"99% of Melatonin Is Made From Petrochemicals" Dr. Deanna Minich & Lara Pizzorno Interview (Part 2)

So what if I told you that melatonin could actually play a major role in aging well and protecting our bones as we get older? Dr. Deanna Minick, one of the major leaders and educators in functional medicine.

To me, melatonin is like the mother compound that can lead to a lot of different things within the body. Melatonin is everywhere within the human body. It's ubiquitous. One of the things that can lead to accelerated aging is when we're not getting enough darkness. Melatonin is more on the side of darkness. It's a dark sensor.

Dr. Minnick, it is such a pleasure to have you with us today. You've called melatonin in some of your writings and in some lectures I've heard a multitasking molecule. We've talked about a lot of the things already. But is there anything else you want to zone in on in terms of how melatonin is a multitasker beyond it does, yeah.

And by the way, that is actually Dr. Russell Ryder coined that term in 2010. That's not my language. So I do want to give credit where credit is due, but it is truly a multitasking molecule. It's almost like a Swiss army knife, right? It's got so many different functions. So we talked about its ability as a potent antioxidant. We talked about its anti inflammatory properties. The other thing that we just lightly touched upon is its ability to protect the nervous system. And I've noticed at Dr. David Perlmutter, he is now talking about melatonin more as it relates to different type of neurodegenerative diseases. This is a paper looking at its role as a neurotrophic factor, so supporting the neurons and in the way of survival, their growth, their differentiation, and seeing improvements with supplementation. So it has a lot of different effects on the brain. If you think of the brain, it's kind of a fatty substance. Right. And so melatonin naturally can cross the blood brain barrier. So if you're taking a melatonin supplement, you can be affecting brain levels, which means that you can be translating that into greater neuroplasticity. And in fact, there was even some preclinical work to suggest that melatonin decreases leaky brain. You know how we talk so much in functional medicine about leaky gut and then eventually getting to leaky brain and causing all kinds of issues. Well, in some of the preclinical work, we see that melatonin may actually help to stabilize the blood brain barrier, so the membrane so to be more protective. And then I Like this picture. To me, again, this is where the picture tells a thousand words. I want you to think of your eyes as part of the brain and as part of what detoxifies during sleep. I don't think we give enough attention to our eyes. And because people are so, so technology driven these days, they're on technology a lot. They're requiring and demanding a lot of their eyes. Right. But our eyes need to rest during sleep, and they have their own glymphatic system. As you can see here on the right, there is an ocular glymphatic system. We need to release toxic metabolites from the eyes. Just think of the lens of the eye, a lot of those free radicals and cataracts. I know that there's a whole initiative looking at melatonin for eye health. So. So think of the eyes as connected to the brain and think of melatonin as being very connected to nerve tissues. And as you can see on the left here, this is a little sampling of the brain tissue. So when we sleep, there is more space that forms between the brain cells or the nerve cells. We get a shrinkage of the cells, like up to 60%, so that things can move in and out of those cells, and we can actually create flow and convection. And that's what melatonin is helping the brain to do. So if we have inflammation, we've got brain on fire, as Dr. Bland likes to call it. We start to create lots of particles in the brain, lots of cytokines, lots of damaged proteins. So we put more burden on the body to get those substances out, which is why we can start to see the connection between melatonin and neurodegenerative conditions. So you asked Laura about different functions. Sometimes what happens in the cell is viruses, amyloid protein, things go off and create a different phase. And then those viruses start to create more viscosity in the cell. They start to change the dynamics. They start to kind of take over the cell and create a factory of proteins. Well, melatonin seems to help to prevent that. Melatonin seems to help to help with mitophagy, which is cleaning up of the mitochondria. Just overall, it's like it's a very healing molecule in that way. We did talk about circadian rhythm, and then the final thing that we did talk about briefly is that it's important for the mitochondria. And Lara, I just mentioned this briefly. I'm no expert in this area, but there is a whole, I would say, group of clinicians and oncologists who have used melatonin in tandem with things like chemotherapy in order to help the chemotherapy to work better and to be more targeted to the cells that need the chemotherapy. So Dr. Paolo Lasoni is an Italian oncologist who is truly one of the pioneers in this area. So he did a lot of that work in the 1990s. He published a lot of that. Now, that's a very specific, specific use requiring clinical oversight and a very different dose than we're talking about just for overall health and well being. But I did.

Jo's research team has been looking into some of that. And the typical dose for, with the oncologist supervision only is like 20 milligrams a day. It's just a huge, a huge dose. But the effects really look very promising. So if anyone listening to this is dealing with cancer, they might want to talk to their oncologist about using, trying some melatonin. Why don't we talk about Erbatonin and how it's different from the typical synthetic melatonin supplements that people buy. I have to say, personally knowing you, I was fortunate to be introduced to Erbatonin. Boy, it's months, months and months ago now. And I had been taking melatonin, synthetic melatonin, for many years because of its protective effects against breast cancer. My mother had breast cancer, and so we put her on melatonin and then I kept taking it because it's also very beneficial for bone. But when I switched to Erbatonin, I noticed a big difference. I needed far less and the effects were better. So I'm hoping you can explain some of the reasons why that might occur for other people. Yeah.

And that was part of my entry into working with Symphony Natural Health. So one of the things that most people don't realize. Let me just, historically, just back the this conversation up a little bit, because after Dr. Aaron Lerner discovered melatonin in 1958, there was more research on the pineal gland. And it was thought that if researchers would take the melatonin from the pineal gland of animals and concentrate it, that that could be a way to deliver melatonin supplementally, which wasn't very ethical. It was not very sustainable. And you just think, I mean, we're talking picogram amounts, really tiny amounts in the pineal gland. That just shows you how potent melatonin can be as a signaler. And then there were concerns about viruses and prions and animal products and things of that nature. So then what soon came to be was that companies were Starting to chemically synthesize melatonin. So that would just be from petrochemicals, right? Just kind of starting with an organic compound, then moving it through a series of reactions. And there are articles that have been published talking about some of the potential for contaminants by way of this synthetic process. So there can be a number of different contaminants in synthetically produced melatonin. So as Laura knows, I mean I'm just very much again about the purity of products and when I see melatonin, gummies, chewables and you just don't know what you're getting, especially if there are interactions within the matrix of a water soluble, like gummy matrix. Right. So what are you actually getting? We just have think about the purity and 99% of the melatonin supplements. If you look on Amazon, they are synthetically produced. They're not plant in origin. So back in 2021 there was a publication, this is before I even got started working with Symphony Natural Health and started looking into their plant melatonin. So there's a separate research group that actually took the erbatonin and compared it against synthetic melatonin. So just so everybody knows what erbatonin is, it is a plant concentrate. So it's not an extract, requires no chemicals. It's green, it's from alfalfa, chlorella and rice. And this was put together through an incredible researcher, Dr. Henry Meissner, a biochemist who is a master of growing plants, understanding plants, you know, just how to optimize the plant to get the best from it. So that's what erbatonin is. It's a combination of those three plants. And in this paper what I'm going to show you is just very simply what they found in this graph. They looked at the erbatonin versus synthetic melatonin and this is looking at what is called COX2 inhibition. In other words, we're looking at reduction of inflammation. And what they were able to show was that the erbatonin was 646% greater in its anti inflammatory activity versus synthetic melatonin. Now you might be thinking, well Deanna, how could that even happen? Is it the same melatonin? Yes, it's the same melatonin. But what you have in the Erbatonin that you don't have in synthetic melatonin is a lot of the other compounds, like different phytonutrients, which could be supportive of melatonin. So you get a little bit of lutein which is Good for the eyes. Zeaxanthin, also good for the eyes. Chlorophyll, beta carotene. You get small amounts of different vitamins. So it's a composite, it's a whole plant material. It's, again, it's not an extract. So it's got a little bit of this amplified action, which actually translates into significant activity within the body. So even if you take that very physiologic dose of 0.3 milligrams, it's almost like you might even want to think of it as like six times that in terms of activity. Here is another graph where they used different synthetic melatonin samples. They compared it to look at what is called free radical scavenging. So this would tell us something about its ability to perform as an antioxidant. And what they found was that it was up to just almost five times greater in free radical scavenging with the erbatonin. So it was better at its antioxidant action than the synthetic melatonin. They also looked at a skin cell line, and what they showed was that the blue bars here, which is the Erbatonin, was better at scavenging those reactive oxygen species in this human skin cell line than the synthetic melatonin. And then finally, just like the very basic, they call it an orac value, but it's just a way to get a gauge on antioxidant potential. And what you see with the Erbatonin is that it is definite. Higher, the higher the number, the greater the antioxidant potential. And you see that it outperforms again, synthetic melatonin. So some people say, well, Deanna, can't I just eat more melatonin since it's found in foods? You told me it's found everywhere. And I just want to clarify that for people because sometimes that is a question. And in fact, we did address it in the paper. So melatonin tends to be found in a lot of different, I would say plant foods and especially the reproductive portion of the plant, like the nuts and the seeds, which is why you might have seen on social media that you just need to have tart cherry juice and then you can go to sleep better at night or just have a handful of pistachios and you'll sleep better at night. But what we know is that there's a lot of variability in how these things grow. I would never say to people, don't have cherries or don't have pistachios, because we are looking at a healthy anti inflammatory diet. But to suggest that this is the way to get melatonin, I think is not as reliable. In fact, I did a little bit of math and I looked for papers where they had quantified how much melatonin was in certain batches of cherries and walnuts and pistachios. And I just did a very quick calculation to look at. Okay. If we just want a physiological dose of melatonin, how much would we have to eat in order to get that? So what we see for tart cherries, at least, using the values that I found in a few studies, I used a range and took an average, you see 2718 fresh cherries. So that's not really doable on a daily basis. Right. But are tart cherries great for other things? Absolutely. They have polyphenols, they have vitamin C, they have a number of things. But it's a little bit challenging to get melatonin through food at the level, even a very basic physiologic level that we need. So I would say, and this is a slide I like to leave everybody with. And actually, oh, let me just mention this. We just had a full moon, and.

I don't know about you, so gorgeous here.

It was gorgeous.

It was just beautiful.

It was so bright. It was so yellow. But full moons, what we see, at least in this study, and this study was done in a slight sleep lab, so there was no interference of light. Many times people think, oh, I can't sleep with the full moon because it's so bright outside. Well, that makes sense because you don't have enough darkness to create more melatonin separately from the light exposure. Look at this study. Evidence that lunar cycle influences human sleep. And what they did was they kept people in a sleep lab, and then they looked at their melatonin levels and they found that just naturally, that four days before and four days after a full moon, their endogenous melatonin levels were reduced. You can see that here by this dip. Right. And they also looked at measures of sleep quality and found that it took longer to fall asleep. Total sleep duration was reduced, and they overall just had less sleep quality and their endogenous melatonin was reduced. Now, you may be thinking, well, I don't have an issue with sleep, but around the full moon, I do notice that I'm not sleeping as well. That might be a time that you need to target with supplemental melatonin and be very aware of it and see if it does improve your sleep. If we think of, like, all the steps to Better melatonin, which means better health, better longevity. In fact, people who meditate even have higher melatonin.

Oh, interesting.

It's so interesting. But we've got to start at the base of this pyramid here with we need to focus on light and dark. Those are free to us. That's not taking another supplement. That is making sure we even save money by having less light and electricity. Right. It's a good thing. So we need adequate darkness. And if we don't feel like we can get that, then how do we shift our home life and be thinking about maybe having blue like with your son, with Galen? I would even say, you know, blue light blocking glasses can help with shift work. Right. So it helps to reduce, especially in a hospital setting when everything is bright and enriched in blue light. So having those blue light blocking glasses, if you're on the computer a lot, just tend to your diet. Yes, yes. I think it's very smart and they're inexpensive. You know, there's a lot of variability of those artificial blue light glasses, but there was even one study that showed that improvements in fasting plasma glucose levels, insulin resistance and sleep quality in healthy participants who wore blue light shield eyewear for two to three hours before bed for one month. So they work, you know, if they truly are blocking the blue light and they can run you anywhere between 20 to $50, you know, it's not a huge investment for again, helping so many different parameters. So get those blue light blocking glasses as one way to preserve your melatonin. Get enough protein in your diet, because melatonin comes from tryptophan, which is an amino acid. So when we're hearing all this buzz about protein, I think that that's for good reason and even ties into melatonin because even the pineal gland needs tryptophan to make that melatonin. Right. Unless you're supplementing with melatonin, in which case you wouldn't need that. Making sure that we have an anti inflammatory diet high in plant antioxidants, that's important. And Lara, you've been talking with the community about that. Making sure that we've got our protective nutrients, you know, whatever we can get in terms of healthy food sources that would give us lutein and zeaxanthin, which would protect the eye from blue light and then plant melatonin like Erbatonin to come in. And based on our age, our lifestyle, our health status, you know, what does our family history kind of prime us for? Potentially we may need to be including a dose of ERBATONIN or supplemental melatonin. I will just mention that if people decide to go on supplemental melatonin and they're on other medications, just check that out with your healthcare practitioner. Because melatonin can actually make certain things better in your body and then you don't need so much of other things. There could be some interactions like with blood pressure lowering medications. So just please note that that melatonin can interact because it's helping the body to work better in many ways. So things like blood sugar agents, sleeping aids, blood pressure's a big one, anything that would modulate brain, you would want to be thinking about that. And I have, there's a website with all research, it's phytomelatonin.org this can give you a list of a lot of those contraindications and those medications that can interact. So you can find a lot of this on here, but you won't find anything about the Erbatonin. You'll just find the general research as it relates to melatonin. But there is also a section on bone health that you can go to. It's under clinical applications and you can go to the dropdown where it has bone health. Yeah.

Can we talk for a minute about how melatonin specifically supports bone health?

Yes, of course. You're the expert in this area and I'm happy to kind of come in at whatever level you want me to.

Yeah, I completely defer to you on melatonin. You know, I've seen some research suggesting that melatonin promotes osteoblasts, which are the cells that produce new bone for us, promotes osteoblast production and activity. Can you tell us a little about that? Have you seen any of that?

Yes, there are some cell studies that would suggest that melatonin could be helpful for osteoblast activity, the bone building activity, and also on the other side to help with reducing the inflammatory cytokines that can be implicated with the osteoclast. So I think in general helping to harmonize bone dynamics.

And what about its effects on vitamin D? Balancing with vitamin D and calcium absorption and that whole.

Absolutely. In fact, just to kind of speak to that vitamin D connection which we kind of started with, this might be of interest for people. I'm just going to share my slide on this. This study was looking at women and their levels of vitamin D and melatonin and they also looked at sleep. But what they found, of course, was that most women were either vitamin D deficient or insufficient. And they found this is the pearl. Higher melatonin levels were associated with reduced risk for vitamin D deficiency. And there seemed to be a correlation between vitamin D and melatonin. So if you've got low vitamin D and you're working on that, it might suggest that you could have lower melatonin as well, because they're kind of, you know, again, one is about the light, one is about the dark, and they work in tandem. So, yes, as part of bone health and focusing in on vitamin D, vitamin K2 and calcium and minerals and magnesium, we do need to be considering melatonin as part of that equation because of its entry with the whole discussion on.

Vitamin D. This isn't any question on the list, but it's something I thought of. So I'm going to throw it in here. You know, many housekeeping functions ramp up at night when the body is supposedly not digesting food. You know that you ate 20 minutes before went to bed, but your, your body is freed and your brain is supposedly not dashing around either. And you do housekeeping functions. You clean things up like the brain and you. And you promote new bone, you know, new bone formation and everything. So I'm thinking that melatonin certainly comes in there supporting that, you know, the ability to do housekeeping functions at night, like rebuilding your bones. So I think that's another aspect. I haven't seen any research discussing that. Do you have anything to add or is that.

It's absolutely a reasonable hypothesis because of the cleanup and especially as it relates to inflammation, and we know that that would impact bone. We also need to remember that melatonin belongs in kind of the hormone web, and one of the hormones is growth hormone, which would also tie into bone. So that would be worthwhile to be thinking about is if we have our melatonin correct, and at its proper level, then you're going to potentially have other hormones that are functioning better, which would help in that cleanup process and also building process. Because the nighttime is so much about restoration, it's so much about rejuvenation. And that's why when people shortcut their sleep for a variety of different reasons, we're really missing out on the building on the osteoblast portion that you just spoke about.

Another kind of an aside here, but I saw one paper stating that melatonin increases the production of collagen, our body's ability to produce collagen for us, which is such an important component of the bone matrix. So I think that's another way that melatonin should be important for our bones. Have you seen any comment on that research?

I haven't gone into that research, but I do know that it can stimulate a number of different peptides that would relate to bone. So it doesn't surprise me that it would influence collagen and overall protein formation. That's a bonus. Right. So I think if women are taking their collagen, thinking about how melatonin can actually prime the signal to allow the body to do its thing more naturally, too. And I also want to toss into the mix of collagen, since we're on it, is how important vitamin C is for collagen as well. Right. It's kind of like a full. And when I was. When you and I were together, Lara, and also with. With Joe, we were talking about, you know, collagenics and kind of bringing in the minerals, you know, all the things that we need in order to build healthy collagen and how important that is. So, yeah, I'm glad that you bring that up. That's. That's an interesting one. Right, that melatonin could be part of that.

Yeah. I need to look more into that research. I think it's fascinating. Dysbiosis. Can we talk about the gut for a second? Because, you know, I remember in one of your slides, you showed that our gut is the major producer of melatonin. I mean, people think about it being just produced from the pineal gland, but actually, the gut cells are very active in producing melatonin. And so I'm wondering about dysbiosis, which is basically an unhappy microbiome, you know, where the good bacteria are diminished and the bad bacteria are increased, and that that promotes chronic inflammation, which promotes bone loss. But I'm wondering if dysbiosis would also affect our ability to produce melatonin.

Short answer is definitely yes. In fact, you know, I'm so intrigued with this gut bone access. In fact, I was listening to a webinar with Jeff Bland through PLMI last night, and they were talking about this very thing. Right. Akkermansia, mucinophilia, a lot of these different microorganisms and how important they are for bone health. So here's the intriguing piece of melatonin. I don't think we quite know why that the gut produces so much melatonin, but we also know just it's been long in, I would say, in the functional medicine teaching that the gut produces the most amount of serotonin. It produces the most amount of, you know, a variety of different neurotransmitters. Now, melatonin comes from serotonin. If we are producing healthy amounts of serotonin, chances are we can be producing melatonin. But yeah, we produce a lot in the gut. And in fact, as you can see on the slide here, it's been documented throughout the whole of the gastrointestinal tract, even into the lumen itself, the mucosa, the smooth muscle. And in fact, one of the things that it may play a role in, in addition to gut microbiome modulation, is motility, motility of the gut, keeping that moving. And so, as you can see here, when we have a distortion of the gut brain access and even the gut bone access, I remember Jeff Bland talking years ago about fatty bone and how we send the wrong signals to the stem cells from the gut and then we start to create, instead of bone cells, we create adipocytes. I think that melatonin has some, some implication here. And in fact, I want to bring it back to even fiber. You and I have a shared love, a nutritional love, which is prebiotic fibers of so many different kinds. And what we know, and what I was listening to last night too, is that these short chain fatty acids, so things like butyrate, which we get from prebiotic fibers, depending on our gut microbiome, can actually stimulate the cells in the gut to release serotonin and enhance melatonin production. So isn't that fascinating? Our body wants melatonin. It's going, it has multiple paths that are redundant in order to get us to melatonin, which tells us that it's important. When nature knows that something is important, it makes for redundant systems in the body. We're even producing it in the gut. Now here's the difference the gut made. Melatonin seems to work more locally. You see how it says here paracrine or autocrine. So this is not always seen in a full on endocrine way, like the pineal gland, which is a true endocrine gland. What we know about, at least to this day, what I can tell from talking with melatonin researchers, is that the melatonin made in the gut is more or less used within the gut or in the surrounding areas, and not as much is circulated throughout the body. There is some, but it seems like it's more of a localized effect. So that could be implicated again in the microbiome, in the motility, in fostering just a healthy milieu within the gut.

And there's certainly a lot of inflammation that can be going on in the gut. So I can see where melatonin could be very helpful there.

Yes, that's a really good point.

What about cortisol? I recently taped Life these days is a little bit more stressful, certainly than I remember from when I was younger. It seems to be challenging in many ways for many people. And dysregulated cortisol production has really become a lot more common. I taped a full Ask Lara on that and how it increases belly fat and prevents you from sleeping and so forth. Can you tell us a little bit about cortisol's effects on melatonin?

Yes. First of all, they're like brother and sister. Cortisol and melatonin are like brother and sister. It's like vitamin D and melatonin.

They.

They're like two sides of the same coin. So cortisol, as you can see here, is the hormone that gets us up and out of bed. Testosterone is also increased in the morning and that is what gives us a sense of drive and motivation. So if we don't have proper cortisol and testosterone, we cannot get a very good start to our day. We're going to be languishing, we're going to be fatigued. This is chronic fatigue syndrome, which is implicated with other things, of course, but cortisol is a daytime morning time hormone. Now, melatonin, as I mentioned, is peaking in the middle of the night, but our melatonin starts to go up as it gets dim. So if we have healthy melatonin levels, this will actually help us with cortisol. When we have healthy cortisol levels, that is tethering us to healthier melatonin. So I just wanted to show you the clock, just as an example. And of course, there are other hormones that are at play here, but we won't get into those. I mentioned growth hormone, the thyroid hormone is actually peaking in the middle of the night as well. But all of these things are very interrelated. But cortisol, I'm glad that you asked about it because it's very connected. So here's the other biochemical pathway I want to show you by way of answering that question. There's more to this here, but when we are stressed, we need energy, right? It's kind of like the first, I would say the first response of the body is, oh, my gosh, there is some kind of thing that we have to respond and react to. We need energy. We've got to move. We've got to move our metabolic resources. So what ends up happening here is our body only has a certain pool of tryptophan, right? This amino acid that we get from Turkey and plant food sources, walnuts, you know, tryptophan is within protein, but most of that tryptophan is going into making energy. It's going into making nad. And NAD is a type of B vitamin that helps us with energy. In fact, that's what our mitochondria is helping us to churn out is more nad. When we are stressed, we have less of that tryptophan left over to go to serotonin and then on to melatonin. Because under normal situations, you know, we only have a little bit going over to serotonin and melatonin. This is why when we're stressed and we're trying to get energy, we're shunting down this pathway, we're making more NAD for energy, but by way of doing that, we're making more neurotoxic substances and we're making less of the happy molecule serotonin, and less of this sleepy circadian molecule melatonin. So we get into a bit of a problem there. Right. So low levels of melatonin may upregulate that pathway. So there can also be kind of like that shift where if we have low melatonin now, we're going to make more of these different other compounds, these kynurenines they're called. And so this, this other pathway that tryptophan is active with, it can ultimately form more neurotoxins. Anyway, when you ask about cortisol and melatonin, they're very much connected through this pathway, the kynurenan pathway, as it relates to tryptophan. So we start to create more neurotoxicity, more requests for metabolic energy, and then we have less leftover for our serotonin and our melatonin. That's how the body responds to that cortisol related stress.

Yeah. So, you know, ensuring that your intake of protein and thus tryptophan is adequate becomes much more important when you're stressed.

100%. I can't stress that enough. And in fact, if we just look at how tryptophan converts, because then people say, well, Deanna, well, forget melatonin, I'm just going to have more tryptophan. Well, first of all, that's great. We do need tryptophan. It's a little bit difficult to get tryptophan into the brain. However, it competes with other amino acids depending on their structure. But if you look at it, once it is across the blood brain barrier, you need 1, 2, 3, 4 steps to convert it to melatonin. And each of those steps requires enzymes. Each of those enzymes also requires certain cofactors. So if we are deficient in magnesium, which is a big one, we're not going to easily be able to convert 5 HTP to serotonin. And we also will have some difficulty with that finish line. I would say the N acetyl serotonin into the melatonin which requires magnesium. So yes, we need tryptophan but in many cases, Lara, as you know, a lot of people have gene variants in different of these enzymes. So they're not always running perfectly and we don't always have the perfect nutritional status to ensure that these pathways are running efficiently for our needs state. So I just wanted to mention that.

I see a lot of people, I frequently suggest people discuss with their doctors taking not just magnesium, supplemental magnesium, but supplemental pyridoxal 5 phosphate because B6 or pyridoxine, about 25% of the population doesn't convert it very well into P5P and then it can't help you absorb magnesium. So it's, I see that a lot. And there's probably look at this, many other things that can go wrong here along this complicated conversion.

Exactly. So that's why it's not just about hammering the protein. And that's why if we were to take a melatonin supplement like Erbatonin, it can readily cross the blood brain barrier and then we don't have to go through all these steps so we have it ready for the body to use and to use as a circadian signal. And again, we don't need a lot. We don't need a lot, right? I think so that's like the double edged sword with melatonin. People think, wow, I just heard so many good things about melatonin. I'm just going to take more because I want more antioxidant activity, I want more anti inflammatory activity. But quite honestly I do think that the body has balance and it has checks and balances in all of our different systems. And if we look at what the body makes. Right, let's just get physiological. What the body makes is on the order. If when we were a teenager we were probably making about 0.9mg just based on that curve I showed you. So if we were to stick with what we make in middle age, which is about 0.3 milligrams and that is the amount that has been tested for sleep, different sleep, I would say organizations also support a lower dose just to again it's like patch the gap. Don't go overboard where you're now you're going to potentially throw the other hormones out of alignment. Right. We're just looking for a physiological balance and in some cases we might need more like we talked about with the oncology areas, or there might be certain other aspects where more might be needed acutely in order to get a certain effect. But that is with clinical oversights. And that's why with the Erbatonin, even though you're doing the 0.3 milligrams, the physiologic dose, you're still getting an amplified activity and functionality of that dose without having to do more because the other plant constituents are there.

I'm scanning through remaining questions we have. We've been talking for a while and I'm sure you have other things you need to do and we've covered a lot of things. I would like to ask you why are some people questioning the safety of melatonin? How safe is it? You know, are there any adverse effects of taking melatonin?

Yes.

Can you talk to us?

Yeah, definitely. Great questions. We do want to be just aware of any potential contraindications or ways in which medications can change if we're taking melatonin supplements. I don't think that children need to take melatonin because their levels theoretically should endogenously be high unless they have other underlying conditions. I also think that because melatonin can stimulate the immune system, there is some caution about autoimmune diseases and whether or not too much. And this is where, I mean, again, I have colleagues within the functional medicine world and they're taking some of them just personally, they're taking double digit, double digit milligrams of melatonin. But what is the effect on the immune system? Are we overseeing stimulating the immune system? Now? One of our shared colleagues, Dr. Terry Wahls, she has mentioned to me that she also takes Erbatonin now because she and I have been talking about it and there's some good data on multiple sclerosis. So I do think we need to be conscientious of that. But I think where melatonin has had the bad reputation because, you know, you see it in the news, it's like it's a hormone. We shouldn't be having a hormone. And in fact, you and I were in the UK in October of last year. You cannot get melatonin very easily over the counter in certain countries like the United Kingdom. And so there is a perception that it is a hormone. And that it should not be taken supplementally. And I think that that really needs to be looked at and looked at with a critical eye to the science. Sometimes it takes the overall society or the clinical sphere 15 to 17 years to kind of have an acknowledgment of all of the good scenarios science. And I think it's about the dose, it's about the format. Yes. Have there been issues with labeling of melatonin and having the label claim not match up? Yes, there has been some of that in the news. The other concern that some people have with taking melatonin is if I take melatonin, does my body stop making it? Now, when they think like that, they're thinking of melatonin as a hormone. And when we think of the hypothalamus and the pituitary sending out the releasing hormones to create kind of this production of hormones in the body and then eventually we turn that signal off, that's what they're thinking with melatonin. But melatonin doesn't work like that. In fact, I've been. So that is the number one thing that I am asked by people is what is the data as it relates to will my body stop making melatonin if I take it? Well, first of all, if you just step back, if you are in middle age or in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you're already not making very much. So it's not like you know that that would be a huge problem. But if you look at the studies that were prospectively looking at endogenous production of melatonin and looking at supplementation, there isn't any data that I can find that would suggest that melatonin from supplementation at modest levels have any impact on endogenous production. And I have asked Dr. Russell Ryder, who again is like the father of melatonin, and he's like, you know, there is nothing that would suggest that that could be an issue. But that said Dr. Dick Wertman at MIT many years ago, this is like in the early 2000s when he was doing work on melatonin, he suggested through various things that I had read that high dose, long term use of melatonin might potentially reduce the sensitivity of the receptors. You know, how you saturate the receptors, like when you have a high dose and then it's almost like you have to take it away to see it again. So there might actually, if we take too much and we're bombarding the receptors, how does that change the dynamics within the cell? I don't think we know exactly.

Yeah.

This is why if we stay on the physiological side with what the body would normally make in middle age, then we're in the realm of greater safety than looking at double dig doses, triple digit doses.

When I looked at the research, I saw several papers. There was no toxicity seen from melatonin in phase one pharmacological studies. In normal volunteers given doses up to 100 milligrams. That was pretty reassuring for me. Let's try to wrap up and just summarize a couple of the key points that you feel are the most important takeaways for people. First of all, how melatonin supports healthy bones and healthy aging.

Yes. And that's really what this community is about, right? Healthy bones, healthy you. So I would say that again, if we can remember that melatonin is a very potent antioxidant, it's protective and it would be helpful for bone as we're more in a pro inflammatory state, especially postmenopausally. From that perspective alone, that would help with the better bone dynamics, helping with better osteoclast activity, and also promoting, as you suggested, which was really spot on, the rejuvenative or the restorative actions of bone building at nighttime. So looking at its antioxidant and anti inflammatory potential would be the two biggest mechanisms for why melatonin is so important as it relates to bone health, for sure.

So for people who are looking to optimize their bone health, and how would you suggest they think about incorporating melatonin into their health promotion strategy?

Yeah, well, I would say that again, going with a low dose, you know, starting with 0.3 milligrams and having that about an hour before bedtime just to try that out. And so if you do the Erbatonin, you know, we have a 0.3 milligram. We also have a higher dose for when you're thinking about jet lag or you're thinking about shift work, or you're needing a specific acute dose for that reason. But starting low, go slow. If you're taking it an hour before bedtime and you're noticing like, oh, this is changing my sleep a little bit, I would say just try it for like three days and try to get in the groove of like, what time would be a good time for you to take it again, if you feel a little bit more groggy, maybe take it a little bit earlier, like two to three hours before bedtime. Or if you feel like, you know, it's changing your sleep a little bit, take it a little Bit further into bedtime. Like I like to keep my nighttime supplements by my nighttime sink, like where I'm getting ready for bed. So I just do everything at once. Right. I actually do take my, just like a composite of certain things at night. And if you take the melatonin, it's, it's also okay to take it with things like the algaecal products. There shouldn't be any issue there. Again, it is more fat soluble and water soluble. It can flex in either direction. Some people like to take it with a little bit of fish oil because it is fat soluble. So that could delay the release of melatonin a little bit. So that would be my guidance is if you have specific questions about your health, obviously check with your healthcare practitioner who knows you well. I don't know your personal history or if you're on medications. But I do think that getting melatonin and starting with a low dose, a safe dose, looking at how you feel when you're on it will be the best gauge. And I would recommend Dr. Russell Ryder's book called Melatonin if people just want to read about it and they're very intrigued about a lot of this research. Now it's an older book, you know, it's from the 1990s, but it's really fascinating and it's, it's an easy read. I mean, I think I read it in just a couple of hours. I was just eating it up. It's so, you know, he was learning all these interesting studies even about aging and animals that were given water with melatonin versus animals without melatonin and how the animals that were given melatonin aged at a slower rate than the animals that were not given melatonin. You know, just little things like that. It just piqued my interest for bone. I would definitely just, you know, this is what I do personally. I do take the 0.3 milligrams. I am hyper focused on my bones. That has become my body system that I'm watching now being postmenopausal. And so that's I think at least a good start. And then if you need to tweak it, you can always check with your practitioner about that.

Well, thank you, Dr. Minick. Your expertise has hugely enriched our understanding and appreciation for melatonin. For those who wish to learn more or connect with Dr. Minick, you can visit her website at www.deannaminnock.com or follow her on social media for updates. Links to her social media, her certification program and whole detox are below. Also, Dr. Minick has provided us with several slides downloads, more information about melatonin, and a free melatonin guide that you can download. This was a stellar kickoff, I must say. I learned so much. I really felt like I knew a lot about melatonin, but now I know a lot more and it was great fun. And I want to thank our audience for joining us and hope this conversation has inspired you to explore how melatonin can support your health journey. And please don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. I'm hoping we'll bring you lots of good information there and watch our other expert interviews. And thank you so much everyone for your time.