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Comment by koliber | Hacker News Reader

I read a while back that our brains produce roughly 0.3 mg of melatonin when signaling us to go to sleep. When I occasionally do use melatonin I split a 1mg pill into half or thirds. I find that it works well enough to help me fall asleep. Wondering how the study would look if hwy used 1/2 mg doses.

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Go to the Netherlands, to the Kruidvat (or Etos or something similar) and just buy a lifetime worth of supply of Melatonin. It's 0.1 mg.

I'm Dutch and live here. But my wife is American. If I ever happen to live in the US (chances are there in my lifetime). I'm going to employ this strategy.

I don't trust the US with this and the Netherlands has proven itself to me in this sense. There are probably many more European countries that do this well. I'm simply not changing a winning team.

But I'd love to hear from other people that believe they found a good melatonin supply in a country. I'm curious.

I feel that the 1mg pill bottle that I have already is my lifetime supply, given the rate at which I use it.

I've been supplementing for almost 2 years. It still works.

I unfortunately need a lifetime supply. I almost take it every day. So 0.3 mg * 300 days * 100 years = 9 grams of melatonin.

I don't expect to live 100 years but it's handy to have a bit of an oversupply.

One can get kids doses that are 0.5 or 0.25mg. Eg see this 0.25 product on Amazon - https://a.co/d/0j74eWFP

Drugs are regulated with the same care in the US, the problem is you are comparing a drug in Europe with a dietary supplement in the US. You can’t expect to grab a high quality of any dietary supplement from say Walmart. It’s the same in Europe. In the US there are labs making high quality dietary supplements, but you usually don’t find them at retail stores or even Amazon, so it needs a bit of research.

If they aren't sold in retail stores or Amazon how are they sold? Private websites?

Amazon requires random sampling confirmation for supplements from independent labs though, so anything officially listed in a supplement category should be reliable.

Walmart typically carries a large selection of supplements from the 'Nature Made' brand (yellow label), which tests/certifies most of their products through the independent 'U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP)'.

While that may not help with the arguments over the correct dosage, it at least means you can trust the ingredients and dosage on the label isn't a lie. A random mail order supplement or bulk powder seller on Amazon...not so much.

>which tests/certifies most of their products through the independent 'U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP)'.

Which is some entity who cares, or who would approve plutonium as a school lunch if the factory paid enough?

Fortunately, it's the former. It's a 200+ year old nonprofit founded by a group of physicians in 1820 that developed the modern drug standards that most of the world actually relies on.

https://www.usp.org/about/usp-convention

I will actually point out an amusing note about Walmart's pharmacy services - you find them in weird places. https://www.delta.com/us/en/careers/corporate-careers

Towards the bottom of the page at Delta's careers page you'll note that Delta's headquarters in Atlanta has a Walmart Pharmacy in it. Delta is essentially signalling to its constantly moving employees that you're more likely to find a Walmart near an airport than a CVS or a Walgreens (especially in super-rural America) and that pharmacy is a constant stream of pilots and flight attendants grabbing refills on their way through.

You seem to be beating around some kind of bush by intentionally neglecting to define your definition of "high quality" in this context. Are you saying that 1mg of melatonin from Walmart or Amazon do not actually contain 1mg of melatonin?

I'm a different person here, but yes, this is actually the case more often than not.

https://aasm.org/study-finds-that-melatonin-content-of-suppl...

I used to do this too, but I learned that will give you inconsistent dosage as the pills aren't guaranteed to have the active ingredient spread uniformly.

If the pill has a score line, it's designed for halving (or quartering, if it has two.) Otherwise, no guarantees.

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