dose of acetaminophen last I checked.

This is all assuming it isn't being used for some kind of chronic sleep issue.

It has a therapeutic index of 10, which is quite low (easy to overdose). I stopped taking Paracetamol almost completely after learning what it can to your body.

Also, there was a story about the developer of DirectX who alledgedly overdoesed on Paracetamol/Tylenol:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201223122742/https://www.wsj.c...

cumulative exposure to dihenhydramine is linked to dementia so it also shouldn't be used regularly

I think it was here, where I read that the optimal dosage for melatonin was 0.3 mg (300 micrograms).

The smallest OTC dosage you can get, is 1mg, and they sell 10mg pills.

When I switched from 10mg to 0.3mg, my sleep improved drastically. Also, I stopped getting those really weird dreams.

But I don't like taking stuff, and ended up stopping completely, a long time ago.

I can attest to having weirder dreams and more nightmares when taking melatonin (3mg)

Is there a source for the 0.3mg, because the most sleep supplements around here I've tried seem to have at least 0.5mg, or at least 1mg. They contain a mixture of other things as well, like magnesium, leonurus cadiaca, humulus lupulus.

Melatonin only supplements mostly seem to start at around 2mg. There may be few of them at 1mg.

I can't tell if I've personally had any effects from melatonin specifically though. Sometimes I may have sleep issues and those nights, I think none of those supplements do anything.

I'll see if I can find the posting. It was a fairly exhaustive article. It was enough for me to give it a try.

EDIT: I think this was it. Looks like it's had a couple of turns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17632668

Yes, I think that's the post. I was also just going to post that.

What I ended up doing is buy smallest dose of melatonin gummy-bears (3mg afair) and they were easier to cut into smaller pieces/lower doses than pills.

I occasionally use these to adjust my circadian rhythm. Naturally I go to bed around 2-4am but I have kids that wake us up at the crack of dawn.

Interesting. Are you certain that in those gummy-bears the melatonin would be spread around the gummy bear equally as opposed to being injected or similar into a single place? I'm not sure how they are combined with melatonin.

Edit: looking around a bit, it does seem like melatonin or supplement ingredients are added and mixed before they are molded, so at least in theory it should be spread around fairly evenly.

My nearby stores have started carrying 1 mg children's melatonin gummies.

Dunno about the US, but in Norway there a prescription version that's 2mg total in an extended release formulation. It's a fairly optimal dosage repeated throughout the night. It's technically meant for elderly people who can't stay asleep very well, but it's been pretty easy to get it off-label(doctors will basically be thrilled to be "drug-seeked" for just melatonin instead of benzos or Z-drugs for once, IME), and the price is reasonable, especially now there's a generic version.

Did absolute wonders for my overall sleep quality anyway. And I struggle with both insomnia and frequent awakenings.

Yes, just get liquid melatonin from Amazon and you can dose it super precisely using small syringe.

Just a suggestion for everyone that takes melatonin -- get some liquid drops. I have a bottle that has 3mg per 30 drops, so I take 3 drops on my tongue an hour or two before I want to fall asleep. Liquid drops are the way to go.

[I just posted this upthread, but reposting because I think it's a great way to go]

Depends on how frequent you use it. I had to throw a bottle after expiring because I take melatonin at most a few times per month to "recalibrate" my circadian rhythm.

Read this: https://nootropicsdepot.com/articles/melatonin-supplements-d...

I still use melatonin on occasion. When I first learned about it, I tried the 10mg version, and it never did anything for me. Years ago I read about 0.3mg being the correct dose, and gave that a try. I don't take it every night, but when I do, I sleep much better, and for longer without waking up.

The main annoying thing about it is that you really need to take it a few hours before you go to sleep. So it's not something where you can realize that you're having trouble falling asleep, and take it only when needed. I have heard of some people where it does make them sleepy immediately after taking it, but I don't think that's a common reaction.

This is 0.3 and not 3 right? I just checked and my pills are 3mg. If it's supposed to be 0.3 I will buy a new bottle immediately and see if it improves my sleep.

100% agree about taking it early, I get a bit of an "omg I'm sleepy" effect immediately, but I'm pretty sure it's placebo, I have to take it about 1-2 hours before I want to sleep. But it's still not super effective on its own.

I use 0.3mg and it has also improved my sleep drastically. It’s not a typo. I also give it to my kids who had terrible problems with sleep (staying up until 1am and bad stuff) and it’s made bedtime happen promptly.

I brought special 300 microgram pills on Amazon. There's actually a link in the story.

it's not a placebo, that's how it works. you get a small window to ride that effect to sleep.

Well, what happens is, I am briefly tired for about 5 minutes immediately after taking it, but if I lie in bed I'm immediately wide awake. But about 2 hours later I'm legitimately sleepy. But it's certainly possible both effects are real.

0.3mg is right. I recommend get dissolving 1mg tablets, just break them into rough thirds. Dissolve under the tongue 15 minutes before sleep.

Fantastic, thanks! I probably misheard my doctor on the phone or something. I'll see what I can find!

I take 3mg most nights and find it's an very effective asleep aid. I've tried breaking up the tablets to take around 1 to 0.5g but I don't feel like it does anything. Of course, this is purely anecdotal and it may well be placebo. But it works and as someone who often struggles with sleep I'm not gonna complain when I find something that helps, placebo or not.

At worst, it's far less harmful than drugs, and at best, it may have a bunch of other benefits from reducing cancer risk to reducing depression, to helping with acid reflux and GERD - none yet proven though.

Really depends on body weight I imagine.

Not enough to account for 0.3mg vs 3mg. Unless I weighed 500kg or something. Which I don't, quite.

Many brain affecting substances don't depend on body weight.

I too have had much better success with 0.3 mg, although it's annoying to have to cut up the pills.

But for me personally, I get the full effect within about 45 min, and it's noticeable within about 20 min.

I only take it very occasionally, when I need to shift my schedule to wake up several hours earlier than normal.

Same goes for me on the timing. If I take it more than an hour before I lay down to sleep it will not help me at all.

In The Netherlands you can buy it per 0.1 mg. There are 500 small tablets in a bottle.

I’ve found if I chew the pill into a fine powder and let it dissolve under your tongue, then I consistently fall asleep in 15-20 mins.

Definitely makes sense that absorption is faster than simply taking orally.

You should be able to fall asleep in less than 15-20 minutes without using melatonin as well.

I was told this by a doctor and just couldn't believe it was true, turns out good habits like consistent wake time and winding down well before lying in bed are super important.

Yes. And that's the reason us insomniacs are taking melatonin.

I can probably count on one hand during my adult life where that’s been the case. Is that really the reality for most?

I have no idea of the stats but I usually absent jet lag, otherwise being on a weird schedule, or having my mind spinning about something fall asleep quickly.

I do use melatonin but mostly only in conjunction with international travel.

Same here. Only happens when I am literally exhausted from a week of 3 hour sleep. Don't even drink coffee. Been like this for as long as I can remember

Most normal nights is definitely within 10 min for me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was less than 5 min.

Hmm is that just a ridiculously unqualified statement, or do you really mean any old time any old place?

Yes, I'm buying it in spray form.

I have a routine where I take 1mg dissolved under the tongue only if and when I’m at the point that I’m almost asleep, but it’s not happening. It’s often enough to nudge me over the edge. If I could conveniently find 0.5mg sublingual pills, I’d buy them. But, 15mg pills are easy to find and 1mg are rare…

I needed to cut small pills into 6 pieces to get optimal dosage, now i know why

There is liquid version in the bottle which you can dose very precisely by using small syringe.

I'll never take it again because of the dreams. If they were fun dreams I would maybe consider it but no. And it's crazy the dosages they sell.

I found the dreams were really weird (Like Salvador Dali weird), but not nightmares.

Some random anecdata:

I have a chronic sleep disorder, "Non-24 Sleep / Wake Disorder", which means my sleep floats pretty freely and doesn't naturally sync up with the sun. For the most part, I've structured my life for that to be ok, but sometimes it's not. I basically use melanin to bludgeon myself into a more normal sleep pattern when I have to. I usually start with 2 mg, 30-60 minutes before I want to sleep, but often when that doesn't work, take another 3 mg, which usually gets the job done. Often I don't even notice 1-2 mg, but 5 mg does register reasonably strongly.

> The smallest OTC dosage you can get, is 1mg

Well, in the US yeah. It's banned OTC in France and the Netherlands will actually sell you the 0.3mg pills.

Just a suggestion for everyone that takes melatonin -- get some liquid drops. I have a bottle that has 3mg per 30 drops, so I just take 3 drops on my tongue an hour or two before I want to fall asleep. Liquid drops are the way to go.

Didn't realize it was available in a liquid form like this. I've been buying "child" tablets and breaking the 3mg apart.

10mg is the same as an edible for me, and super unpleasant when trying to rest.

I took 13 mg every night for a few months after hearing it might help with acid reflux and I was desperate. I personally didn't suffer any effects or withdrawals from it, but remember you may be different and be careful. I eventually learned that, yeah, 0.3 mg is a good dose, so now I buy 1 mg pills, bite off an edge, and throw the majority of the pill away, and I was surprised to see it works just as well (on the rare occasion I take some these days).

Why not just cut them? https://www.dontwasteyourmoney.com/best-pill-cutters/

>The smallest OTC dosage you can get, is 1mg

There are 0.3mg pills available, for example: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Extension-Melatonin-300-Capsules...

"life extension melatonin" reminds me how sad the regulation around "supplements" and claims about them are in the US

Cool but also really funny how much more expensive it is to get a much lower effective dose. 60 pieces of 10mg are $2.70

I buy children's melatonin. The doses get do much smaller with children. The price is much smaller.

Life extension is just an expensive brand. You're paying for reassurance you aren't being swindled because the US's regulations around supplements is a joke.

About 0.1mg was the sweet spot for me.

Good luck finding it at less than 3mg actually. What you need to do is to find an edible version, like those strips, and cut them into 1/8ths (it’s easy to create 1/8ths, annoying to make accurate 1/10ths)

> It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone.

You can thank Mel Gibson and industry lobbying [1][2].

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/supplements-a...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV2olDA0w8U

Other hormones don't get the same treatment. I'm not sure why only melatonin is treated as a dietary supplement when the other hormones are not.

For example, you can't get testosterone or epinephrine, over the counter. Maybe the only other hormones that are as readily available as melatonin are birth control pills, but those are considered pharmaceuticals, and regulated as such.

Well, what are the risks and downsides of testosterone and epinephrine vs. melatonin?

Melatonin is so harmless I’m still not sure if it’s a placebo half the time I take it.

> You can thank Mel Gibson and industry lobbying

Why do we always need a boogeyman?

Melatonin appears nearly harmless. Isn't it strange that we've grown so accustomed to so many things being restricted that we're taken aback by this sliver of medical self-determination, and we publish hard-hitting investigative pieces about how supposedly terrible that is?

I get it that we maybe don't want to go back to the era of "patent medicine" containing radium, but when we require prescriptions for birth control, eyeglasses, and non-narcotic sleep aids, maybe we've gone a bit too far.

> Melatonin appears nearly harmless.

Does it? We really haven't done enough science on it.

> Melatonin has been linked to headaches, dizziness, nausea, stomach cramps, drowsiness, confusion or disorientation, irritability and mild anxiety, depression and tremors as well as abnormally low blood pressure. It can also interact with common medications and trigger allergies. [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/01/health/melatonin-overuse-well...

I've personally stopped using it because of how it started to make me feel. "Brain fog" was not uncommon, not to mention the lack of quality control of the dosage amounts on a pill to pill basis.

I don’t mean to be flippant but aren’t those all symptoms of sleep deprivation? I’m wary of phrasing like “linked to” in science reporting because it falls short of asserting causality.

Like I mention not enough science has been done on this. However I felt better almost immediately after I stopped taking it.

Commenting on HN has been linked to most of these symptoms yet it’s not regulated either.

If posting on HN is triggering allergies, stomach cramps or low blood pressure you should see a doctor and get off of HN.

> The article suggests it's safer than current food additives, but I find that statement questionable. We don't understand the full effect of Melatonin on the human body, so I don't know how you can make that conclusion.

Only allowing substances for which we understand the full effect on the human body is not a mainstream criteria or standard used by any agency in the world. I'm not aware of any substance for which we have a full understanding of the effect on the human body.

They'd definitely need to disclose this, too. Imagine it being unsafe to operate machinery and drive just because you ate a bowl of berries. (Or for me, melatonin supplements always make me wired for some reason. I wouldn't want to feel caffienated after a bowl of berries.)

I would be annoyed if I started getting so much melatonin from my food that my nightly 0.3 mg melatonin stopped making me sleepy. And I imagine everyone else would be annoyed when they stopped getting sleepy at night from their own melatonin. (Apparently 0.1 - 0.3 mg is what we produce naturally?)

Because it doesn't do much. The extremely incorrect overdoses of it found in common products often lead to worse sleep and next day drowsiness, making it an unpleasant experience. Even used in correct, very low dosages the impact is low.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E4cKD9iTWHaE7f3AJ/melatonin-...

It sounds like the stuff a conspiracy group would be able to make a lot of noise with like fluoride in the water and mercury in vaccines.

isnt Melatonin responsible for body development like puperty etc

Melatonin synchronizes the circadian rhythm and the day-night sleep cycle by being released in the absence of light.

The release of other hormones such as cortisol, growth hormone and sex hormones are all synchronized to this day-night cycle.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5372003/

I saw Andrew Hubermann talking on a podcast(pretty sure it was on Joe Rogan) about Melatonin; he said studies showed melatonin will significantly shrink your testicles. Since then I haven’t touched the stuff.

Melatonin is very interesting because it is believed that all living things (bacteria, fungi, etc) have it [1]. Calling it a "sleep aid" is somewhat off because in humans and other animals it is compound heavily involved in modulating circadian rhythms. It is not a "drug".

And a little personal anecdote about it: I have gone through a period of bad sleep and depression and was taking melotonin to help with sleep. On some mornings I would wake up completely emotionally destroyed, barely able to function. After observing the patterns for a few months I notice that this happened only on days after melotonin intake. Looking around the internet I've found stories of people describing exactly the same symptoms as I've had mornings after melotonin ingestion. Long story short I am likely not taking melotonin ever again and regret ever doing so. Sometimes I even wonder whether it generally exacerbated or even caused my condition at the time. I think research on this is scant atm.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6481276/

Isn’t a drug just anything that affects how your body functions? It doesn’t have to be something that your body wouldn’t have in it anyway

I’m no doctor but I think the difference between a drug and a hormone is that a drug is a foreign substance you take to affect the way your body functions while a hormone is something produced endogenously to regulate various processes in the body.

People need to understand that melatonin is a hormone and that comes with different risks and issues than a drug.

Drugs and hormones aren't separate groups either. Melatonin is a hormone which is also sold as a drug. Additionally, some hormones are wholly artificial; many of the estrogens and progestins which are used for birth control fit that description.

Nah, there are drugs that already exist in the body (such as the extremely strong psychedelic DMT, which naturally occurs in tiny amounts within human brains and within many other animals and plants).

There isn't a hard scientific boundary of what substances count as a "drug", and if a hormone is being taken as a pill to affect a human then it is being used as a drug.

There is no concrete definition of "Drug". Most working definitions are "Something that affects you, but isn't food".

Nor is there a concrete definition of hormone.

Drug: Chemical that affect you (by ingesting), but isn't food.

Hormone: Chemical that affects you.

They are not mutually exclusive. A drug may be a hormone and hormones may be endogenous or exogenous. For example, oral contraceptives are drugs which are exogenous hormones.

One may think of the neuroendocrine system as the body's event system. Hormones are the event signals. Where they're emitted from doesn't particularly matter, the key is they're flowing and circulating to places and producing observable effects on any tissue with the appropriate interfaces which range from cell membrane receptors to nuclear receptors.

You are probably correct, I honestly do not know. What I meant is that there is an association between melatonin and sleep and there is _some_ research on it as an effective medicine but the quantity of it (to my untrained eye) is limited. So when people take it they generally take it as an over-the-counter supplement with some hope for uncertain effects because "it's the thing in the body that regulates sleep". Thus the quotes around "drug".

Sugar affects how your body functions too.

So homeopathy pills are drugs!

How were you taking it? My psychiatrist recommended that I take it 12 hours before I want to wake up and really only recommends 1 mg or so.

Honestly, I do not remember. A few years have elapsed. I did not do so in any thoughtful way - there was a supplement in pill form and I took it in the evening. Pretty much the only time in my life I self-medicated with something. I would say just observe how it makes you feel, keep a diary? At least out of curiosity rather than caution. If you find it makes you feel better then that's great. (Of course subjectivity is a problem in this case).

Just taking melatonin vs not taking it isn't the only decision space. There's a lot that goes into taking it to make it work. I've never done so but I understand this to be the case from reading this [0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

I believe it. I guess my takeaways are:

* Be cautious, effects of taking a hormone are complex and it can be more potent than might be evident at first.

* If you have sleep issues they might have a root cause. In my case I think it was circumstantial anxiety.

* Jetlag is not that big of a deal.

The dosage of melatonin you can buy over-the-counter in the US always surprises me. In the UK I believe it’s only 2mg with a prescription, but I was seeing 5mg+ just in a grocery store.

Behold the new target market: children at 1mg [1]. The US markets melatonin as a vitamin.

I really have no clue on the long term adverse effects, but having used 5mg as a sleeping aid for a bit, one thing is for sure: melatonin is really not for OTC child use.

I'm shocked that this is legal!

[1] https://www.target.com/s/kids+melatonin+gummies

My friend, a children’s psychiatric nurse, said they offer something like 0.2mg doses for kids in their care. 1mg is huge!

Yes, let’s make everything illegal, so you have to pay somebody to give a prescription to you any time you need anything. Somebody else always knows better what is good for you! Especially it will help poor people, which already shop at veterinary stores instead of pharmacies.

Part of the problem historically (into the 2010s) was that MIT had a patent on doses of melatonin under 1mg[1]. So manufacturers could only avoid the patent by selling larger doses. That patent is expired but to some extent customers probably still think more is better.

Personally, I use a fairly large dose of melatonin daily without ill effect; and it works better for me than smaller doses.

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5641801A/en

I've seen few better examples of what's wrong with the patent system than this.

Up to 2mg for sleep, 3mg for jet lag in the UK. 3mg affects me badly - I take at most 1mg.

Melatonin in the US is frequently found in 5 or 10 mg doses, which is a huge amount and can cause adverse reactions in people. A better dose is 0.3mg (300 mcg) or 0.5mg (500 mcg).

General problem with "supplements" I imagine.

It seems to be particularly bad with Melatonin, because a lot of people do really badly with big doses. A 3mg dose makes me more exhausted than I've ever felt before melatonin. I tried A couple of times. Never again. I wrote it off until someone pointed out this isn't unusual with doses that high. 1mg dose is fine. I can't image how I'd have felt with a higher dose.

Also, a supplement being labled "500 micrograms" has no requirement to be correct. The FDA has handwaved away the entire industry, and broadly there is zero quality control for actual active ingredients. Many supplements will claim that they've been tested, but there's no legal requirement to do so, the labs are usually owned by supplement makers, and there's no penalty for lying about any testing as fraudulent marketing claims largely go unpunished because the US judicial branch chooses to interpret the law stupidly conservatively

It' a general problem with the US.

That explains a lot. I have a bottle of 5mg pills and I found out I could still feel the effects when I would take a tiny “nibble” of the pill. So over the course of a bad sleep week I would slowly consume a single pill. This bottle is a lifetime supply, assuming it doesn’t degrade.

I wonder about the dosage you might’ve been taking. Many, many people take much more than needed, and higher doses are more likely to have adverse effects. 250-300 µg is an appropriate dosage for most adults. Note that common over-the-counter dosages are 10 to 25 mg. There is a Cochran collaboration meta-analysis supporting this.

I work in a pharmacy school in the US. One of my colleagues told me a funny anecdote about traveling in Great Britain. He had forgotten his melatonin, so went to a pharmacy to get some. The pharmacist told him that it was only available with a prescription, being a neurohormone. But here’s some promethazine OTC. That’s Rx only in the US.

I think that's super reasonable and I have no record or memory of dosage, sadly. Although nowadays I approach such things from a very different angle: why do I think I need to medicate at all? Why am I, a relatively young and healthy person, not sleeping well? Jet lag in my book is not a strong enough reason to self-medicate, just suck it up and learn to enjoy early mornings =)

I have been reading a book about biological effects of daylight and how little sun a modern person is exposed to on a daily basis. There has been more research on the topic, especially since a recent research on receptors in the eye responsible for detecting gradual changes in daylight (ipRGCs). Spending more time in the daylight might be a better way to self-medicate.

My own two cents on melatonin at low (.5mg) dosages: it helps me go to bed and keep a reasonable circadian rythm 100x better than any sleep hygiene trick. Without it I have racing thoughts for hours and no sleep pressure on a 24 hour cycle. It's a great boon for me, a healthy normal person.

10-25mg seems really high. UK NHS advice is 2mg for sleep, 3mg for jet lag, w/advice it can be increased to up to 10mg if you don't get the desired.effect at lower doses.

For my part, 3mg leaves me totally ruined (exhausted, lethargic, worse than being ill) the following day. 1mg seems to improve my sleep, but I can totally believe less would work too. I will certainly not go higher.

UK is weird with this - I can order all kinds of stuff from abroad that I can't buy OTC here, but there's also another recent "workaround": online pharmacies here can sell you a variety of prescription drugs provided they ask you the appropriate questions and have a prescription issued as part of the sales process. Got my last melatonin that way.

I can tolerate 3 mg very well, 5 mg seems to be the bridge too far, where I wake up exhausted and lethargic.

I experimented with higher doses, such as 15 mg. They worked like sledgehammer to the forehead, with a weird feeling the next day. Not recommended. A good sleep mask and ear plugs are better than increasing dosage of melatonin, at least for me.

Here in CZ, melatonin is OTC.

In addition to the same 3mg, I ask my Google Home (the first "mini tower", not the puck) to "play the sounds of the ocean" + run an older, slightly noisy purifier (mainly for the white noise, have other much better filtering purifiers in the house that are just too quiet!). Putting my phone away, after a few pages of a novel in my Kindle 11 SE (warmest setting ) I'm dead asleep.

My level of tiredness in the morning seems mainly linked to hours of sleep + how heavy I lifted the day/s before.

(I should trial 1mg as well.)

At lower dosages it acts to nudge your body to feel drowsy.

At higher doses it has a soporific effect similar to other more powerful sleep medications.

I and my family use it to help with long jetlag but just for the first few days.

It can be frustrating finding it in reasonable doses. I remember reading somewhere that the original formula was quite a small dose and other manufacturers simply increased the dose to get around the patent. Naturally, people showed a preference for the higher doses because they assumed it must be better, despite a lack of evidence. As a result, manufacturers making pills with a more reasonable dose were less likely to sell their product and a general trend of increasing doses was observed. This is why it’s easy to find 10-25mg dosed pills in stores, but difficult to find anything sub 3mg, let alone sub 1mg.

I had much better results with tryptophan than melatonin in sleep quality.

Taking melatonin for me resulted in top many random grogginess or waking early in the middle of nights.

Terrible title.

...melatonin could also be a vital tool to help fresh produce survive its own journey from farm to fork, reducing the monumental amount of food loss that occurs each year.

I interpreted the title to mean it would be applied to food after it was deemed "waste" as a form of "waste treatment" of some kind.

I am not thrilled by the proposal. Melatonin impacts the immune system in ways not yet understood. This could be kind of like adding more antibiotics to the food chain.

Didn't see anything in the article about how much melatonin a person would get from eating food treated this way. I sometimes take small doses of melatonin during the summer months when my sleep pattern tends to drift if I don't actively keep it under control but wonder if consuming it through diet would end up making lots of people groggy during the day.

Forget groggy, melatonin generally works as a sleep aid for me but also gives me wildly trippy and fucked up dreams. I stopped using it specifically because of that.

Your dosage was likely too high. I had the same issue using the smallest dose I could find at the pharmacy (5mg) and it was totally fixed by going to a pill one fifteenth of the dosage that I procured online.

I wouldn't be surprised, they were plain OTC 10mg pills but as I read in an article posted fairly recently on HN I learned that the required dose is often much, much smaller than that. My foray with melatonin was a few years ago and I'm not having trouble sleeping now so I haven't dipped my toes into it again.

Just to confirm, my limited understanding is that 10mg is an incredibly high dosage.

As is mine, now. Back in the wild days of 2016 or so advice online said "just go get some melatonin and you'll sleep!" and the bottle said to take 1 or 2 an hour before you want to sleep, so off I went.

Wait until you read this: "Oral administration of 1,000 mg a day of melatonin to five adults for 25 to 30 days resulted in drowsiness being noted as an adverse effect. There were no severe and/or irreversible impacts on clinical parameters (blood pressure, heart rate, ECG, serum chemistry, urine analysis) in these people." Source: Nordlund JJ, Lerner AB. The effects of oral melatonin on skin color and on the release of pituitary hormones. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1977

I take 300mcg time release and it gives me more vivid dreams. Stuff is powerful

0.3mg is the dose you want, apparently https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

Thank you. Man, that explains a lot of my easy to sleep but wake up early in the morning issues.

I bite off tiny pieces of 5mg pills. One pill lasts me about a week and a half

I did this too. Someone had told me at one point the best thing to do to ingest it is to crush it somehow and keep it under your tongue for 30 seconds. And I also knew I wanted very small amounts of the pills I had. So I would take the tiniest nibbles of the chalky pills and leave them in my mouth for a while, until I could feel the effects slightly come on. Grew weirdly fond of the taste.

It seems like that would be very hard to get a consistent dose with such a small amount. Those cuts would need to be extremely precise. It would be more reliable to buy the 1mg children’s dose and cut them in half.

That's the best part, great way to induce lucid dreams consistently.

Melatonin causes wild dreams for me, too, but I actually enjoy them. Free cinema.

Good question. The paper says 0.1 mmol per liter, i.e. fruit is sprayed with a solution containing about 23 milligrams per liter of melatonin.

It's possible that the amount retained would be less than a few milliliters of solution equivalent — less than 100 micrograms under practical consumption patterns — so having little activity. But if the melatonin is absorbed by the fruit, the effect could be significant and particularly problematic since people often eat fruit in the morning.

In any case, I think that a more likely goal of this research (vs actually spraying commercial fruit with melatonin) might be to identify compounds able to produce the same beneficial effect on fruit without causing any adverse effects in humans.

If you have IBD / Chrohn's be careful with melatonin https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/melatonin-used-to-...

One of the publications they cite says melatonin is good for IBD: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03009...

Too lazy to see if that's backed by a study on actual human health outcomes instead of rat models like the thrust of your article.

As mentioned in the article, there's also studies where it may improve things. This particular one is a mouse model with induced DSS colitis, which I kind of wish would be erased from methodology forever across literature.

Not only is it mice rather than humans, but it is focused on replicating the end symptoms without mirroring the underlying causes.

For example, what if IBD/Crohn's had to do with decreased gut melatonin production, leading to bacterial changes in the gut leading to autoimmune attacks leading to gut inflammation/ulcerations? Without replicating the casual factors, simply inducing ulcerations using a chemical agent without also replicating the autoimmune attack isn't very helpful.

And anecdotally, my own disease is in complete remission with a surprisingly light medical treatment particularly after comparing dietary interventions inducing remission in two meta-analyses and finding the one key shared factor was reduction in processed sugars and introducing the same in my own diet.

But that's with me taking 20mg of melatonin for a sleep disorder. And when my sleep is disturbed too much (as occurs if I don't have the melatonin to use), the resulting physical stress can sometimes induce small flares.

In my own experience and in having looked at studies looking at melatonin use in human IBD patients, I'm fairly skeptical of the findings in the DSS mouse study are enough that anyone with sleep issues helped by melatonin should avoid it.

Especially given there's a 2-fold increase in risk of disease activity in humans with poor sleep:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659204/

On a youth camping trip, one morning a boy found his (contraband) snacks had been raided. A raccoon (probably) had chewed through the tent, into his backpack, eaten various snacks, and opened his bottle of melatonin and eaten quite a few pills.

I wonder what the effects were of a massive overdose of melatonin on an animal the size of a raccoon...

It probably took a nap? I'm not sure about raccoon biology but in humans melatonin is one of the least hazardous things. I'm not sure you can overdose on it practically speaking

Not even that. Melatonin works best as a sleep aid in small doses. Larger one have less effect.

Apparently you can: https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/sleep/melatonin-over...

  A study of poison control calls in the U.S. found the number of melatonin poisoning–related calls increased six times from 2012 to 2021. Of these calls, more than 4,000 teens and children were hospitalized and two died.  

  Signs of melatonin overdose include excessive sleepiness, vomiting and trouble breathing. Other side effects of both low and high doses of melatonin can include headaches, excessive sleepiness, blood pressure changes, gastrointestinal problems, changes in other hormone levels and mood problems,

Upper dose for melatonin has not been established, generally considered safe. https://ajac.substack.com/p/melatonin for references.

I'm on 40mg every night, gives me deep restful sleep.

As an insomniac I am jealous. I take prescription medication for it but nothing I've tried (both prescribed and over the counter) has ever been very restful.

That's pretty high, I would not risk it due to the slight correlation with dementia later on.

Interestingly, the opposite might be true: https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/accolades-honors/melatonin-alz...

Most people know melatonin as extracellular melatonin, released by the pineal gland, which acts as a hormone to promote sleep.

Melatonin is also a powerful intracellular antioxidant that protects cells against oxidative stressors made in mitochondria as byproducts of ATP production. Aside from the pineal gland melatonin, melatonin is produced directly in mitochondria by cytochrome c oxidase upon exposure to near infrared.

https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?t=404

That seems more relevant to this discussion.

Some low-tech (and IMO better) solutions for food waste:

* Buy food locally, support your local farmers.

* Grow your own vegetables (some are really easy: potatos, onions, garlic, zucchini, corn, beans, etc.). Even tomatos, peppers and eggplants are not that hard.

* Compost your food waste - put it back in your garden.

* Learn how to preserve food when there's an abundance.

* Also, learn to eat better.

I think it's a real shame that so much food waste ends up in landfill instead of being composted locally. If you compost your leftovers, you turn your waste into a resource, and use that to fertilize your garden.

Pretty funny wording:

> fruit fared better with melatonin treatment than did vegetables, which remained more susceptible to the cold (though, chilling injury was still reduced in some vegetables such as bell peppers and cucumbers by up to 24%.)

I wonder whether this actually only works on biological fruits (bell peppers and cucumbers are fruits biologically).

I don’t think sprinkling all the produce with a pharmacologically active molecule is a good idea. Side effects can and will be a big problem.

Speaking of fruit preservation: has anyone bought prepacked/sliced fruit from the grocery store / Costco that has an "off" flavor to it? Almost like they added some preservative. (The different fruit had the same flavor, which makes me think something was added). I have, and nothing was on the ingredients, so I am wondering what could have been added.

Could it be lemon juice? That's a common think to add to preserve color and prevent oxidation in a home recipe.

Powdered citric acid or liquid lemon juice is a common and harmless preservative.

Just reading through this - if I were a producer or distributor of food I'd suddenly be thinking about not only preventing food waste, but simply extending food storage times.

This could mean a lot more profit for large food corporations.

Take care with the stuff. Thought it's safer than other sleeping tablets (and it is), but when they say don't use long term it's for a reason.

Ended up with strange continuous low key chest pains. Was fine, just had to stop

This just sounds like a bad idea. Not least of which, is that we have enough food to feed the world, and food waste has a usefulness and that is in creating new live soil.

Melatonin disrupts circadian hormonal cycles. One of the key ways being delay of morning secretion of cortisol and other hormones.

It really should not be ingested except on rare occasions.

I don't think I've ever bitten into a pear or plum with "unappetizingly soft or gristly bits".

...and IgY for animal products.

You will take the drugs. And you will be happy.

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