Beyond Sleep: Exploring Melatonin's Powerful Role in Longevity and Wellness with Dr. Deanna Minich of Symphony Health - Episode 262

Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Cruz of Sandy K Nutrition, Health and Lifestyle Queen. For years now, I've been bringing to you conversations about wellness from incredible guests from all over the world. Discover a fresh take on healthy living for midlife and beyond. One that embraces balance and reason without letting only science dictate every aspect of our wellness. Join me and my guests as we explore ways that we can age gracefully with in depth conversations about the thyroid, about hormones, and other alternative wellness options for you and your family. True wellness nurtures a healthy body, mind, spirit and soul. And we cover all of these essential aspects to help you live a balanced, joyful life. Be sure to follow my show, rate it, review it and share it. Always remember, my friends, Balanced Living works. Hi everyone. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition, Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today with me, I have a special guest. Her name is Dr. Deanna Minick of Symphony Health. We're going to talk all about melatonin. This is such a great conversation to help people really understand that melatonin is so much more than just a little sleep aid. So I'm going to leave that there because I'd love for you to listen to the entire conversation and do two things for me. I'm going to consider this just to thank you for providing information just to help you live your best life each and every week through my podcast, through my social media following. By the way, go follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, where else am I? Threads kind of everywhere. YouTube Rumble. Just look for Sandy K Nutrition and follow me there. But what I would love for you to do just to help more people learn about my podcast is to share this episode with at least one one person. You can do that through text, through email, whatever works through social media and tag me. And number two, go and review and rate my podcast. I think you can do that through both Spotify and Apple. But these reviews help me to keep bringing to you amazing guests each, each and every week. Also, some of you know this. I am a registered holistic nutritionist, but I'm also a writer. My degree is actually in English literature, so I love to write about health topics in short essays just to help you think about your health as it relates to you. It's not about me telling you how to, you know, be healthy because I don't know you and everyone's so bio individual. But that's what these essays are about. They're really just to help you think about things in a different light. So go and follow me on substack. It's sandycruz substack.coms and y k r u s e.substack.com and join my community there, which it's full of critical thinkers just like me. My last announcement is I've actually joined forces with my husband's company as the director of operations and the health and beauty consultant. Now let me explain that Sandy K Nutrition is not going away, but over these last eight years in this community, over five years of podcasting, I have met some incredible people and brands that are doing amazing things. So why not bring them to a B2B retail level? Let's see more of the good on the shelves to crowd out all those not so good products, right? So if you're looking to expand, and I'm talking about expand in distribution in Canada and sales worldwide on a retail level, get in touch with me if you have a great brand or if you know of a great brand, and if you're ready to scale up to the Costco's, the Walmarts, the Canadian tires, these are the big box stores. So get in touch with me, Sandy kgpartners.com or sandy@tk sandyknutrition ca and now let's cut on through to this Amazing interview with Dr. Deanna Minick.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Sandy K. Nutrition, health and lifestyle queen. Today with me, I have Dr. Deanna Minick. She is a certified functional medicine practitioner, a nutrition scientist, an international lecturer, a teacher and Author with over 20 years of experience in academia and in the food and dietary supplement industries. She is also the chief scientific officer for Symphony Natural Health, the makers of Herbatonin, the world's first plant, Melatonin. Now, today we're going to talk about a subject that I actually really love because most of you who've been following me for a long time know that I am a big fan of Melatonin. And we're going to talk about the lesser known own benefits of melatonin and especially as it relates to longevity. So that's one of my favorite things to talk about, is how can we age better. So with that, welcome, Dr. Minick. Thank you so much for coming.

Hi Sandy. Great to be here with you. And this is one of my favorite topics. So I'm excited to go deep with you on it.

Yeah, I am too, because I feel like I think we. I've already done a show on this and this was quite a long time ago, a few years ago, but I feel like melatonin, like, some say it's amazing, some say it's not. Some Scientists have all these warnings about it. Some say, oh, God, everybody should be taking it. So I think it's important that we talk about it and kind of break it down with all of your experience. But before we do that, I'm going to ask you to tell us how you got into this field, because we kind of had a little bit of a chat in advance, and we have some similar backgrounds, but, you know, please do tell us.

Sure. Well, the way I got into melatonin specifically was, I would say, during the pandemic, we were hearing a lot about all the different nutrients that would be beneficial for the immune system. And me being a nutrition scientist, I was aware of a number of them, so vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D. But then I started to see talk about melatonin, and I was wondering, why is this? Like, this was kind of new for me. In the course of my education, my career, I hadn't seen much about melatonin in, like, as a nutrient. Right. Especially for the immune system. So I started to go into it a bit. And I had also been in conversations with Symphony Natural Health, who at the time I was not working with, but learned about their plant melatonin, which is Erbatonin. And so I think that one thing just led to another. I began working with Symphony, and we wrote a paper, a published review paper, called Is Melatonin the Next Vitamin D? So that was a labor of love that was like, goodness, like scratching the surface of all things melatonin to understand it. And then even Last year, in 2024, we did a melatonin masterclass where I interviewed some of the world's experts on melatonin. You know, I. I know things about melatonin, but I wouldn't say that I'm an expert or that I've spent my life on melatonin. I learned from the giants out there, people like Russell Ryder, Dr. Tan, Dr. Cardinelli, you know, some of these people who are now in their 80s and have spent their lives researching melatonin. So that was kind of my entry point into melatonin. Writing the paper, doing a melatonin masterclass, and also learning much more about what melatonin does, which is so intriguing. It's. It is not just a molecule for sleep, as we now know, although many people don't know that. Many people do have that fear factor when they hear melatonin, just like you said. So, and I think that there could be a lot of reasons why that is, you know, and we can. We can get into that.

I. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. And maybe, you know, I always say knowledge is power and then you decide if this knowledge resonates with you and your body and your bio individuality. I always say that because I do want to preface this conversation to say nothing we are speaking of here is medical advice. And this conversation is just for educational purposes only. You have to go and speak with your own practitioner that you have trust in, that you work with, who knows you on if melatonin is right for you. I think it's just really important to say that because a lot of times people will listen to this podcast and they'll be like, oh, well, Deanna and Sandy said it's for this and I need to take it. And so let's just start with that. But you started your conversation just now saying how it does so much more than just sleep. So let's get into that. But it's also just.

It.

It's also a hormone as well, correct?

Yeah.

Maybe explain a little bit, you know, what is melatonin?

Yeah, let's go back into the history of melatonin and there's a great book out there for the general public. It's called melatonin. It's by Dr. Russell Ryder. It was actually Pub published in 1995, but that paperback book is. So I would just say it, it, it is still relevant today. In fact, it could be updated with some science. I was talking with Dr. Reiter about that. But that book really does bring together all of these many functions. So let me just give you the Cliff Notes version. So when was melatonin discovered? It was discovered in 1958 by a Yale trained dermatologist. His name was Aaron Lerner. And Dr. Lerner was something that could whiten the skin. And so he began looking into the research and came across melatonin, which he found out was produced from the pineal gland. He did some experiments and found that it was not doing anything for skin lightning. But the name melatonin essentially came from his work, mela, referring to the melanin in skin, and tonin, because tonin represents the chemical class of compounds that melatonin is connected to, like serotonin. And so it, it has a certain trip to mean structure. So 1958 we knew about melatonin and then there was more research on the pineal gland, which we know produces melatonin in response to darkness. And then I think that we started to see an uptick in people looking and exploring supplementation with melatonin for a variety of different reasons. And so extracting melatonin from the pineal gland of animals, concentrating it, but then we know that that is, is not such a great practice. And eventually it started to become synthesized. Now, a lot of the early work on melatonin, I would say, was directed towards its work and sleep. For sure, it does do something in sleep. It opens the gateway of sleep. And the way that it does that is by getting the circadian rhythm in sync throughout every cell of the body. So we produce melatonin from the pineal gland, which is in the brain. And in response to that signal, we get more and more melatonin, which then connects to the rest of the body to synchronize what we call the cellular clocks. So the brain clock is synchronized with the cellular clocks through melatonin. And so that happens during darkness or when we're sleeping. So by way of thinking about melatonin as a sleep hormone, the way that it is implicated is in this circadian rhythm or this signaling. So I want us all to remember that, because I think that even more than sleep, it's a circadian rhythm signaler through darkness. And what are we doing in the dark? We're sleeping. One of the things that melatonin does do in order to enable us to get to sleep is it brings down the core body temperature a bit. So it's a hypothermic agent. So when we start to feel a little bit chilled at night, many times, you know, we kind of feel like, okay, now it's time to put the blankets on. We start to get tired. Right. So there's that kind of effect of melatonin. So melatonin opens the gateway of sleep. It does not necessarily keep us asleep. And I think that's another misconception of where people have gone awry with the information, thinking, oh, the melatonin didn't work. I Woke up at 2:00am or, oh, I feel groggy, you know, the melatonin did it. You know, there are more players in the sleep web of our biochemistry than just melatonin. And so it's, it's not only that, but first and foremost, yes, we see it as a circadian signal. It's also a potent antioxidant. It is helpful as an anti inflammatory. It modulates the mitochondria, which really fits your interest in longevity. And that's why a lot of biohackers are talking about it. You have people like Seam Land and other people, if you look at biohackers, they all in some way, what I have Found they do talk about melatonin. Not necessarily high doses of melatonin, more like microdosing melatonin, physiological effects of melatonin and then what it also does, and this is a lesser known function, but it's starting to emerge in the science, is it helps with brain detoxification at night. So what we see at night when we're sleeping is the brain cells, the neuronal cells, they shrink. And we see this in animals. We don't have human clinical data on this, but in animal models, what they see is that the, the brain cells shrink in order to allow for better convection of metabolites out of the brain. And it appears that melatonin is part of that process. It's a neuroprotective agent and it may be helping with that glymphatic fluid flux. So I just listed a lot of different things there. There's a lot in the way of those mechanisms. Like if we're just thinking sciency and how does a molecule work, circadian signaling, antioxidant effects, and we're talking a potent antioxidant effect, anti inflammatory. Looking at the mitochondria and also looking at the brain, I would say that those are the top five effects of melatonin. I didn't even get into the immune system. But that does tie into, to its anti inflammatory and its antioxidant effects.

Yes, I remember reading about the melatonin during the pandemic. I do remember reading the research that was coming out and I was fascinated with it because as I briefly mentioned to you, I started microdosing with melatonin way before I even went back to college for holistic health. And I was doing it intuitively. And I want to say something right here because I think it's important always to give a real life situation. And this isn't for me to tell you as a parent to go out and get your kid on melatonin. This is not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is sometimes the research can seem very, very scary. Because I know, Deanna, there's, there's research out there to say that if you give your child melatonin, you could delay puberty. There's, there's a bunch, but isn't there? Could you just kind of.

I wouldn't say it's very strong that we can pinpoint and say that melatonin could delay puberty. What we do know is that melatonin and some of the other hormones that come up during puberty kind of come into this dance, if you will. So there is this kind of connection with puberty. So melatonin tends to just naturally come down and then some of the other hormones start to come up. But I don't think that we have copious evidence to suggest that taking melatonin. There are just too many variables there. What is the dose of melatonin? What is the child's exposure to endocrine disruptors? You know, so many different things. So I don't think that, you know, that's not my area of expertise. But I would say that in general, I don't tend to see that or I haven't seen it in the literature that I have been looking at there.

There was a very well known podcaster who was a scientist who was reviewing the science. So I will say a big issue right now with the whole world is that we see a 30 second clip on social media and then we pass judgment on that 30 second clip. So I will give grace in the sense of, you know, maybe there was more to that conversation.

I, I think I know now that you're mentioning where it appeared. I think I know the context of that conversation. I think it was in reference to animal studies where they showed that there were changes in reproductive activity, that melatonin was implicated in reproduction and somehow that levels of melatonin came down with levels of reproduction going down. But when I asked Dr. Reiter about that work that was taken out of its animal context and applied to humans, saying that if you take melatonin in, you're going to drive reproductive capacity down. What Dr. Russell Ryder mentioned to me and I confirmed it when I went into the studies, is that if you look at animals, they are seasonal breeders and melatonin was helping in the way of their breeding pattern. So there are certain times of year, especially even in Canada, I think it's like the white tailed deer can only mate during certain times of the year because otherwise the, the offspring will not survive through certain seasons. So melatonin helps to gauge the reproductive capacity of animals that are tuned into seasonal breeding, but humans are not seasonal breeders to the best of our knowledge. And so we can't assume that melatonin would be implicated in the reproductive capacity of humans in the same way. So again, there's just no science to make a clear judgment and statement around children delaying puberty by taking melatonin because of what we see in these animal studies. So now I know what you're talking about. Yeah, that has come out on.

So I.

You know, without the, and by animals, this pattern and how melatonin is helping, helping them with that reproductive pattern.

So what I will say too is that for anybody listening, I think it's really important. This is a great time for a pause, Deanna, just to say we have one hour here, which is great, and we can get a lot of information out to educate, but you still have to go back and review what we're talking about because we have all this information at our fingertips now. So the same thing with social media. There was a bit of a scare after that, whatever it was. 30 second clip. But I will say, in my situation with my children, it really helped my family. It helped my family. My. My children are now adults. It didn't do anything that was dangerous. It was like. I personally chose a very small micro dose just to stop the rumination at night. And it helped me too. And I still, to this day. So this is going on at least since 2010, I would say I have been taking. And this is well before I went back to college and bec. You know, in the podcast world and became a practitioner. I was doing it because I personally saw a massive benefit for myself and my family. And I still do it and I still like the microdose. And I do want to get into what you did mention about the sleep aid and the circadian rhythm. So taking a simple supplement like melatonin and thinking it's going to help you sleep all night, I think it's important that we kind of break that down because, you know, I have a lot of rules, personal rules that I follow. I try and turn off all my social media by 8 o' clock and just turn the ringer off. I will only answer texts if they're from my kids or important ones from my family. Otherwise I do my best to hold myself to that because I know that the social media can affect my circadian rhythm. I turn all the lights down. I don't have any of the LED lights going, so I do a lot. So I'd love for you to get into a little bit about how we can support. Obviously there's melatonin component in there, but.

Our circadian rhythms, yes, we definitely need to start there. And in fact, even in the paper that we publish, there is a graphic in it for people. So if they are intrigued by some of this information, but they feel like I need more, I want to read more, or I want my practitioner to read more. If you could put that pra. That publication, that paper in the show notes so that people can access it. We made it open access. So that anybody can read it, it's just online. So one of the first things to think about if we think of a triangle at the base of that triangle, the, the biggest thing we have to do is get our light right. And that also means that we need to get our darkness correct. You know, we need to start with the obvious, you know, our overarching environments. And for many people, they're not getting enough morning light and they're definitely not getting enough evening darkness. And it's darkness at night in the absence of blue light that generates the melatonin from the pineal gland. So when people say, oh my goodness, I, you know, melatonin didn't work and I can't sleep well, or, you know, whatever the thing might be, we have to really start with our environment. Do we have enough light during the day? Do we get enough darkness at night? And I would say, Sandy, that one of the most societally accepted endocrine disruptors and melatonin is a neurohormone in part in conjunction with all these other things. But we can also change a lot of the wiring of our endocrine system through artificial light, this artificial blue enriched light. Now, during the day, as you and I are talking, it's not an issue because we don't have melatonin during the day. We are flatlined on melatonin from the pineal gland during the day, but at night, that's a different story. And people, they even think with well intentions to go to a gym and work out under those fluorescent lights, or they're going grocery shopping under the fluorescent lights. And a lot of that is very disruptive. So what could you do for that? Wearing the art, the blue light blocking glasses, which can be helpful just as a quick fix. So sometimes, you know, we have to travel at night, we have to be on a plane at night, or we're in the car, we see bright headlights. You know, wearing these blue light blocking glasses could actually be beneficial. And there are some studies on them. There's also something that I recommend to people that everybody can do, and this is free, and that is you have to measure your light and darkness. If you don't test it, if you don't measure it, you just simply don't know. Many people think, oh, well, it's dark enough. There is an app that I use. It's a free app, but I'm sure there are many. But the one that I happen to use is called Light Meter Luxury. The Light Meter Lux app measures lux, and lux is a unit of light. So one lux is equal to a candle flame about 3ft or 1 meter away. So what you want is your sleeping room, wherever you're sleeping, to be less than 1 lux. Now I was, I think, yeah, last summer I was at the beach, it was 12 noon, sun was overhead. I took out my light meter lux just to see what are my eyes seeing in the way of lux. And it was 15,000 lux. So we, if we are outside and exposing our eyes to sunlight, we can get thousands of lux. So moving through the day from that full spectrum high intensity light which actually many of us aren't getting because we work indoors, we spend time indoors, we're not outside. Maybe we live in higher latitudes where there isn't a lot of sun. So we are starved for the light as much as we are for the darkness. But measure the light and measure where you're sleeping. And if you can't get it to be dark enough, wearing a sleep mask, you know, that is just one simple strategy. I also think, Sandy, I don't often mention this, but I'm going to mention it to your listeners. I think that this is important because my other teaching separate from melatonin is I talk a lot about detoxification and toxicity. We need to have a clean, non toxic room that we're sleeping in. I mean there are moldy mattresses, there are allergenic, I would say bedding materials that people are sleeping on. So they're going to feel not so good in their bed. Right. They, you know, what are they sleeping in? What is the temperature of the room? Do they have an air filter in the room? You know, this is basic sleep hygiene. But I think since you're asking about, you know, how do we kind of set the stage for healthy sleep and get our circadian rhythm on, on point. We do need to be looking at sleep hygiene just as part of like the base, the foundation of that pyramid.

I couldn't agree with you more. And I will say because I'm in Toronto and right in December, oh my God, there's like stark. So we in our family, we use a happy light and you know, you. Yep. And, and I always tell my daughter who's away at school, I'm like, when you wake up in the morning, blare that light in your face and I'm like, if you're going out at night, don't do it because you're, you know. She thinks it's like a makeup light, right?

Yeah, yeah, you can use it that way. That's true. And you only need it For a couple of minutes. It really doesn't have to be for very long. You just want to set the signal through the eyes to tell the brain that the sleep wake cycle is now changing. Now we're in the wake cycle. Melatonin goes down, cortisol comes up. So cortisol and melatonin are, have kind of this seesaw relationship. And that's why I think some people are grogging in the groggy in the morning. They don't have the bright morning light to turn off the melatonin signal. But when you see that bright light, that again sends a signal through the eyes to let the brain know it's time to wake. So you don't even need a lot, five to 10 minutes of that bright enriched light should be sufficient for most people. And even if it's cloudy outside, even if it's cloudy, just go outside. There has to be some ambient light though. You can't be in darkness. And it's like 6am in the winter and it's dark. That won't work. But as the sun starts to rise a bit, even if it's cloudy, you are still getting full spectrum light. So just note that going out throughout the day in order to get that intermittent light exposure is really important for the eyes, signaling to the brain.

Beautiful.

So that's, that's great that she's using a happy light. Sometimes you've got to create a workaround. You've got to hack your environment because it's not optimal all through the year. So it's, it's just good to do.

I, I do worry about, you know, this seasonal affective disorder. I do worry about like, you know, you could see, it's like a lot of people just get much lower. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In the winter we tend to nest more. We tend, there's nothing. But you know, when it affects our mood and our ability just to, to function as, you know, balanced, happy humans, well then that's when we need to look at other things. I do find that interesting. Can you just about the cortisol and the melatonin, like what is the interplay between the two?

Well, so when we are stressed, we actually pull away from making healthy amounts of melatonin. And the reason for that is through tryptophan. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid. 95% of tryptophan goes into energy production, into producing NAD, which is an energy currency marker within the cells. So most tryptophan goes into energy and when we are stressed, we're actually needing more energy. So stress is a very catabolic process. So we start to take more of that tryptophan down the pathway, the kynurenin pathway, it's called, into making more energy. But if we make, if we kind of drive that pathway too much, it can lead to some neurotoxic substances. It's not good to keep draining that pathway. So essentially then we have less tryptophan, less left over to make serotonin and melatonin. So that's why we become less happy. We don't sleep as well when we're stressed, is because we're tugging on the biochemical chains in one side of that pathway where it's not in balance. So that's, that's something to note there. So somebody who's stressed all the time, I mean, typically their sleep is off. I mean, it's connecting somehow to melatonin, but also to other hormones. And I just want to back up to what you were saying about seasonal affective disorder. I think both you and I recognize that there's a personalized approach to anything that we do. And one of the things about SAD or seasonal affective disorder is that people with lighter eyes, meaning the iris of the eye, the colored part of the eye, so light blue, light green, even light brown, you are. Well, for the most part, these people will be more sensitive to light compared to people with dark irises. That doesn't mean that, you know, you don't need to take any precautions if you have a dark brown iris. But people who have light colored eyes are going to be more susceptible to the effects of artificial light at night. They're going to have greater melatonin suppression. There was one study that showed people with light eyes versus dark eyes had a 17% suppression of endogenous melatonin just from exposure to artificial light at night. Yeah, so there is that. But now here's the flip side of having lighter eyes. People with lighter eyes tend to be less prone to seasonal affective disorder because, again, their eyes are so light sensitive. Right. That's why typically you see people with lighter eyes wearing sunglasses and, you know, saying, oh, I'm. My eyes are sensitive. That doesn't mean that everybody with light colored eyes has that. But you're going to see that a bit more for people with light irises versus darker colored irises. But again, I would still say that we need to tend to our eyes no matter what color eyes we have. But how often do we hear about eye color as it relates to light and dark exposure. Right. The other thing is full moons. Full moons can change your melatonin production. And so there was one study and it was done in a sleep lab. So no interference of moonlight or enriched light outside. But seeing that for four days before and four days after the full moon, that endogenous melatonin had come down significantly and sleep was also disturbed. So there's a lot to be said about the seasonal rhythms, the light in the dark and also even the light in the dark of our eye color and how that interacts with in the environment. And we may need melatonin if we have certain environmental exposures. Maybe we need a little bit more during certain times of the month when we're not sleeping as well. I'm even thinking of menstrual rhythms and women experiencing that, especially in their luteal phase of their cycle. Right. They're not sleeping as well. Progesterone is, is lower. Right. So yeah, I think I just wanted to add that to the mix because many times people lose the context of who, why, and when to do melatonin. And I think that truly there's like a checklist of all these different personalized factors. Everything from your genes to your phenotype to your environment could say whether or not having melatonin would be useful for you. And even your age, age, gender. You know, there's so many different factors that play into it.

That's, that's amazing. And by the way, I am the only brown eyed individual. My children have blue eyes, my husband has blue eyes.

Okay.

So that I find that really interesting. And, and then again, what you said about the moon, you know, I always say this, Deanna, listen, I always say I'm a little bit science, I'm a little bit woo. And I'm. I'm kind of one of these people that's very fluid in my way of thinking. And I'm always like, I think that we would be amiss to think that what goes on in our environment doesn't have an effect on us as humans. Because if you think about it like, you know the story of the Suez Canal and they waited for the full moon, for the tides to go, for that ship that got stuck. Like there's just so many. Yeah. Of these situations. And they talk about how many people have more sleep disturbances around the full moon. I come from a family of old country farmers, so my parents were born in Croatia and my dad will be 88 in April. They still live. Yeah. My mom will be. She will, she's nine years younger. She's going to be 79. And they, you know, when I, when they tell me their stories, like I, it's mind blowing. You know, they lived off their land. There was no light. There was. They, they cooked on, on fire. Like we're talking so old school.

Wow.

And I, I visited as a child. I watched, you know, I watched my grandmother get the chickens for our dinner, if you know what I mean. And you know, the eggs were fresh and, and so what I'm saying is like, you know, I know we live in a modern world and I think we should be grateful for what technology has done for this world, but if we can somehow emulate some of the way they used to live. Sure, there they had their problems too, of course, but, but like a lot of their practices, right, like they didn't think about scrolling social media at night and oh my gosh, that's going to affect my sleep. No, they just, it was dark, they finished farming, they would cook and eat over candlelight and go to bed.

Yeah, that's ideal. And that red light of the candlelight is perfect for the eyes at night. And you still see in indigenous peoples that, who don't have electricity, they mirror their sleep wake cycle based on the light dark patterns. Right. So when it's dark, you go to bed, you can't do very much unless you have a fire burning. But even that is not the kind of light that is disruptive for us. We want that kind of light. So that's why for some people, they even change the color of their screens to a more red hue. Right. And so even smartphones have that function where you can change the screen to a more red color so that you don't have the blue enriched light. But keep in mind too, you know, we still have the electromagnetic fields. You're not exempt from that technology, just if you change the screen to a reddish hue. But you know, I think again, we have to look at where we are. We are not living in the early 1900s anymore. We have, we're just going to have more and more technology coming our way. And so how do we use it to the best of our ability for our health and well being? I think we, we need to find out how to do that. And that's where having a supplement, having. You know, I was just listening to somebody on a separate podcast not too long ago about our soils and how depleted they are and how so much is in the soil. Actually, I was listening to Sadhguru and Sadhguru was talking about his initiative around soil and how we all come from the soil, we all return to the soil. And if we don't have healthy soil, we don't have healthy food. And one orange from the 1950s, we would need like eight oranges to get the nutritional value of that food these days because we don't have the earth reserves of what we need as people. So we need to find workarounds. And that's why so many people need to take supplements, because their nutritional status is impaired in some ways. And if you look at chronic disease, there is most often, if not always a nutrition. A nutrition, I would say, insufficiency and. Or deficiency. Right? So that's why I even look at melatonin. Very similar to vitamin D. To me, they're circadian nutrients. We're living in modern times in enriched blue light. And it's almost like just like we take vitamin D and then we measure our vitamin D through the year. At the end of winter, at the end of summer, we try to track our vitamin D very closely. Because vitamin D, just like I said, cortisol and melatonin are like on a seesaw. Same thing with vitamin D and melatonin. They're like brother and sister. They are both kind of unique because vitamin D is not just a vitamin, it's also working like a hormone. And vitamin D is implicated in immune function. It has a lot of the same properties as melatonin. And in fact, some time ago, there was a study, it was a smaller clinical study, but they basically showed that the women in the study that had poor sleep also had lower status of vitamin D, and that that was connected to melatonin. So melatonin levels were somehow implicated or associated with the vitamin D levels. So I do think we have to be thinking about melatonin as a nutrient. It's a circadian nutrient. It's a different kind of nutrient. And that's why some people you'll see on social media, you know, thinking that they can get melatonin from food, from tart cherries, from pistachios. Have a handful of pistachios before you go to bed. Well, we know we don't want to be eating a lot before we go to bed, right? So we. That would be something that would be contraindicated for most people. So anyway, I just think that there's a lot there. We're living in different times. I really like hearing about your. Your parents and just, you know, how different people have lived. Because we are. We've come a long way. We're living in Very technological times. And we are transitioning. We are trying to accommodate for that transition.

Yes. And so we need to do what makes sense for us in order to. I personally try to emulate as much as I can. I mean, I'd love to sell my house today and go and buy, you know, a couple of acres and have my chickens and, and all that kind of stuff. Maybe someday. That's my dream, Deanna. And grow my own food. It is my dream.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right now I live in a suburb just west of the city of Toronto. It's too convenient. But what I do look at and always remember are some of the stories. And to your point, you know, my mom used to grow apples on their property. And then what they would do to preserve them is they would make a hole in the ground and they would put the apples in there and then they would do some sort of a cover with like hay and all of that. And then they'd have apples all winter long. And now we, we get our apples. So we have an abundant amount of apples in the fall in Toronto. It's like apple season, end of summer, beginning of fall. But now, like, they're stored in those weird refrigerators that have gases that go through in order to preserve them. It's not the same. And so I would argue, and I'm going to say you probably know more about this than I do, but the nutrient availability in that apple is going to change from when it was picked to sitting in a freezer or some sort of a gas going through to preserve it.

Would you agree? I absolutely agree. And in fact, just to get back to the rhythms of nature, so if we think of the 24 hour rhythm of nature, the light and dark cycle, but then we also have the seasonal rhythm, and depending on where we live, we get certain things in our environment given to us from the ground, from nature. Right. So I live in a very similar climate to Toronto. And we get. We have apple tree. We do live on five acres and we have some apple trees and they always emerge with their apples in September. Ish. And I've thought about that. Because if you think of September apples, this association, even when we think of going back to school, there's typically an apple. Right. Why is that? Well, if you think of the transition from summer into fall, there is also this more vulnerability we have with our immune system. Allergies crop up, right? Seasonal allergies. What are apples rich in? They're rich in quercetin, they're rich in polyphenols. That would help our immune system. And Sandy, if you go deeper into looking at the rationale for seasonal foods and why we need to eat in season, apples also contain polyphenols that help to prime our circadian rhythm and help us to make that change through the brain. I know that that may sound like, you know, just, whoa. Most people don't realize that they just hear eat in season, but they don't really know the reasons why. We're starting to see now the science emerging around the hypothalamic junction and how the brain receives these polyphenols as chronobiotics. Very similar to melatonin. Not the same, but, you know, they do prime our systems of time within. So it's really important to eat in season from the aspect of getting the nutrients you need for that respective season. Just what you said as well. You're going to have the highest, well, the highest density you're going to get with that food at that particular time for the most part. And also it just will keep you entrained with nature's rhythm when you do that. And food will be less expensive because it's typically going to be more expensive to get foods that are from far away from different climates. You know, if you go to your neighborhood grocery store, like if I look at mine, if I want to get dragon fruit or papaya out of season, yeah, it's a bit more pricey and they don't really look as robust. They don't look enticing, they don't look ripe. They look like they were prematurely picked and sent over because people had demanded that. But actually that wouldn't be the food that my body would need to eat during winter.

So I'm so glad we went there because you know what I used to do? Oh, my God. I know we're getting a little off topic, but this is important because the closer we can eat to season, eating in season, because I remember learning about this in college, it's just the healthier our bodies will be. And just like what you said, we're going to get the nutrients. Okay, let's set aside the conversation about organic or not organic and GMO and let's. That's a big topic. But eating in season. And I will say that I think that when we think about supporting our bodies in that way, we're going to support a healthier melatonin. But I have to ask you this. Do people in general, if we are all kind of healthier, balanced individuals, do we in general sleep more in the winter than we do in the summer?

Yes, yeah, that's just the natural rhythm. And it makes sense because the light and the dark are guiding us in that direction. We have more darkness in the winter, and people are more lethargic, less active in the winter. They just aren't as energized like they are in the summer to be outside and being more active. So, yes, there, there is that trend within the seasons.

Do we produce more melatonin? Is that one of the reasons why.

We can, if we don't disrupt it through artificial light at night? But most people aren't doing that, right? Most people aren't honoring the dim. It's. It's called dim light melatonin onset. Even as it starts to get dim, our pineal gland gets the signal to start producing melatonin. So we slowly start to rise in melatonin. Then we produce the most amount of melatonin between 2 and 4am but if we're not honoring that curve upward because we're not adhering to darkness at night, then we're not getting enough melatonin to sleep properly, even in times of darkness, when we have more darkness naturally.

Okay, I have to get into a couple of things because I know there's some really interesting research and I don't want to let you go without asking you this. Melatonin and cancer.

Yes.

What does the research say? Because I did review before and by the way, I will say I don't know if I saw this paper on your website, but you guys have a great website with a lot of information on there. Is that for practitioners only or for anybody?

We have two websites. One is symphonynaturalhealth.com and that's for everybody. And then we have symphonynaturalhealthpro.com that's for professionals. So on that site you're going to see different things. And Sandy, what I would say too is on the site you will see the option to actually purchase the melatonin masterclass. So if somebody actually wants to listen to Dr. Paolo La Soni, who is the Italian oncologist who first started using melatonin supplementation with his cancer patients back in the 1990s, I interviewed him and so we actually have. And he's in his probably his late 70s, 80s now, so he's not doing a lot of interviews. So to have that time with him was precious. And I did learn a lot and he has done a lot with cancer. So again, I'm no expert in oncology in that way, but for some people under certain states of health or disease, it may be beneficial to Bring in melatonin in order to help with the mitochondria with cellular health. So with cancer, with we, when we look at Dr. Lasoni's work from the 1990s, he began using high dose melatonin supplementation while certain types of patients were undergoing chemotherapy. So he wouldn't use high amounts for an extended time, but during the treatment phase. And what he came to was that basically the melatonin helped the chemotherapy to work better and help to protect the normal healthy cells. So it did the best of what you wanted it to do. So he has a whole way that he's done that. And even from his studies, you don't see that you change endogenous or naturally occurring melatonin. Right. There was no real report of that. I think that's one of the bigger questions that people have. If I take melatonin, do I stop my body from making melatonin first and foremost as we get older? So you're in your 50s, I'm in my 50s. As you get older, in your 50s, you're making about 10% of what you had as an adolescent. So children have, if you look at the curve of melatonin from the age, I would say of about 3 months of age to 12 months of age, an infant is increasing in their own endogenous production of melatonin. And that'll happen faster if the infant is nursed by a woman, especially at night, so that her melatonin comes through breast milk and then helps to fortify the infant's microbiome and to kind of help the infant with colic or any other kind of sleep disruption. So from that point on, a child will start to increase in their melatonin, just like you and I talked about a little bit with puberty. It starts to come down a bit and then we start the roller coaster slide through life. So by the time we're in our 50s, we're making 10% of what we were making at that point of adolescence. So yes, if we're thinking of, oh my gosh, we're stopping our body's production of, of melatonin, you pretty much have stopped your body's production of melatonin.

It's already happening.

Through middle age. And not only that, there have been prospective studies. Prospective just means that the researchers set out to actually answer that question rather than just kind of look at what appeared in the, the research after the fact. Some prospective studies have actually not shown that endogenous production of melatonin was impacted by taking exogenous melatonin. Now I'm going to give a little bit of a, I would say some context or even a disclaimer to that. When we're talking about the amount of melatonin we're taking, I'm talking about taking physiologic doses of melatonin, meaning that if we're both in our 50s and we want to replenish what we had in middle age, we're looking at about 0.3 milligrams to kind of help and fill the gap of what we lost through age and just to be biologically appropriate for our time of life. So between.03 and 0.9 milligrams, you know, there are studies with 0.3 milligrams showing benefit for sleep and other things. Now when people start to think, oh, all these studies on melatonin, if a little is good, then more is better. But then what ends up happening when these people start taking double digit, triple digit amounts of melatonin? I, I don't think we know long term what the effects of that would be. Right. Because that's not physiological, that's pharmacological, that is supraphysiological. And even though Dr. Lasoni used that in his cancer patients, he used that for a very short duration. Right. So during the chemotherapy time is my understanding from the research and after interviewing him. So what could happen if we are taking too much melatonin is potentially we could saturate the receptors and then maybe we just don't see the signal as well. Or, you know, maybe it's just, it's to the point that, you know, it's kind of like you have to pull back and then the cell has to see it again. So that's why having a physiologic dose I think is more reliable and more safe and more consistent with what we see in the science out there on a number of different indications.

I'm glad you mentioned that because like I said, I'd been, I, I called it microdosing before it was even micro. Like that term wasn't even used. I'm like, I'm microdosing.

That was very astute of you. Yeah.

And it was not intentional. But I'm like, because I, back then, I, I, and this is going back a long time and I still, I've gone through periods where I, I don't take melatonin and it doesn't affect my sleep. My kids as well, they who are adults now, I think a lot of the time, most of the time, because my daughter won't Take anything that I tell her she needs to take. So she's not taking melatonin. She sleeps very well. So this is from our experience of very small doses of 0.25 to 0.5 as the maximum. And even when I was. I was in Europe last fall, I found it to be beyond incredibly helpful to get myself on that time zone so quickly.

Yeah.

And, you know, I would use it, you know, was it. I can't. I. I'm so backwards, you know, Like, I think there was a time where I was like, waking up at 3 o' clock in the morning and thinking it was time to wake up. And so I would take a tiny little amount of melatonin, like a quarter of a milligram. I would fall back asleep, and then I was like, good within, like a day. It was amazing how fast it worked for me. So I'm glad that you mentioned that about the. Whether that signal gets lost if you take melatonin for a long period of time. So it's really more about the dose.

I think it's about the dose and I think it's also about the format. You know, 99% of melatonin on the market is synthetically derived from petrochemicals of various types. So there is the potential to introduce contaminants. The other thing that I've seen with melatonin supplements is that there are other things added to the melatonin supplement like other herbs. And many people don't realize this, but those herbs may impact the metabolism of melatonin. It may inhibit or accelerate the metabolism of melatonin. So when you put, you know, in the supplement world, we call that mixology, you put in a lot of different things because you think that, well, this study showed this on this plant, this study showed this on melatonin. So they must work best together. But that's not always the case. Sometimes you can have an antagonistic effect. So sometimes the melatonin supplement isn't working in the same way because of things that would go against each other in the formula. And this is what would bring us to erbatonin, truly, because erbatonin is a plant melatonin that is directly concentrated from the plants, and that would be alfalfa, rice and chlorella. And what's really interesting is that there was a study comparing erbatonin against synthetic melatonin side by side. And this was published in a journal called molecules back in 2021. And what these researchers showed was that the plant melatonin outperformed synthetic Melatonin in every cellular assay. So it was more than six times greater in its anti inflammatory effects. It helped with free radical scavenging by up to 470%. They even did a skin cell model and they found that the Erbatonin could potentiate the reduction of a lot of these free radicals by 100%. So there's something to be said from having a chemical derived form of melatonin which just on its own, you know, just being that kind of naked molecule, that's, that's fine. But there could be other things that come along with that that make it not work as well. Whereas with the erbatonin being from plants and not even an extract, it is very simply the cell matrix of plants. Three different types put together standardized to melatonin and it has been shown to be even more effective. So you could be taking the 0.3 milligram of erbatonin, but yet getting 6 times greater anti inflammatory effects, up to 5 times greater antioxidant effects. Just by nature of the other things that are in the plant. Naturally, we're not adding in a human way other things and then putting it together with the melatonin, it's just whatever is in the plant, like chlorophyll, lutein, zeaxanthin, you know, if you look at Erbatonin up close, you'll see it's green. So it's actually plant material. But it's been standardized to melatonin. So you know exactly how much melatonin you're getting. But it's amplified in its response because of the other adjunctive things that are coming along for the ride.

That's amazing. I've used it and it is available in Canada because, well, but I am a practitioner, so I have a practitioner account. And for those of you who are listening, chlorella is very powerful even as a, a lot of people take it to detoxify, right?

Yes. So and alfalfa, actually alfalfa is extremely nutrient dense, very high in beta carotene. Now the amount that we have in the capsule of all of these vitamins and different phytonutrients aren't going to be appreciable. Right. It's just smaller amounts that are coming along. But still, yes, alfalfa, chlorella, heavy hitters in terms of detoxification, ph, balancing, just even supplying nutrients now.

And, and the thing I like is that it comes in two doses, right? 0.3. And then what's the other one?

The other one is 3 milligrams and that would be for more of, let's just say jet lag like you were describing, or more acute uses where you need a bit of a higher dose. And sometimes, you know, there are sleep protocols where you can use both a low dose and a high dose of melatonin to help with things like shift work or, you know, again, thinking of jet lag too, there's a way to use both of those doses even.

And I had another question. Darn it, what was it?

I can't remember, but it was, it was at the top of my head and now it's gone. But in terms of. So is there anything that people, if they can't get herbatonin or erbatonin, is there something that they need to look out for in their melatonin? Like, I mean, are there? You know, because you mentioned that it could be synthesized with other molecule. Like that's kind of scary to think about it. And I know that in some countries melatonin is not available unless you have a prescription, like in Europe.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. And I don't know if that degree of caution is needed for melatonin as, as, as I see it, just because of all of the many benefits that people could be getting. Yeah. But maybe, you know, if we look at the processing, I do think that that's important because there are at least two published papers looking at the risk of contaminants and synthetically produce melatonin. So anything from like tryptamine derivatives or different serotonin derivatives and thalamide derivatives. So you just have to know your source. So whoever you're getting melatonin from, I think it's really important to ask them. Did you have third party testing where you actually looked at contaminants that could enter into the process? Did you look at heavy metals? I mean, there is, you know, basically good manufacturing practices that they need to be adherent to. The other thing is, when I look at gummies, we didn't talk about it until now, but melatonin gummies, which have become so popular, you know, I, I think of gummies as a matrix. Right. It's kind of a, a water soluble matrix. There can be a lot of interactions. You could have greater degradation of certain compounds, certain breakdown of certain compounds in that matrix. Do we know and does your manufacturer know about the shelf life of melatonin in that gummy? And plus, you know, just getting all that sugar right before bedtime, that sticking to the teeth idea, right before bed, I just don't know. If that's a great idea. I had a client years ago where she had a lot of limitations on her eating and what she could have. And she ended up doing gummies, like the whole day through as a way of just getting nutrition and food. And when I tallied up all of the sugar that she was getting, it was enormous. It was like teaspoonfuls of sugar. So I just think that we need to look at the format that we're taking it in, the purity of the compound. And my preference, Sandy, has always just been to go with plants, plant compounds, because, you know, it's intriguing that the plants around us are also making melatonin. They don't have a pineal gland. They use it in a different way. But to me, that feels like a safer source than something that is synthesized or that comes from animal pineal glands, which you don't tend to see a lot of anymore because that's too expensive. And it's very inexpensive just to make it from various chemical processing using these different chemicals. Right. Different petrochemicals. So just ask your manufacturer all of the questions. Are they cgmp? Did they test the melatonin? What about label claim? I think there was a study in Canada that was published basically showing that label claim varied significantly, being under claim as well as over claim by several hundreds of percent. I think 476% or something on that order. But yeah, so we have to think about specifically. Yeah, yeah, that was a study where they took products. I thought it was in Canada. And they looked at the actual amount versus what they were claiming on label and found that there was a discrepancy. So, yeah, I think just know your company, know the source, because you could be paying a lot of money for a supplement that is actually not giving you what you need.

But yeah, or too much.

Yes, in either direction. Right. But yeah, that, that maybe it was just the. The research was done in Canada. But yeah, I mean, basically they looked at a number of supplements, like something on the order of 30 different supplements, and finding a wide range of. Of the melatonin content.

Interesting. Now, I have to ask this question. Are there any contraindications for someone to take melatonin? Like, is there anybody who really needs to be more careful?

Well, again, you have to look at the dose and what is the dose of melatonin they're taking? So that's the first contraindication that, you know, sticking with a physiologic rather than than a pharmacologic dose. For the most part, melatonin Is safe as long as it's taken within its physiologic dose. Higher doses may. It may. You know, there could be some issues there, especially from an immune system perspective. So melatonin, because it can stimulate the immune system and have an effect on the immune system in higher amounts, what you could see is some changes in immune activity. And so thinking about people with autoimmune conditions or people on immunosuppressants taking high doses of melatonin, the other thing to be thinking about is because melatonin works in so many ways through the mitochondria, as an antioxidant, as an anti inflammatory, it could actually improve certain things like blood pressure or inflammation or even blood sugar. So what could happen is you might need less of certain medications. So if you aren't aware of that and you're taking melatonin and your blood pressure starts to go down, you may have to adjust your blood pressure medication with your doctor so that you don't have low blood pressure. And there could be some interactions. Right? I mean, melatonin being that it's taken at night, I think it's more or less removed from certain medications. But there would have to be caution with things like SSRIs or that would be implicated in serotonin, because serotonin is connected to melatonin. So I think that those are the basic ones. But for the most part, melatonin is. Is quite safe when it's used in the doses that have been studied and that are physiological.

Perfect. And you know, you mentioned the immune system. I wonder, like in the research about melatonin and cancer, is that why they've. They saw that it actually helped some cancer patients because of that?

I think there are multiple. I think, yeah. I short answer is yes, possibly and probably other mechanisms of action. If you think of cancer, cancer is a metabolic disease. And much of that dysfunction is through the mitochondria. The highest amount of melatonin in the cell is actually made in the mitochondria. So it's a mitoprotective, it helps with metabolism, all of those free radicals that are produced with age and with overeating. Right. We're protecting the cell from a lot of that free radical spray from melatonin. So if cancer is a metabolic disease, and this is why for people on a ketogenic diet, they're not using the mitochondria is much. Right. So a high carbohydrate diet is shuttling a lot of this through, causing a lot of free radical activity. So that's why typically with cancers of various types, we see that there's a connection to insulin resistance, certain ways of eating. And so I think it has to do with the mitochondria first and foremost and its mechanism of action. There's. It's a very important mitochondrial regulator. Right. The second thing is, I think of its role as an antioxidant in protecting the body. And what's unique is that melatonin is both fat soluble and water soluble. So it can go to a lot of different places of the body. And one molecule of melatonin can quench up to 10 free radicals, whereas something like vitamin C is able to quench something on the order of one to two free radicals in a water solution. Right. So in, in the blood, not necessarily like in the brain or the fatty tissues of the body. So I think melatonin as it relates to mechanisms in relationship to cancer is probably working on multiple mechanisms. But my prediction is primarily through the mitochondria.

I just find that so interesting. I. I find it like all the research. I mean, we couldn't even touch on all of it. We're now at over an hour and I know you and I both have calls soon, so please tell us where we can find you.

Sure. You know, the best place is symphony natural health.com if you go on symphonynaturalhealth.com you're going to see so many different resources. And if you're a practitioner, we actually have a practitioner toolkit that we built up around melatonin. So we have a checklist which is a melatonin insufficiency assessment. We even have a darkness deficiency questionnaire that you can take just to see if you're truly deficient in darkness. So there's a lot there, a lot of blogs, a lot of different people that we've had come our way through the medical team to share their expertise. So I would say symphonynaturalhealth.com would be the place to go.

Perfect. And I am definitely going to look for your interview with Dr. Paolo Lasoni.

Yes, yes, definitely do that. I mean, the man is just, he's done so much with melatonin. He has dozens of studies if you look on PubMed. And he's also a very spiritual guy. So he has a lot of philosophical orientations into melatonin. And I would even concur with him that melatonin in so many ways is like a molecule of consciousness. It's got a lot of different layers underneath it as it relates to dream states and brain activity. So maybe you'll have me back. We can talk about that one.

Oh, I think we'll have to. Because you know what? Like I, you know, you and I just met, but most people know that I don't believe that we can optimize our wellness or our happiness or our longevity unless we have some sort of a spiritual connection that resonates with us. So I love that. And yes, we should definitely do that. And I just want to thank you so much. This has been such a great conversation. I could have kept going with you for sure.

I know. I was sensing that as well, and I'm sorry it has come to a close. I think that there's so much there on melatonin and I hope that people ask the right questions, check in with their providers or practitioners and continue to read the material. We have a lot of resources for you, so thanks, Sandy. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you.

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