"Melatonin Is The Next Vitamin D" Dr. Deanna Minich Interview (Part 1)

Who would ever think that light and darkness connects to bone health? But ultimately it does. One of the first things that people notice with melatonin insufficiency is that they have fatigue, unexplained fatigue. So to me, melatonin is like the mother compound that can lead to a lot of different things within the body. Melatonin is everywhere. It's in plants, it's in animals, it's in our skin, it's in our immune system. Within the human body, it's ubiquitous. So if you're all in this community because you're watching your bone health, and I'm part of that community as well, being a post menopausal woman, you want to be thinking about melatonin.

So what if I told you that melatonin, a hormone we usually associate with sleep, could actually play a major role in aging well and protecting our bones as we get older? Hi, I'm Laura Pisorno, the author of Healthy Bones, Healthy youy and Bone Health Expert for the Algaecal Community. And today, on behalf of Algaecal, I am really excited to get to introduce you to Dr. Deanna Minick, one of the major leaders and educators in functional medicine. A nutrition scientist, Dr. Minick lectures at medical conferences worldwide. She's the author of more than 50 scientific publications, has written six best selling books for consumers, and has created a number of innovative wellness programs including her Food and Spirit certification for clinicians and her 21 day detox and 21 day rain diet programs to optimize everyone's energy and vitality. One of her latest papers, which is free full access on PubMed if you'd like to read it later and I'll post a link, is titled Is Melatonin the Next Vitamin D? A Review of Emerging Clinical Uses, Safety and Dietary Supplements. Deanna's cutting edge understanding of the importance of melatonin for our health, including the health of our bones, will be the primary focus of our interview today. So Dr. Minnick, it is such a pleasure to have you with us today. Can you tell us what led you to become interested in nutrition and create your eating the rainbow approach to healthy living?

Sure, Lara. First of all, thank you so much for your enthusiasm for this topic and for having me as a guest. I know that we've been trying to do this for some time, so I'm really glad that it's finally happening. Great to be here with the community. So how did I come to have an interest in nutrition? I would say that it was my mother. So back in the 1970s when I was growing up, my mother was one of those health nuts. We called them health nuts back then, but now they are trendy. And, you know, health is all the rage, right? This is what we want to know about. So my mother had us eating brown bread instead of white bread sandwiches. It was all about getting the rainbow of colors. And at first, I was rejecting this because as a child, I didn't really want to be different from my peers. But then later in life, as I was thinking about going to medical school school, I soon came to realize that I was more interested in preventative aspects of nutrition. And so I went on for my master's degree. I then went on for my PhD in medical science. And during my master's degree, I did do some work in a group of compounds called the carotenoids. I did that at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And so I studied things like lycopene, beta carotene. We looked at oxidative stress. So I would say that that was my first. Well, actually my second connection to eating the rainbow, and then my third and final connection to eating the Rainbow was through Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who I worked with for over a decade. And for those of you who don't know who Dr. Bland is, he is the father of functional medicine, as we, I would say, endearingly call him. And so he was all about looking at phytonutrients, which we know Dr. Pizzorno does as well. So looking at these phytonutrients or phytochemicals, and see. Seeing that they had a lot of potential to change health, and we were learning much more about them in the 21st century. So that's how I got there.

So I'm wondering what sparked your interest in melatonin.

You know, I have to be honest, I knew nothing about melatonin about five years ago, other than it was a neurotransmitter that was connected to the pineal gland. But since I had such a focus on phytonutrients, to me, it was. It felt like it was many steps removed from my research. But then as we moved into looking at the pandemic and people were exploring immune agents for their health, I thought it was very intriguing that melatonin kept coming up along with vitamin C and zinc and vitamin D. And that caused me to start to look into melatonin. And then I began to work with a company called Symphony Natural Health, who had a plant, melatonin, which was music to my ears because my research had all been in plants. So that's how I came to melatonin, learning about it, just by way of learning about the immune system and all of the many ways that melatonin is implicated in immunity and how it has a relationship with vitamin D. So, you.

Know, some of our audience may know very little about melatonin. So can we start with just a few basics? First of all, can you explain a little bit more, you know, what is melatonin? And very to someone who isn't a scientist.

Yes, yes, yes, of course. It's always good to start there. And I think what would be best is in this case, I'm going to show you a couple of slides because I think that a graphic, as Laura and I both know, we like images. And sometimes just seeing one image can be very powerful. So what is melatonin? Let me show you on my screen. Melatonin, its chemical name, if you look at the far left here is 5 acetyl, 5 methoxytryptamine. Now you don't have to remember that melatonin was discovered back in 1958 by a Yale trained dermatologist. In fact, Dr. Aaron Lerner, who was this dermatologist, was looking for something to lighten the skin. And he had looked at some of the research back in the early 1900s showing that in frogs, that the pineal gland of animals, when put into a vat of frogs had lightened their skin. He had looked into a little bit more of this molecule. Well, as it turns out, melatonin doesn't have anything to do with skin lightening, but it was named as mela, which would refer to the skin and tonin because chemically it looks very similar to serotonin. And what we later learned was that melatonin is everywhere. It's in plants, it's in animals, it's in our skin, it's in our immune system. And the precursor of melatonin is actually an amino acid, a building block of protein. And that building block is tryptophan. But now, just to go back to the plant connection, what we see in the literature, in the scientific literature, and this is just kind of one of those fun facts, is that melatonin has been used in agriculture as a growth factor for plants. And in fact, melatonin can help to increase the production of phytochemicals within plants, even things like glutathione and glucosinolates. So to me, melatonin is like in many ways like the mother compound or actually molecule. It's a molecule that can lead to a lot of different things. Within, within the body. I, I just show this other slide because if we think about melatonin widely, you know, it's everywhere. It's in many different life forms. Even if they don't have a pineal gland like plants don't have a brain, they don't have a pineal gland like humans do. But yet melatonin is still found within plants, within the human body, it's ubiquitous. So we find it in the fat soluble tissues like the brain and the skin. We find it in the water soluble tissues as well. So it is in the blood, it is in urine, but it's even in breast milk. And what's really interesting, this is another one of those little fun facts. This is why women who are nursing infants, that nursing in the evening hours will impart some, some of the mother's melatonin to the infant, which could potentially help with things like colic and sleep. And you don't find melatonin as an additive to infant formula. So I just think that that's kind of interesting. So it's found throughout the body, and as we opened up with our talk today, it is found throughout the immune system. But just for our purposes, before we get to the next question, I just want to make one distinction that's really important and it's at the bottom of this slide. When we think of melatonin in the human body, many people are referring to pineal melatonin. The pineal gland is a small gland in the brain that is signaling the circadian rhythm throughout the body. Melatonin is produced in the pineal gland as a response to darkness in order to better cycle our sleep and wake rhythm sleep. So that's the one that we're going to focus on. But that said, being that melatonin is throughout the body, the other big producer of melatonin is the gut. And I think that through the gut we will start to have that conversation about bone. So I'll stop there. But that gives us a little bit of a primer on melatonin.

Really interesting. Thank you. Okay, so, you know, back to sleep. I think most of our audience will think of melatonin in relation to sleep. Can you tell us a little bit about why, you know, how melatonin affects sleep for us beneficially?

Yes. So, and I'm going to pull this, this figure up because this is basically how sleep happens. And what I would say, Lara, is that it's, it's more about, I would say, circadian rhythm. Many people pigeonhole melatonin as the sleep hormone, but Actually, it's the circadian rhythm modulator. And by way of tuning the circadian rhythm, it helps us with sleep. So what happens is we have the sun during the day, and that connects to vitamin D and many other signals. And in fact, having bright morning light helps to signal melatonin synthesis at night for proper sleep that evening. But in response to the eye picking up the lack of blue light at night, what ends up happening is that that signal goes from certain cells within the retina to this cluster of neurons referred to as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which eventually then signals the pineal gland to produce melatonin. And when that is happening, that is in response to dim light and ultimately darkness. This is telling the body that it's time to synchronize are clocks all throughout the body. And so what melatonin does is it opens the gate of sleep. Now, that's really important because people say, oh, I took melatonin and then I woke up at night. Well, melatonin is not really about staying asleep. It's about getting to sleep. And one of the other ways that it does that, other than signaling the brain through darkness, is it's a hypothermic agent, meaning that it helps to reduce our core body temperature. And when we get that signal and our body temperature is diminishing a bit, that sends the signal that we are also priming the body for sleep. So, Lara, when you asked me about, how does melatonin relate to sleep? It does so through the darkness, the perception of darkness. And it also does that through the perception of temperature. And so temperature is a big deal when it comes to sleep. And this is why menopausal, and I would say perimenopausal women have an issue with sleep is because they have thermoregulatory issues that prevent them from having proper sleep. And just to show you, too, I think that this is important as it relates to sleep, but so much more. This is why there's that little voice inside me that just kind of gets kind of emotional when I hear that people say that melatonin is only for sleep. Because when you start to look at the breadth of research on melatonin, as you know, I know that you've already looked very deeply into this. It does so much more. So this slide is showing you a little bit of a glimmer of some of the different functions in the body. And so one of the things that happens when we sleep is that the brain gets a chance to detoxify. And in fact, that's probably for me, one of the most exciting functions of melatonin, that melatonin seems to play a role in protecting the nerve cells and encouraging the flow of toxins, things like amyloid proteins or tau proteins, things that need waste products from the brain, that need to move from the brain into the glymphatic fluid. And that is simply a very specialized lymphatic fluid around the glial cells and then into the lymph, and then we excrete. But we can't do that during the day because our brain is active. So as it turns out, melatonin is really instrumental in that sleep phase of releasing the brain from a lot of these toxins that just accumulate from metabolism.

So because of all these options, would you say that melatonin helps improve sleep quality as well as just, you know, opening the gates for sleep?

Yes, in theory. So here's what I have seen happen just through people, and listening to people from a clinical perspective, sometimes when they start melatonin, it's a little bit of a bumpy ride. And that could be because the body is starting to acclimate, that you are now correctly synchronizing with circadian rhythm. And sometimes that isn't just as easy as taking a melatonin supplement. What we need to do is really clear the brain, kind of move into that synchronous rhythm. But over time, what you tend to see is that for people, especially like you, Lara, who, you know, you've been taking melatonin for a long time, so your body has synchronized to sleep. But as we get older, what ends up happening? And now this is what you're seeing here, is how much melatonin our pineal gland produces over the life cycle. So here we have the amount of melatonin, we have age. And as you can see here in early childhood, up until about puberty, we have the most melatonin from the pineal gland that our body is most likely ever going to make. Which is why I'm not a huge advocate of children taking all of these melatonin gummies or melatonin supplements in order to help with sleep. I think we need to look more at sleep hygiene in children. Now, that said, as we get older, we began this very slippery decline into lower amounts of melatonin produced from the pineal gland. Now, why is that? Well, it's like many other hormones, right? It's like estrogen, it's like progesterone, testosterone, cortisol. It's kind of a bumpy flux as well. But as we can See, as we move into the 50s and on to the 60s, we have perhaps less than 10% of what we produced when we were in our childhood. So if you look at the literature, what you can start to see is that there may be a connection here between endogenous melatonin production, which lowers with age, and the increased rates of things like neurodegenerative diseases. But since this is an audience that's also very interested in bone health, even things like osteopenia, osteoporosis, and looking at all of these different diseases that start to crop up with advanced age. And if you think of sleep as we get older, what happens? Sleep is not so smooth anymore. We might have more issues with early morning wake ups. And one of the things I hear a lot about from people is that they wake up between 2 and 4 in the morning. Have you heard that, Lara? In terms of just.

Yeah, I do it occasionally, especially if I'm really stressed. My brain won't quiet down.

Yes. And let me show you why that might be the case. It might be low blood sugar, it could be stress. But what we see is that as it becomes dim outside, our levels of melatonin start to rise. Now this at the bottom here is looking at the, the daily 24 hour cycle. So as it gets dim outside, let's just say it's 6pm, we start to produce certain amounts of melatonin, but then it peaks at about 2 to 4am so this is a study showing that at certain time points that were measured in this particular study. So 2am, 8am, 2pm, 8pm this was in men and women, they showed that melatonin was the highest at 2am well, melatonin is not the only thing that's peaking at 2am for us. We have superoxide dismutase, we have catalase, we have glutathione reductase, and we have glutathione. All of them are peaking at 2am, at least in this study. So the takeaway here is that there might be a lot of, I would say, activity in the way of detoxification or even antioxidant repair, defense enzyme systems. And so if somebody has stress or they have some degree of toxin load, they may actually have some issues with this, this waking up. We also know that melatonin can alter some of the sleep cycles and phases, especially when we look at the phases relating to dreams. And so some people say, oh, I get nightmares if I take melatonin. Well, this might be because our dreaming might be a little Bit more enhanced. Right. And this, you could say, could actually be a good thing, because through dreams, we can actually process many things psychologically. Right. So it seems to open the gate, in my perspective, not just the gate of sleep, but also the gate of the conscious and subconscious states a bit. So that's what I would say about helping with sleep quality. We might need to look at our age, we might need to look at our sleep hygiene practices, we might need to see if we have a darkness deficiency and we just don't have adequate amounts of dark in order to allow our pineal gland to produce sufficient melatonin.

If someone's going to take melatonin to support sleep, when's the best time to.

Do that, the best time to take it? If we just give a general guideline, it would be about 40 to 60 minutes before bedtime. Now, that's just for the average person, not personalizing to that individual. Melatonin is metabolized by a specific enzyme in the body, and some people are fast metabolizers and other people are slow metabolizers. So I'll give you an example. Like my husband Mark, I learned this later on, that he is a slow metabolizer of melatonin. So if he were to take melatonin 40 to 60 minutes before bedtime, he would wake up a little bit groggy because his body is not metabolizing the melatonin in a way that kind of synchronizes with his sleep cycle. So for somebody like him, he needs to take melatonin two to three hours before bedtime to synchronize better with his sleep. And it's very similar to caffeine, Lara. So caffeine and melatonin are metabolized by the same enzyme system, which is cytochrome one, a two. And so if somebody has difficulty in tolerating caffeine or caffeinated beverages, coffee, black tea, chances are they might be a slow metabolizer of melatonin as well. So just a general guideline would be to possibly take melatonin a little bit further out from their bedtime so that they metabolize it correctly and in synchronicity with their sleep pattern.

Good advice. So another reason that I know a lot of people have relied on melatonin is for jet lag.

Yes.

Do you think it's helpful for that? Can you tell us a little about that?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, there are sleep protocols for use in jet lag. And in fact, I would say that that was one of the more emergent uses of melatonin, supplementally, is that people would start to take it for jet lag in order to give this signal to synchronize that sleep wake cycle in a different time zone. So as part of best practices for that, you know, we'll, we'll talk about dose, but typically a higher dose of melatonin would be required so that the body is seeing that signal, that circadian signal. And to do that three days before the onset of travel and then when you're actually at your destination. So as an example, if I was going from Seattle to Stockholm, I'd want to take a higher dose of melatonin, like 3 milligrams, three days before I would travel, just so that my body is getting, getting used to seeing that signal at a higher dose. And then when I'm traveling, when I actually arrive in Stockholm, I would take it at bedtime, and then I would take it for about three days thereafter just to, you know, the way I see it is it kind of smooths out the rough edges of jet lag. It helps you to have better quality sleep and helps you to get to sleep better and easier at your destination.

Yes, I wish I had known this before Joe and I went to Iceland and London a few months ago because I could not sleep. Took me several weeks to get back. Yeah, if I'd known this, I would have done a lot better. What about circadian rhythm and sleep disturbances associated with shift work? Like, I know I have a personal interest in this because my son is an emergency medicine doctor and he very often has overnight shifts, you know, like at least several times a month. And I'm wondering how he can use melatonin to help mitigate the damage that that causes.

Absolutely. I think that that is a big issue for so many different people. Shift work syndrome, as it is referred to. And in fact, they. There's even this newer language in the literature called circadian syndrome. So being when we are misaligned with the circadian rhythm of day, night, as our body is seeing it through our eyes, that we can develop mood disturbance, sleep disturbance, weight issues, inflammation. So can somebody with shift work actually fare quite well if they take melatonin? Yes. And just like there are protocols for jet lag, there are also protocols for helping people with shift work. And so the idea is to prime that circadian signal again, much like jet lag, to take that higher dose melatonin closer into bedtime of when you actually need to sleep. And then that can override any kind of issue with the pineal glands seeing light or darkness. But there is a way to do that. And the other thing that's important with shift work and jet lag is that both of them, because there can be increased inflammation, increased oxidative stress, especially with flying and all of the radiation and the other issues that people experience, that melatonin is not only helping with the signal of sleep, but it's also helping with the antioxidant aspects that would be required in both shift work and in jet lag. But the short answer here is that yes. And in fact, I can supply you with very specific clinical guidelines, if you like, these documents for your audience. We had the medical team and we have a sleep expert who put this together. And so it's very detailed and so it gives specific instructions and people can check this out with their health practitioner. Right. This is not to take the place of one's health care provider's advice, but may inform them as to a protocol for jet lag and for shift work with using supplemental melatonin. So I can provide.

That would be incredibly helpful. So you talked about this just a little bit already, but what about all the sleep disturbances that occur with perimenopause and menopausal transition? Can melatonin help with this?

Yes. Short answer is yes. And again, the reason why is more than it just opening up the sleep gate and also more than it just helping with temperature regulation. I want to show you a slide because this will explain how it could help in menopause. I think how does something work? Because if I know how something works, I know how to apply it clinically. The way that I do think we are helping with women going through the menopausal transition is in at least two ways. One of the ways is that because melatonin is both fat soluble and water soluble, it has a lot of capacity to work very effectively in many different body compartments. And as a woman goes through menopause that transition, her body in the absence of estradiol, is very susceptible to immune dysregulation, to increased inflammation, to being compromised in oxidative stress. Like she has more of these things, she has less protect habilites. So when melatonin is metabolized by specific enzymes in the body, it creates a whole host of different metabolites. And even those habilites have the potential to scoop up free radicals. So one molecule of melatonin can scavenge up to 10 free radicals. Now, when you look at vitamin C, it's not to diminish the importance of vitamin C, but on average vitamin C Can scavenge between one to two free radicals. And as you can see here, it's twice as effective as vitamin E. And vitamin E is very specific to fat soluble tissues. So I find it very exciting. This ties into the mitochondria. This is when people think of the M for melatonin, they often think of the M of mitochondria. And that is because melatonin within the cell is primarily produced and working at the level of the mitochondria, and primarily in this way of scavenging a lot of these free radicals, cleaning up the damage of metabolism, helping with oxidative stress, helping with glutathione production. So this is unique. This is why melatonin is not just a sleep hormone. It's actually a neurotransmitter hormone in the context of sleep. But then it flexes over to a lot of different functions, which, as we start to circle into our conversation on bone, want to keep this in mind because this is in part how it is working in bone, is through its antioxidant activities. Yeah.

One of the things I repeat to the point of probably making people nauseous is that anything that increases your inflammation chronically is going to activate the cells that break down bone osteoclasts. And so we really need to look at all sources of chronic inflammation in the body. And it appears that melatonin is an incredibly helpful ally.

It is. And there are some experts out there on bone health and melatonin who have made that their life's work. And I've had the opportunity to meet one of them. His name is Dr. Daniel Cardinali. He is in Argentina. You may have heard him on the melatonin masterclass, but we didn't get into bone as much. But one of his areas of research is on bone health. And he talks exactly about what you're. You're stating right there. And I think the reason why certain researchers have used melatonin for bone health is because it is such a heavy hitter. It's not just acting as an antioxidant in fat and water soluble tissues, but it's priming the antioxidant response throughout the body. And it is again, shepherding things like glutathione production. And, you know, it's so interesting because so many people say, well, glutathione, that's like the master antioxidant. But oftentimes I'll say to those people, but did you know that melatonin is actually priming glutathione?

So that's really Interesting. Yes, I think. Well, we'll get into that in a little bit. Yes. And I know melatonin actually has beneficial effects on bone building cells, osteoblasts, and also lessens, helps lessen the activity of osteoclasts, probably largely by its effects on glutathione and its antioxidant effects.

Yeah, absolutely.

So let's talk a little bit. Let's get dark here. Talk a little bit about darkness. The amount of darkness that our bodies need for health beyond what we need for sleep has become the focus of a lot of research recently. Can you tell us a little bit about this emerging concept of darkness deficiency?

Yes, and for that reason, I'll just bring up this slide, which is actually in the paper that we wrote. So I kind of see vitamin D and melatonin as two sides of the same coin. Vitamin D is the biological light sensor, which we all know about. Right. I think that for many years, people have recognized that, oh, they're not getting enough UV light to help to create the active form of vitamin D in the skin. And there's been a lot of information around sunlight deficiency and vitamin D. So people have been supplementing with vitamin D. We also know that vitamin D is more than a vitamin. It's actually it works like a hormone. So our cells, certain cells in the body, have receptors for vitamin D. Much like with melatonin, there are receptors on certain cells for melatonin, so they seem to share certain functions. And I would say that melatonin is more on the side of darkness. It's a dark sensor. And when I think of that specifically, you know, again, we need darkness in order to make pineal melatonin. So one of the things that can lead to accelerated aging is when we're not getting enough darkness. And this is again where I have a lot of concerns about children being exposed to artificial light at night. They're on their devices, they're on their computers, they're at school sporting events with electric light. You know, many people think going to the gym late at night, but then they're exercising under fluorescent lights, this bright blue enriched light, which during the day is not problematic, but at night it stops the synthesis of melatonin. So we can actually be prematurely aging ourselves through that exposure to artificial blue light at night. This is one of my favorite slides to show because I do a lot of teaching on detoxification. And one of the, I would say the most pervasive toxins that is now rampant over the planet is artificial light at night. And I would Say it's the most societally overlooked endocrine disruptor. It's disrupting the pineal gland and its production of melatonin. If we disrupt melatonin, we start to disrupt cortisol and the glucocorticoids. And we know that cortisol has a direct relationship with bone. So one of the tips I would say for everybody listening is get your light right and get your darkness right. This is one of the first steps, even before supplementation. Right? Supplementation is like the end of the line. What we want to focus on is let us look at light and dark exposure, because what is happening now is that people wake up and then they, they're sitting indoors and they don't have the bright blue enriched natural light, the full spectrum light that we would get exposed to on the outside. And the measure of light is lux. So one lux is equal to a candle flame three feet away or a meter away. So you want, in your sleeping room, 0 lux. And the only way to know if you're at zero lux is you have to, you have to measure it somehow. So with my, with my smartphone, I do have an app, and it's a free app. It's called Light Meter Lux. And I can supply that to you as well. And you can give that out to everybody. But it's very, very easy. I mean, you just use the camera and you just point it, keep it at the level of the eye to see how much you're getting in the way of light exposure. And so many people are getting too, I would say too dim during the day and too bright during the night. And one of the things that we need for proper melatonin is not just the darkness at night, but we need to turn off the melatonin signal in the morning by having exposure to bright morning light. So this is really important. I can't stress this enough. And as you can see from the slide, one study showed that 30 lux at night suppressed endogenous melatonin by greater than 50%. Wow. Greater than. And if you have light colored eyes, you're even more susceptible. So people with light green, light blue, and even light brown eyes, they're going to be more susceptible to the suppressive effects of blue light at night on that pineal melatonin production compared to people with dark brown eyes. Now, just because somebody that has dark brown eyes, that doesn't mean that they can just be okay with lots of exposure to artificial blue light. That's not optimal. But we do need to take into account the color of our Iris. Because if we are more sensitive to light at night, we should be wearing things like blue light blocking glasses. In fact, I have glasses now. I have different kinds of glasses for the different times of the day because we want more warming hues. So we want to wake up to like the blue hues is what I would say. We want to go to bed with more of, like, if you think of candlelight, do you think of a fireplace? Think of the oranges, the reds, like a sunset. That is naturally what our eyes should be seeing and not this artificial blue enriched white light that is actually damaging not just to our eyes, but, but also to the skin. You know, all of these, again, these endocrine effects. And we do have a large portion of our melatonin within the skin as well, just like we do with vitamin D. So I just wanted to mention there are different recommendations for light and dark exposure, but here's the takeaway for you. I would say measure the light and get that right. Make sure you're using dimmers if you do have them, and using blinds, opening up the window shades. I mean, really be in tune with the light and dark. Who would ever think that light and darkness connects to bone health? But ultimately it does, right? So living in accordance with the circadian rhythm and what nature provides us. And Lara, you and I live in the Seattle area, so.

We don't have.

A lot of bright sunlight during the day, but even on a cloudy day, you are still getting full spectrum light. So when you first wake up. And Dr. Sachin Panda the Salk Institute does a lot on circadian rhythm research. And according to him, in my conversations with him, if you can just go outside for like five to 10 minutes and just expose your eyes to that light as soon as the light is appearing, that will then set your next night's sleep. So many people overlook that, right? We don't have a morning ritual to kind of get us exposed to that morning light. And then of course, another thing that sets our circadian rhythm is when we eat. And one of his recommendations that I have been adopting is not to eat for one hour after waking. Kind of like let your sympathetic and parasympathetic system warm up. But essentially getting that first morning light exposure, waiting about an hour until you eat. And then, you know, we kind of set the circadian tone in that way. Having a ritual for every day to align with nature and the seasons that change with light and dark is really important, even down to your bone health.

Living in, living in cities, it's harder and especially Living in Seattle, you know, when you were talking about bright light in the morning, I was thinking, well, I may have to do something else.

Yes. And you can get like a happy light. So I actually interviewed a neuroscientist at the University of Washington right there in the Seattle area. His name is Horacio de la Iglesia. He has even been part of this initiative within Seattle to change the start time of kids at school to honor that light and dark. Right. That kids need more sleep. And he talked about happy lights. You know how they have those lights for sale where it's like a full spectrum light.

Spectrum light, yeah. Joe likes candles at night. I just thought he was being romantic. But he's probably improving our health as well.

Yes. There's a biological reason for it, but it's great if you have both the romance and the biology. That's a good match.

Yeah. So how can someone tell if darkness deficiency is affecting them?

Well, let me give you kind of the checklist of how do you know your melatonin is actually low? Because I think that probably people listening to us, we can already get an idea if our darkness is deficient. And I think that we need to look at light and dark as nutrients they are feeding us in some way. In fact, I think that those are the first primary circadian nutrients before we even move into macro micro phytonutrients. Because if our light and dark isn't right, then our metabolism is thrown off. Right. Our clock genes are wired through the level of the genes in the DNA. And so if our cells are off, then our metabolism and everything else is off. So how do we know if we're darkness deficient? I actually have a darkness deficiency questionnaire that people can take. This is a darkness deficiency questionnaire that people can take to figure out if they're highly darkness deficient, somewhat, maybe mildly. And then some of the strategies that you can use in order to optimize and get more darkness. Right. I think we've just become, you know, the invention of electricity has been good on the side of making us more productive, but not so healthy on the side of our biological rhythm. And in fact, when Dr. De la Iglesia, he did some work in South America with indigenous peoples and living with them and seeing how when it's dark, they all go to bed, they're all sleeping, when it's light, they're all very active. Right. They don't have the artificial light imposed upon them that is negatively altering their biology. And they tend to be healthier people as well. So let me, let me just go back to that checklist because I know people are thinking, oh my goodness, I'm 55 years old and I live in the artificial light at night. My melatonin must be really low. For the sake of our conversation, we're very focused on melatonin because I feel that melatonin has been overlooked and undervalued. That said, we need to see melatonin within the context of everything else, whether it's gut health, hormone health, looking at cortisol and stress. So it's not that melatonin is a miracle molecule. It's part of the greater web of our system's biology. So I just want to mention that, that there could be many things here underneath the surface more than melatonin. So this is not like the shiny object of this is going to solve all of my problems, but it can be a piece of things like neurodegenerative issues, accelerated aging, fatigue. I think one of the first things that people notice with melatonin insufficiency is that they have fatigue, unexplained fatigue. Now you could say, well that's because of toxin load that is poisoning the mitochondria. So I can't churn out enough ATP for energy. Sure. But melatonin is also very protective and helpful for the mitochondria and would be helpful for energy production. Right. So one of the first things that people notice when they start a melatonin supplement is they have more energy. The other thing that they tend to notice is their blood sugar becomes better. I had somebody who I saw at the PLMI conference who started Erbatonin and he emailed me. I forget the duration, maybe it was like a week or two after saying that his aura sleep score improved just, you know, quickly like that. So there can be a lot of things that shift for people, especially people who are measuring certain things about their health. They might find that their inflammatory, their inflammatory, I would say states or their levels have changed. Like I know that especially for immune health, it could help with reducing viral load. So lots of different things here and what you see on this list that all of you have a lot of interest in is with bone mineral density. So if you're all in this community because you're watching your bone health, and I'm part of that community as well, being a post menopausal woman, you want to be thinking about melatonin as a potent antioxidant and anti inflammatory agent that can help with the osteoblast. Osteoclast dynamic, for sure. So this is a short list of some of the things that might give you an inkling that there could be something off. And then what are you doing throughout your day? Are you doing lots of travel? Are you a shift worker? What is your sleep like? So those are just some general indicators. And in some cases, functional medicine doctors like to do a urine test to see whether or not a patient has enough melatonin. Now, that's. That's okay, but it's not optimal. And I'll tell you why. Because in the urine, what you're measuring is a metabolite of melatonin. One metabolite, it has a sulfur group on it. So it tells you how you're metabolizing melatonin, but it's not really telling you. It doesn't give you a sense of the curve, because in order to do so, you'd have to wake up hourly and be taking samples. And if you were exposed to light.

In any way, it might not be helpful for your melatonin production during.

Not right. Exactly. So I think you have to kind of go with your symptoms, your age, just your overall lifestyle habits, just to see if you might be vulnerable to melatonin as an imbalance. And if you're a menopausal woman and you have hot flashes, I know that there was a study in which they used 3 milligrams of melatonin and found improvements in menopausal symptoms. And so you want to be thinking about that transition and stabilizing the body a little bit more, using potentially a melatonin supplement to kind of again, help with the thermoregulatory, the anti inflammatory, and the antioxidant issues.

First of all, how melatonin supports healthy bones and healthy aging.

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. In fact, people who meditate even have higher melatonin. If you are in middle age or in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you're already not making very much.

My mother had breast cancer, and so we put her on melatonin, and then I kept taking it. If anyone listening to this is dealing with cancer, they might want to talk to their oncologist about trying some melatonin.

Absolutely.