The Shocking Truth About High-Dose Melatonin, Does Melatonin Supplementation Shut Down Your Own Production, How To Use Melatonin To Enhance Fasting & Much More With Dr. John Lieurance.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, there's a negative feedback loop. You take testosterone, it's going to shut down your own production. Melatonin doesn't have that negative feedback loop. I had a bunch of cars that were old, and I were to go out into that city and change the cars so that they were more efficient. The pollution would be better. And that's ultimately what I think a lot of the listeners want. Produce less pollution. Melatonin could be used with just about anybody looking to maximize their performance. And that's really what melatonin can offer you.

Help performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, folks, here we go. Buckle up. It's my crazy doctor friend, John Laurence. I got on the show today. He. He blew your mind on the last episode, and this one promises to be just as good, so I hope you enjoy. All right, folks, as promised, the brilliant, slightly crazy, super fringe Dr. John Laurance is back on my show today. John is unfortunately not out with me in my guest house post sauna and cold pool, amped up on fringe butt suppositories and nasal sprays like he was the last time that we recorded. We're instead connecting via Skype. But I had to get John back on because he's just putting the finishing touches on this book. The book is about melatonin, and that may sound like a yawner for you, pun intended, because you might just consider melatonin to be like this thing that you may or may not take before sleep, but holy cow, he knows melatonin backwards and forwards. You guys may have heard me talk about how I have completely reset my circadian rhythm using this high, high dose melatonin suppository and this liposomal melatonin that John developed. And it's doing a lot more than just regulating sleep. And we're going to delve into that in today's podcast. If you missed my first podcast with John, it was called the Crazy Future of Medical Biohacking Skull Reset suppositories, nasal sprays, nebulizers, sound therapy, and more. And you should go back and listen to that too, because we get a ton into John's backstory and delve into, like, you know, Amazonian herbal hoppe nasal spray, which I still use, by the way, to, like, nebulizing glutathione for viral issues to NAD suppositories instead of, like, getting NAD IVs, which also works really well and a lot more so that original episode and then all the shownotes for today's episode I will link to@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Melatonin Miracle BenGreenfulFitness.com Melatonin Miracle and then just real quick, if you don't know who John is, he operates down in Florida. He's basically got a private practice down there in. It's Sarasota, right? John?

Yep, Sarasota, yeah.

So he's a naturopathic physician. He's a chiropractic neurologist. He spent most of his career focusing on things like balance disorders and tinnitus and hearing loss and degenerative neurological disorders like Parkinson's and alt Alzheimer's as well as a lot of these stealth co infections like, you know, chronic Lyme and chronic inflammatory response syndrome and mold illness, because he's had Lyme himself. And we got into all that on the first episode, which you got to go listen to. But he also just develops these, these crazy, crazy products. And I'm constantly sending people to your website to check out your new stuff, John, because it's just, it's fringe, it's out there. I honestly, I don't know how you get away with, with selling this stuff online, but you somehow do it.

Well, it's been a selfish endeavor because a lot of the products are things I wanted to use myself and it's allowed me to kind of reach out and work with patients all over the world, really, because we're able to create products that are almost as effective as if you were to do an IV or an injection where you're able to kind of circumvent the oral route with the suppositories and the liposomals.

Yeah, I mean that, that's what I was on the phone with somebody yesterday. They're like, I gotta go in and get my super uncomfortable nad IV and sit there and cringe as the IV gets emotional. So I'm like, why don't you just like put nad up your butt and let it slow bleed into your system for eight hours like I do now while I'm asleep. And it's kinda kind of a lot easier. So anyways though, we're not here to talk about nad in your arsehole. We here to talk about melatonin. So anyways, but for those of you who want to go visit John at his clinic or if you live near Florida or you want to make a medical biohacking trip, medical tourism, so to speak, in the US I'll link to John's site, as well as all John's products in the show notes. So, John, this whole deal with melatonin, you know, I'm aware of Dr. Frank Shallenberger because I really, really got super interested in ozone. And when Covid hit and I bought like a fancy ozone generator and started doing ozone water. And, you know, and I've had my wife do, because she's had, like, UTIs in the past, and she's going to love me saying this on the show, but I've had her do, like, vaginal ozone insufflation and I've done like, ozone through olive oil for things like upper respiratory tract infections and really dig ozone and found Dr. Frank Shellenberger, who arguably was like kind of the guy who pioneered the use of ozone and functional medicine. But I didn't realize that, A, you did an internship with him, and B, that he utilized melatonin in a way that kind of influenced you. So can you tell that story?

Yeah. So, well, before I did my internship with Frank Shallenberger, I was at a brain rejuvenation conference, and I was sitting next to a doctor that that was. Was watching the presentation with me and a present, a presenter came on and started talking about these super physiological doses of melatonin and how neuroprotective it was. And he was seeing a lot of benefit in the clinic. And the guy sitting next to me kind of reached over and he said, you know, I've been doing this in my clinic, and it's been one of the best clinical pearls I've learned in a long time. And so that got my attention. So when I went to see Shallenberger to do my internship with him, I actually slipped into his schedule to have him kind of take a look at me. I was post Lyme. I was having a lot of neurological symptoms like word finding and my memory, and I just felt like I wasn't performing at what I should be. He suggested I start taking 200 milligrams of melatonin, not just at night, but if I could tolerate it, which he said 20% of the population can, which I've come to find is about accurate, that when you take it during the day, you don't get sleepy if you have light exposure to the eyes.

Hmm. And just to interrupt real quick, just when we're throwing around dosages super quick for the people who may not be familiar with melatonin dosages, typically most supplements, most recommendations. If there are recommendations for people to take melatonin, say, like at night, before sleep, it's Usually like anywhere from 0.3 to 3 milligrams. A high dose in many cases up until Dr. John is hitting the scene is like 10. And so what Frank was talking to you about was 200. So we're talking about literally hundreds of times, more than a lot of times, what you'll see recommended.

Right. It's a shockingly high dose of melatonin. And for whatever reason, there's been some false information put out into the medical community about some dangers about melatonin. So we should probably nip that in the butt right away.

Why don't you finish telling the story about Shallenberger and then let's get into some of the rumors about melatonin after that.

I tried the protocol. It worked for me. And I had been doing some and formulating some different products through mitozen.com and we, you know, we added that to the, you know, the Sandman, which is our 250 milligram suppository, you know, to our product line. And then we started to use those with our patients here clinically. And a lot of the doctors that I work with started using it with their patients. And we've just seen some, you know, very promising results with using these really high doses of melatonin. So you call that super physiological dosing of melatonin. That's the official medical terminology for it, super physiological.

Okay. So when you're talking about a super physiological dose, and you mentioned that Frank had been using that for cancer and then you used it for tbi, why is that term used, super physiological? What's that mean exactly?

Well, because the amount of melatonin that the pineal secretes is really a tiny amount. And so when you start to take melatonin at these really high doses, it's higher than what the body produces naturally. So way higher than the endogenous production that's made in the body. So we use it for sleep. But there's so many more benefits which we're going to dive into in this podcast with melatonin that we're using it for our patients for.

Okay. So I think what I want to do before we dive into what's going on with these higher doses is back up just a little bit and explain melatonin, because we have time when it comes to melatonin. And you have a really good section in your new book, which I don't even know if I mentioned yet. It's called the Melatonin Miracle. It's fantastic. I kind of got my hands on a beta copy and have all sorts of pages folded over in it. But you reference melatonin as the way it's commonly referenced, the so called hormone of darkness. And then you describe why it is that it's so important. So what exactly is melatonin from a hormonal standpoint? What are the important things that people should know about where it's secreted and what it's doing?

If you look at melatonin, it's a primary protector from stress. And so if we were to compare it to something, I would like to compare it to the electromagnetic field around the earth. That's an internal produced field that extends outside of the earth and it's protecting us from the ultraviolet rays that would normally kill life on the planet. So in the same way, every cell in your body actually produces melatonin. And not just in the cell, but in the part of the cell that actually makes your energy, which is called the mitochondria. And these mitochondria produce melatonin in a response to stress. So one of the things I thought was really interesting is if you go back in the earliest days of research with melatonin, the researchers initially didn't see any benefit to giving melatonin. They were giving it to animal models.

Any benefit for sleep, you mean?

For anything? Okay, yeah. They were just looking in general to see if there was any difference in lifespan and disease production. And I'm not sure if they even really looked at sleep in particular. I think it was just general health. And so they were kind of like, well, melatonin doesn't seem to be a really important substance. But then they changed the study around a little bit, where they took the group of mice and they put them in these round tubes and they poked little holes in the tube. So the mice would have to be in this dark little tube, which this is kind of one of the ways that they mimic stress. So for a certain amount of time each day, they'll put them in these tubes. And you can imagine how stressful that would be if they shoved you in a tube with little pinholes, right?

Yeah.

They took the mice and then they had the two groups both being subjected to the stress. And the one that was given the melatonin lived longer and didn't develop a lot of the diseases associated with that chronic stress that the mice that didn't get the melatonin. So that's when the research really started to open up and they started to notice that there was a lot of benefits to melatonin.

Now, the interesting thing that I think about melatonin and that this is kind of like possibly a little bit of a rabbit hole, is I used to do bodybuilding. And in the bodybuilding industry, what they realized after deciding they want an alternative to spray on tans and fake tanning lotion or a copious amount of time spent in tanning beds was something that could allow for melanin production and the darkening of the skin. And so a lot of bodybuilders started using this peptide called Melanitan, which you inject, and it works as advertised. I tried it for a few days, this was a couple of years back, and my skin started to darken and get this nice tan almost right away. But one of the side effects, and this is actually a quite common side effect in many men who take it is essentially the equivalent, almost like a priorm, like an erection that won't go away. And so I was like laying in bed at night with a massive hard on that you'd think most guys wouldn't complain about. But we're talking about, like distracting for five or six hours. So I couldn't sleep. And so for me, that sleep disruption due to a lot of stuff going on in my crotch wasn't worth the trade off for a tan. But, you know, I tell that story because from what I understand, you know, melatonin regulates melanin aggregation and a little bit of that pigmentation response, because I think it was in frogs, they found that when you extract this, this hormone that they had found in the pineal gland, it modified melanin pigmentation in frogs by reducing melanin aggregation. And I also think that's interesting because I think it was Dr. Jack Cruz who I heard this first from that, that you see some melanin production downregulation if you're out in the sun and you wear sunglasses, because one of the triggers for melanin to be produced to actually protect you from the sun is a trigger that's produced when photons of light hit your retina. And so if you're wearing sunglasses outside on a bright sunny day, you're actually more likely to burn and less likely to tan and also less likely to harness appreciable amounts of vitamin D from sunlight if you're wearing sunglasses. So that's one of the reasons folks rarely see me sporting sunglasses outdoors unless I'm like, you know, snowboarding or trying to protect myself from sunblindness, like out in the desert or something like that.

Yeah, I do the same thing. And that's. We get into quite a bit of Depth on that in one of the chapters in the book where we talk about skin and. Yeah, so I don't like to wear sunglasses either, unless, you know, I have to. But it's definitely interesting how you'll tan instead of burn when you avoid sunglasses. And a lot of people don't know that.

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then, you know, that's kind of the whole idea behind the pineal gland. Right. It secretes melatonin in the presence of darkness, which is why, you know, as many of my listeners already know and are well aware, bright light exposure at night reduces that melatonin production. You know, adequate amounts of natural light during the daytime can enhance the activity of the pineal gland later on at night. But, you know, this whole idea of the pineal gland producing melatonin, especially yolks to light and also yolk to serotonin, which is why I think a higher carbohydrate meal or adequate carbohydrates in the evening can assist with sleep, kind of dictates what I would ask you for my next question, and that is this. If the pineal gland is producing melatonin and we begin to supplement with that same hormone, essentially, you know, either liposomally, you know, using something like your Sandman product or via suppository, like the Sandman suppository, what's that going to do to endogenous production? That's the million dollar question I get over and over again is I'm gonna shut down my own melatonin production if I take it. So, so give me the, give me the lowdown on that.

So, yeah, so that' sthat's how most hormones work. There's a negative feedback loop. So like, for instance, if you take testosterone, it's going to shut down your own production. So what's really interesting is that melatonin doesn't have that negative feedback loop. So, you know, I'll give you an example. I did an experiment on myself. I don't think I've shared this with you yet, but I discontinued the experiment about a month ago. But for three months I was doing 800 milligrams of melatonin per night.

Were you doing that via suppository or via liposomal?

So I was doing both.

Okay.

Both at the same time.

Okay. In both ends.

I think you've experimented with as well.

I don't think I've ever used your liposomal at the same time as I've used the suppository. I've always just used one or the other. Anyways, back to your story. Using 800.

Yeah. So you know, the first time I did that, it was quite a strong effect as far as becoming groggy and going to sleep. And I slept really, really hard. But when I started that, I thought I got Covid. So I started to get sick and then a close friend of mine that I had close contact with tested positive. So I started to get a little bit of a runny nose and I was like, okay, I got Covid. So that night I took that massive dose and then the next night I took it and I just kept that going and I adapted to that high dose. And then I completely stopped taking any melatonin at all for a couple of weeks. And I really felt like it didn't really interfere with my sleep rhythms. And my oura ring scores were still fairly good. Obviously I think they were a little bit better with the higher dose, but so I personally kind of experimented with feeling the effects that. So your melatonin is going to build based on sunlight hitting the retina. And so when you stop, when you take exogenous melatonin and you're still going to release the same amount that you're storing, that's related to the sunlight that you get that day and it just doesn't change. There's just not that negative feedback I get.

Well, not only do I get a decent amount of sunlight now that spring is approaching at the time that we're recording this, but even in the winter, which is when I first began experimenting with the high dose melatonin you were sending me in the morning, I blast myself with a ton of technology that kind of simulates the sunlight I'm not able to get in the winter, especially living on a north facing slope out here in Washington state. So I've got one of those daytime blue light boxes on my office desk and then I've also got these glasses called the retimers that produce blue light and then those in ear human chargers. That sounds like a lot, but I'm basically bombarding myself with at least three different sources of bright technology based light during the daytime. And so that may also have been why I saw such a good response to this protocol. But I kind of call it the melatonin sledgehammer hammer because I was having some pretty serious sleep issues. After some travel it would have been winter of 2020. And so I started into that, that higher dose melatonin protocol and was kind of bouncing back and forth. Like some days I'd use the liposomal, some days I'd Use your suppository. And I was generally for about 30 days in a row, I did about 300 to 400 milligrams of melatonin every single night. And I went from like multiple nighttime awakenings, early morning awakenings, not being able to go back to bed, daytime sleepiness due to poor sleep cycles. And it's almost like it reset everything. And then I actually, I quit cold turkey because what happened was after my sleep was all normalized, I went on a trip with my wife for about a week. And I thought, well, this is a perfect chance for me to just like not take any melatonin with me and just force myself to kind of reset and see what happens. And it was, it was like my body had learned to sleep based on that higher dose melatonin protocol. And when I cut out the melatonin, my sleep cycle remained really stable. And so even now, you know, it's probably one or two times a week when I have like a late night event where I'm under bright lights or I've been traveling and I've arrived back home that I'll use that kind of like melatonin sledgehammer type of approach, similar to how one would use like a vitamin D sledgehammer if they're first getting the onset of cold or flu, doing like a 20,000 to 50,000, like an intramuscular injection of vitamin D, that type of thing. Kind of a similar approach with melatonin. But I experienced none of the actual indicators that would indicate to me that melatonin production had been downregulated. If anything, it seemed to stabilize my sleep score after going 30 days without skipping a beat, going high dose.

Have you looked at your heart rate variability when you're taking the high doses?

It doesn't seem to really change much, aside from the fact that whenever I get better sleep, my heart rate variability improves. And so if it's a good night of sleep, whether or not I'm using melatonin for sleep, I see an increase in heart rate variability. But I'm not, I'm not convinced that's due to the melatonin. Although you might have a different thought versus just better sleep in general.

Well, the way I look at heart rate variability is it's really kind of how well we're dealing with stress. And oftentimes it's too strong of a sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system is more predominant. And there's not that yin and yang between the two sides of the autonomics. And so melatonin's actually been shown to really strengthen the autonomic nervous system and particularly the. The parasympathetic nervous system. And so I've actually seen. Seen some dramatic improvements with heart rate variability with both myself and also some of my patients.

Hmm, interesting. Okay, cool. All right, so, so basically, in terms of endogenous production, would you say then that. That that is not a concern for people if they're supplementing with melatonin? Not.

Not a concern. Yeah, according to the literature, that's not a concern.

Okay. So a couple other questions regarding dosing. You actually say in your book that melatonin may not even be effective unless taken at high doses. What's the reason behind saying that? That, like, a small dose doesn't even work?

Well, if somebody's taking it for sleep and, you know, they're under the age of 40, a couple things I would point out is what the research says is that you should possibly take it even three or four hours before your bedtime to be more effective. But we're not talking about taking melatonin just for sleep. It does. And I think kind of back to your story about traveling and kind of resetting the circadian rhythm. There's so many melatonin receptors. There's the G protein compound melatonin receptors, which. There's an MT1 and MT2 and an MT3. And the MT1 and 2 are mostly with the nervous system in the brain. So we're basically. We've got all these melatonin receptors throughout our bodies and our cells. So when we start to provide these signaling with melatonin, we're kind of retraining not just the sleep wake cycle, but there's so many different other systems in our body that also have. They're connected to this circadian rhythm. One example is that your microbiome also takes the signaling from melatonin release. And in fact, the melatonin is 400 times higher in the gut than it is in the brain. So it's a lot more higher. And so sometimes when you get into these higher doses, you might be looking at some of the benefits through the gut. And the microbiome actually takes. There's something called microbiome swarming. And the primary activator of microbiome swarming is actually deep sleep and melatonin release. So this is where your good bacteria literally go into a phase of growth and proliferation. And one of the interesting things I found in the literature with melatonin supplementation for a lot of gut diseases is that they actually found that there's a suppression of the bad bacteria and a support to the good bacteria.

That's interesting. So melatonin is actually having an impact on the microbiome as well.

Big time. Yeah. And that's why we created the mito phase fasting protocol. We wrote an article and we published it. Right. It was like a month ago.

There's a big article on my website about this whole idea of in enhancing autophagy and kind of like using this fasting high dose NAD protocol that you developed. And melatonin is a part of that as well. Right?

Right. So yeah, the mito fast after the fast. So when you're fasting it's a hormetic stress to the microbiome. Your body's basically robbing the microbiome of nutrients. So it's kind of survival, the fittest, you get rid of the weak and then when you start to refeed, you're going to repopulate. And so what we're having people do is do high dose melatonin in that refeeding phase to support the microbiome swarming and also to prevent some of the bad guys from repopulating.

So basically this idea of it not shutting down endogenous production and also higher dose administration being more beneficial than lower dose administration. I think there's a couple things that I learned from your book that I wanted to make sure I mentioned to folks. You do mention some research that shows those smaller doses taken farther away from bedtime than most people. I think take melatonin like two to four hours before bedtime that does seem to be effective at reducing sleep latency or the amount of time that it takes to fall asleep. So there are some benefits to the smaller dose. You will fall asleep faster. But when you're talking about the actual anti inflammatory effects, cellular autophagy, the effects on the biome and some of the other anti inflammatory and other benefits that I think we'll also be touching on even more as we move forward here. The peak blood time, or the peak plasma levels I think is what you call them in the book, decline pretty rapidly in response to like that low dose administration. But then the actual, the peak plasma levels stay elevated for an extended period of time during the entire night. When you've got something like, like a melatonin suppository. You know the same thing with like your NAD suppository. And a lot of times I'll do the NAD and the melatonin suppository at the same time. So I'm basically getting this slow bleed so to speak, of melatonin and NAD into my system the entire night. And again, like, at first, I was a little bit concerned about the dosage levels, but you've got several studies in the book where you talk about, like, daily oral doses of 30-60mg of melatonin being well tolerated and having virtually no side effects. There's one clinical trial you talk about where people are getting daily 300 milligram melatonin suppositories with no clinical complications. You know, another one where there was 60 milligrams of intravenous melatonin and no issues. And so it seems to actually be, if anything, not only safe but also beneficial. And so I think that the lower dose does have some benefit, but again, it's farther away from bedtime than most people are taking it. And the benefit is primarily that reduction in sleep latency.

Yeah, exactly. So when I start talking to people about these higher doses of melatonin, I try to get them toto think about other benefits that melatonin has besides sleep.

Yeah. And that's what I want to get into, man. And so the first thing that intrigued me, that you briefly touched on, but I'd love to hear you unpack just a little bit more, is the effects of melatonin on the mitochondria. So what's going on from a mitochondrial level with melatonin?

Okay, great question. This is really at the core of how melatonin works. And so what happens is there's a number of different stressors, right? There's chemical, mental, emotional, physical, electromagnetic. There's infections. These are the primary stressors that we have to deal with. And then we have hormesis, which is our ability to respond to stresses. And if the dosage is just right, we have a response of the body where we could even come back stronger. So we have the mitochondria really being at the core of our ability to handle stress. For instance, if we over train, it's because we exceeded our mitochondria's ability to handle that stress or very often cancers. They're looking at cancer as a core mitochondrial problem, Chronic, like, even Covid. Right. So if we look at Covid, when that gets to the point where it's a critical situation, the immune system shuts down, and there's something called a cytokine storm that results in acute respiratory distress syndrome. And that is a mitochondrial problem. And so what results from these stresses is something called cytokines. And these cytokines are basically inflammation at the cellular level. And When a cytokine approaches the cell, what happens is the cell is absorbing glucose into the cell, and then it converts it into pyruvate. And so then the pyruvate is shuffled into the mitochondria, and it's converted into something called acetyl CoA. But if there's cytokines, what happens is that pyruvate is taken out of the mitochondria and put into the cytosol, and there's an enzyme that blocks where we can use pyruvate efficiently. And the cytokine causes this shift where we can only make 10% of the energy that we would otherwise make. And so this is the reason that we have this cytokine storm with, say, Covid is because we shift to this inefficient energy production that's called aerobic glycolysis, where they call it the Warburg effect. If people want to dive into this, they can look at Otto Warburg's work with cancer and the mitochondria. But for our sake, I think it's important to understand that inflammation, which is the result of all of the stresses, shuts down our ability to make energy, and it literally cuts it by nine out of 10. You got 10% of the energy that you could otherwise make for somebody with COVID All of a sudden, their immune cells have no energy, and then it just gets out of control. So at the core level, the melatonin is actually produced by the mitochondria to buffer this entire system to quench that enzyme so that you can then start continuing to make energy.

I think that's also important for people who are concerned about heart health as well, because we know that sympathetic nervous system stress, and I have a big podcast coming out on heart health soon, is one of the contributors to potential for heart disease. But that stress, whether brought on by environmental or by, you know, emotional variables, does result in some amount of inflammation that shifts even the heart into some element of glycolysis and lactic acid production. And that can actually lead to both calcification, as well as influencing the electrical activity of the pacemaker cells in the heart. And so that's actually one of the reasons that the body has some pretty cool mechanisms to keep the heart to kind of like shuttle fats to cardiac tissue so that cardiac tissue gets first dibs on fats, because the heart runs so well on ketones and on fatty acids, along with the diaphragm and the liver being a couple other organs where that occurs. But essentially, I would love to see just Based on this little thought that I'm having. What. And I don't know if any studies exist on this, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, John, what the effect of melatonin supplementation on cardiovascular disease risk, or cardiovascular, say, like heart attack recovery, would be in response to, like higher dose melatonin.

Yeah, well, I have a whole chapter on that. There's actually a lot of research that's been done on that. So, you know, the brain and the heart are the two metabolically demanding organs in your body. So those tissues are working very hard. They need a lot of continuous energy. And so when you start to have a breakdown in mitochondrial function. So you have to look at the mitochondria in a couple ways. One is, is it efficiently making energy? In other words, we talked about efficiency, meaning that it's like if you were to have, say, like a log, right? And you throw that log on the fire and one log might burn for 10 hours, the other log might burn for an hour. So we're talking about having logs that can only burn an hour. And that's what's happening at the cellular level when there's too much stressors. So circling back to that, we have the situation where the heart is so metabolically demanding and you start to shut down the ability to produce lots of energy, but then you have the inefficient production of energy, meaning that it's going to make energy and it's going to spew a lot of oxidation. It would be like an old car that's producing a lot of pollution. If I had city and I had a bunch of cars that were old and I were to go out into that city and change the cars so that they were more efficient. Maybe they were burning, you know, instead of gas, they were burning electric. And so the city, the pollution would be better. It would use less energy. Right. It would be more efficient. And that's ultimately what I think we want. And we want, you know, a lot of the listeners want their bodies to be more efficient, produce less pollution. And that's really what melatonin can offer you because it supports the mitochondria, which is at the core of making energy.

Right. And I think that when we look at the heart particularly, there are some other variables that influence the propensity for beta oxidation or burning of ketones to be limited, particularly things like the nature of the water within the cytoplasm of cardiac cells, particularly whether or not that water is structured in the cytoplasm. Another one would be how much Exposure to photonic light has occurred, which allows for the mitochondria in cardiac tissue and beyond to actually work properly. And so there's a variety of factors here, but low inflammation, low stress, adequate exposure to particularly the infrared light spectrum, and adequate hydration, particularly mineral intake, are all things that kind of play into that variable in terms of not only cardiac cell efficiency, but overall mitochondrial efficiency of the entire body. And it seems as though melatonin is pushing that along quite beautifully.

Yeah, well, the other thing is the autonomics, you know, and having a strong autonomic nervous system. And if they have an over dominant parasympathetic, you start going out there and you start exercising. You know, everybody's felt that, you know, over adrenalized feeling. And the athletic performance declines with that.

Right.

So think about this. You get a really deep restful sleep, the body is basically repairing itself, and you're supporting your parasympathetic nervous system. I mean, these are all just little glimpses of all of the things that melatonin can do for someone who's an athlete or someone that's maybe got a disease issue that they're dealing with and they want to decrease their inflammation, improve their immune system, improve their body's response to stress. You know, it just overall, you know, I just think that melatonin could be used with just about anybody looking to maximize their performance.

Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned immune system there. I love the section of the book where you talk about how it's possible that people may not need to be wasting their money flying to Mexico for these fancy NK killer cell injections. You know, a lot of people don't realize it's illegal in the US to actually grow stem cells. Like, you can harvest stem cells, you can store stem cells, but you're not allowed to actually grow them to mobilize or to modify human cells in culture in the U.S. and if you go to like Mexico, you can expand cells and produce like these higher amounts of NK cells. And so a lot of people will engage in so called medical tourism and go to Mexico to amp up their immune system with some Fancy, you know, 40 to $50,000 NK cell injection. You know, you talk in the book though about the impact of melatonin on the immune system, particularly on killer cells. What's going on there?

Yeah, it's super interesting when you look at the information and the research on how melatonin affects natural killer cells. Actually, there was an interesting article in 2005 in Immunity and Aging and it was called melatonin Immune function and aging. And what they talk about in that article is how there's something called immunosenescence. So I know a lot of the listeners are familiar, familiar with senescent cells. Right. It's that permanent state of sleepiness that cells go into and it's linked to aging and chronic inflammation and all those types of things. Well, that happens with your immune system as well. And what melatonin does is it actually increases the secretion of something called progenitor cells, which are basically stem cells that will turn into natural killer cells. Melatonin has also been shown to improve interleukins and T helper cells. So, yeah, lots of information on melatonin as it relates to the immune system. And as you mentioned before, you know, there's people paying 40, $50,000 to go to Mexico and get their natural killer cells expanded. And you know, to know that melatonin can do a fairly decent job at that, you know, without spending tens of thousands of dollars. And also something that you can do kind of on a regular basis over the course of several years.

Yeah, I think the study was in immunity and aging on melatonin immune function and aging. And I don't, I don't remember the percentage increase in there as well, but it was a marked shift in the cytokine profile and particularly the, the competence of individual natural killer cells that were, especially in aging individuals where you see a decline in the NK cell activity, that melatonin administration had some pretty enormous therapeutic value to enhance immune function, particularly in A, aging people and B, in people in an immunocompromised state, which in an era of COVID where, no saying that melatonin's like a Covid cure or something like that. But, but in terms of the impact on the immune system, not only is it important, but I do know in functional medicine there are many practitioners who have been using melatonin and even higher dose melatonin for things like long haul Covid or even amping up the immune system's ability to be able to fight off any virus for that matter. And so there's definitely something going on. And then the other thing is that based on the anti inflammatory activity that you talked about earlier, the inhibition of the cytokine storm, particularly that induced by COVID 19 was studied, like in 2020, it was studied and it was showing exogenously administered melatonin could inhibit the cytokine storm.

Yeah, you know, there was a study that came out just in December from the Cleveland Clinic and they looked at people that they gave melatonin to, and they didn't state the dosage, but there was a 52% decrease in the likelihood of contracting Covid. So for those people that want to decrease their chances of catching COVID they might consider melatonin. And then there was another group of doctors that came out and they released this article, and they're really trying to promote people for getting. For taking melatonin two weeks prior and one month following a vaccine. Now, I know everybody's got their own. All their own opinions on vaccines. We probably shouldn't get into that on this podcast. But for those people that feel like they're going to get that vaccine, they really should consider taking melatonin prior and after, because one of the things that they talk about in this paper is that you'll have a stronger antibody response. So when you get the vaccine, you rely on especially healthier. They were saying, healthier people, it's probably even more important because they don't have as strong of an antibody response to the vaccine.

You know what? I think that that's part of it, but I also think part of this might also come down to the adjuvants in vaccines, because melatonin is actually. It's a chelating agent. I learned this from your book, that it actually prevents toxicity induced by metals like mercury and lead and cadmium. And I don't know if aluminum, a common adjuvant in vaccines, I don't know if they. If they've studied the protective effects of melatonin against aluminum toxicity, but they've looked at a host of other similar metals. And it's really interesting. I was unaware of this till I read your book, how powerful of a chelating agent it is. And so for people who have, like, a robust, say, like a sauna practice, or people who are doing, you know, say, like coffee enemas, or people who are doing, like, you know, metal chelation protocols, it appears that melatonin seems to support a lot of those pathways.

Oh, yeah, I was shocked when I read that, too. And it not only chelates heavy metals out of the brain, which actually might account for a subset of patients when they first start taking really high doses of melatonin, they may actually feel a little bit off. It does happen occasionally, and it might be just from the detoxification from the melatonin, but, yeah, it also protects you when you get exposure. So I think that's another good reason that anybody doing the vaccine should consider taking melatonin.

Yeah. And like you mentioned, you know, if you, if you start Using high dose. Really. The main side effect I noted was morning grogginess. But the interesting thing, and of course this makes perfect sense based on what we explained earlier, was as soon like I'll wake up and I'll have a little bit of morning grogginess from, you know, basically I can almost guarantee it's the melatonin because it doesn't happen when I don't take the melatonin. But as soon as I blast myself with sunlight or morning light exposure, it disappears within like five minutes. Like it's remarkably fast how soon the grogginess disappears. So it's like the, like exposure to light if you're groggy for melatonin administration, especially high dose melatonin administration for sleep. Like if you get blasted with light as soon as you wake up or, you know, or at some point in the hour after you wake up, for me personally, like, the grogginess just completely vanishes.

Well, I think it makes a lot of sense what you're doing, because what you're doing is you're really hacking this circadian rhythm and the sleep wake. Now a lot of people might be sitting there thinking, wow, that sounds really extreme. Why is Ben and John Laurent such extremists? But we live in a different world now. You can't expect to just kind of muddle along and continue to be healthy because there's so many stressors. I'll tell you another thing that shocked me was when I really looked at EMFs. Right. So you look at EMFs and there's, there's just compelling evidence showing that it's carcinogenic.

Right.

If we're exposed to too much cell phone radiation or our WI fi, these electromagnetic frequencies can be very destructive to us at a cellular level. And one of the things that I found in the research is that the pineal gland actually perceives these EMFs as light and it decreases melatonin. And that's in the literature as well. So it makes an argument to almost look at. You look at the graph, you say, okay, well, you know, there's actually an interesting body of evidence showing that melatonin suppresses cancer. Right. So is it the carcinogenic effects of EMF because it's lowering melatonin? You know, are most of a lot of the negative effects of EMF related to the fact that it's squashing our melatonin? I don't know.

It's interesting, but related to the melatonin issue, I talked earlier about the effects of melanin in terms of being able to, say, protect the skin from damage in response to UVA and UVB exposure and how limiting exposure of the retina to photons of light may actually exacerbate that issue. But then there's also some interesting data on melatonin and its protective effect on skin. Like the actual stimulation, the production of collagen and elastin. Can you get into that a little bit? Kind of like the anti aging type of use for melatonin.

You look at the skin. I look at the skin a lot like I look at the lining of the gut. Right. You have two areas that are in touch with our external world and there's a lot of activity there. And when you have activity, you're making energy and you're producing oxidation. And so melatonin is the primary buffer against this oxidation. And so when we go out into the sun and we get blasted by these UV rays, when we have a strong oxidative capacity, then we're going to be protecting that skin. So they have done a number of studies where they've shown that people that take exogenous melatonin have much improved skin with collagen and elastin. Like you just mentioned, we're actually playing around with some melatonin creams and, you know, we're kind of beta testing. I think I gave you guys a bottle of that at some point.

Yeah, you sent me up a bottle of some kind of a skin cream that I used for a little while that had melatonin in it. Yeah, I didn't know that it smelled very sulfurous. What was the sulfurous smell that might have been.

I might have put glutathione in there. I've, you know, I've done a few different versions of it.

Yeah, it had kind of a glutathione type of, type of smell to it.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you can apply melatonin, you know, to the, to the skin. And I, you know, I think a face cream with melatonin makes a lot of sense. And I haven't, I put it on in the morning and I really don't feel, you know, any negative effects as far as feeling groggy or, or anything like that.

So. Okay, got it. You know, I want to turn to, to kind of like this, this idea of, of stacking. Like we touched on the mito fast protocol where. And there's a whole article about this on my website that you wrote that I'll link to if folks go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MelatoninMiracle where you talk about how you'll stack melatonin into a specific fasting protocol that also includes NAD administration to enhance particularly the mitochondrial benefits of a fast. And it's a pretty cool protocol. But I'm curious about a couple of other things when it relates to things that combine well with melatonin. Because when I look at the ingredient label of the Sandman, like your liposomal for people who don't like to shove things up their butt, or the suppository, there's stuff in there. Besides melatonin. What else are you combining with the melatonin?

Well, we have magnolia bark extract in the Sandman and that helps with. It works through gaba, so it enhances sleep a bit as well. And we have some full spectrum hemp in there, and then there's the terpene from lavender called linalol that we put in there. Yeah, I mean, those are the primary active ingredients.

I thought you had like a probiotic in there too.

Oh, yeah, yeah, we do have a probiotic. Yeah.

Which bacterial strain are you using for the probiotic? In the suppository?

Yeah, Ben. So we basically have two probiotic combinations. One of them is called APO808, the other one's APO19. And they're both proprietary blends of mostly strains of bacillus. And the idea was to add very specific strains that would support the absorption of, in the situation with the APO808, the melatonin and the glutathione. And with the APO19, it was more with the CBD and the cannabinoids.

Oh, you mean the actual strain you're keeping proprietary.

Yeah.

Look at you holding your cards close to your chest. Well, either way, for colonic flora, this idea of having bacteria up your butt along with the melatonin during a night of sleep seems to be something that for me at least, seems to have a little bit of a gut stabilizing effect. And so these other compounds are particularly in there for relaxation or are they in there for the cause? One of those you mentioned has more of like an autophagy producing effect, doesn't it? One of those, those plant based polyphenols.

Yeah. So the mito fast, you know, there's a phase one, phase two, and phase three. So the phase one is we're loading the cells with nad, so we're charging the cells up the phase two, we're adding these plant polyphenols like fisetin, sterile stilbene, resveratrol, you know, some curcumin and.

That'S all in the Lusitol product. And that's another one of your products.

So one of theone of the main reasons that we want to fast, and this is probably something a lot of people, a lot of your listeners already know, but that we want to, we want to clean up senescent cells, we want to trigger autophagy, we want to trigger mitochondrial biogenesis and mitophagy. So all of these things can be even further accentuated where you can do a shorter fast and get the benefits of what would otherwise be a longer fast. And that was really the goal of this is to allow people to fast for 24 hours or three days and get the effect of a longer fast. Like a five or six day fast.

Yeah, I do a quarterly fasting protocol and at the time you sent me that article I had just finished up like this five day juice fast. Because a lot of times for my fasting protocols I'll experiment with like a Ayurvedic cleanse or a Panchakarma or a Kitchery cleanse or you know, or a fasting protocol or fasting mimicking diet like Valter Longo has done research on. And so I love to find new ways to kind of clean up the body for those quarterly fasts and then test them on myself. So you wrote that article right after I'd finished this other fast. So I didn't try this yet, but it seems pretty simple. It's like the first two days before I start my fast, I load up with a whole bunch of nad. So I could either go get an NAD IV or use your NAD suppositories or the NAD liposomal or whatever. But it's like a high dose of NAD for the first couple of days, like let's say a Monday and a Tuesday. And then the next couple of days you'll do like a water only 48 hour fast. But during that time you're up regulating the effects of the fast by doing melatonin and that lusitol suppository that you talked about or the lusitol liposomal. You have an oral version of everything for people who don't want to do the suppositories. And that's got all the plant based like the fisetin, the carcetin, all the things that would upregulate cellular autophagy during the fast. And then after I start eating again, then I take some of your like almost like mtor stimulating compounds.

It's called Stemtor. Yeah, it's something that's gonna raise mtor, Right, right.

Similar to like taking like essential amino acids or something like that. You would stack those at the very end to shove your body back into an anabolic phase and.

Yeah, well, that's what we have people do is the kion aminos. Afterwards we have them increase their protein intake and then we have a product called Stemtor that has high leucine, it has HMB and it has deer antler velvet. So we're trying to like further kind of accentuate that growth and repair where you get more stem cells to be released. Then once they're released, we have something called Stemzen, which is high CoQ10. And people can do this on their own, but there's something called fucoidin. So we've combined fucoidin in this high CoQ10 with the stem CEN product, which improves the survivability of the stem cells once they're released into circulation.

Yeah, yeah. Fucoidin. Isn't that from sea moss or something like that?

Exactly, yeah, it's from brown seaweed.

Yeah. Brown seaweed, that's right. Yeah. That's an interesting molecule in and of itself. And by the way, for people for whom that might sound like a dizzying and complex type of fast, so I know you have like a, you have a kit, I think you have the liposomal version of that fast and then the, the, the suppository based version of that fast. And the box just arrives at your house with the instructions. And that's. So it's, it's at the time of recording this. It is basically the end ish of winter 2021. For my spring 2021 fast. This is the one I'm going to do. I'm going to do the mito fast protocol. So I'll keep people posted when I personally do that protocol. But it's pretty simple. Like there's really only two days where you're doing a full on fast and it's sandwiched in between NAD and then these like mtor stimulants. So it's kind of, kind of a cool idea.

Well, there's, so there's two, there's two versions that we, that we promote. One is where you do a 24 hour to 36 or 48 hour fast. And then we have a three day, a full three day fast. And really what I try to get a lot of my patients to do is to do a 24 hour fast every single week. Right. There's just part of their ritual and then one Week out of the month, I'd like them to do a full three day fast. So we'll actually have them do this mito fast protocol for a full three months in that fashion.

So it's three months where you're doing for each of those months a three day fast. That's a cool idea. We mentioned that Lusitol plays a role in this. That being the one that's rich in a lot of these autophagy enhancing compounds like fisetin as resveratrol. I know you have like EGCG from green tea extract in there and quercetin and curcumin and all these things that kind of shut down inflammation in the brain and also enhance cellular senescence and enhanced cellular autophagy. What's really interesting, and you and I were chatting about wanting to mention this before we started recording and I think I actually do want to mention this because it's interesting is that, you know, I do on about a quarterly basis like a plant medicine protocol where I actually do kind of like journey with, with, with a variety of different plant medicines. And I kind of treat that similar to like a, like a TBI or concussion really in terms of paying attention to not only the neurotransmitter deficits that, you know, a protocol like that can produce, but then also some of the brain inflammation that, that can occur when you're using a lot of these compounds in high doses that are amplifying neuronal activity like you know, 20 times. Plus if you're, you know, whether we're talking about like a ayahuasca retreat or some other compound or stack of compounds you might be using for say like a journey. And I began, I think this was like a year and a half ago. What I started doing after that was when I'd go to bed that night, I would use the Lusitol. And then. This sounds like a lot of stuff to shove up your butt, but one Lusitol, one Sandman and then one of your CBDs. What's the CBD one called?

Neurodiol.

Yeah, neurodiol. Yeah, it's like a high dose cbd. And I would do those three and wake up the next morning after a plant medicine ceremony.

Totally fresh.

Yeah, totally fresh, totally clean.

So I also have been fortunate enough to have some really profound positive experiences with plant medicine. And I feel like it's a very valuable tool if you can find the right people to work with. The first time I did it, I was just, I mean, I was worthless for two Weeks. I mean, I was just, you know, I was wiped out. And so the next time I went, I, you know, I used my products and it was like the next day I woke up, I'm like, you know, I feel amazing. I slept great that night. And I actually wrote an article on this. You know what we'll do is we'll link to this article at Bengreenfield Fitness Melatonin Miracle, and we'll put that article in there for people that want to understand the protocol.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's pretty simple. And, you know, one thing I should mention, because this is actually a question I get kind of like, people will ask me, like, how do you do a coffee enema? Because a lot of people just like, don't really know how to do a suppository. Typically, I, like, a lot of people will use coconut oil or KY jelly or some type of lubricant to kind of like moisten the rectal area. I honestly, I don't even fuss around with that because the suppositories are kind of slippery as it is. But you literally just like lie on your side and typically, like, you, you straighten the leg that's underneath you out and kind of bend the upper leg forward just a little bit and then you just insert the suppository. You know, typically it's easier if you're just like lying in bed. And as long as you're not getting up and walking around and like, you know, taking a pee, which kind of relaxes some of the rectal sphincters, etc, and you kind of like do it as the last thing you do before you go to bed. It works. It works really well. And if I'm going to do. Sometimes I find that the high dose Melatonin, if I take that like an hour before I plan on going to bed, it kind of starts to hit me right when I'm going to sleep versus, like doing it when I'm in bed and waiting for it to hit my system. So in a case like that, I'll literally just like put in the suppository and then I'll go and just for like two minutes, do a handstand against the front door of the house and just like go upside down for a little while. And at that point it feels like it just kind of stays in there even as I'm walking around, brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed, et cetera. So that's, that's the way that I do it, is I'll just slip it in, do a handstand or like hang from an inversion table for a couple of minutes and then, you know, do all my pre bed stuff and then just hit the sack. And about the time I hit the sack, it's like I'm lights out.

Yeah. Well, I think the biggest, you know, thing is when people insert, if there's, you know, if they're, if they need to have a bowel movement, there's something already in there. It can kind of trigger some movement. So, yeah, you know, sometimes you can put a suppository in and then I got to use the restroom and you might lose it. You know, you just have to insert another one. So once in a while you might, you might lose a suppository. But most people, you know, it dissolves within just a few minutes. You know, you don't want to try to be too active and walking around. But yeah, it's.

I don't know, this might be gross for some people to be hearing us describe this, but these are the practical things people don't talk about. So I just want to fill you guys in if you're listening. Another couple of tips for you is, first of all, it's normal when you first put it in to feel like you kind of want to go to the bathroom, but then if you don't and you wait just like five or 10 minutes, that urgent goes away once your body overcomes that sensation of something being in the butt that it wants to get back out of the butt, and it'll just go away after a few minutes. So know that. And then the other thing is, in case something does, like slip out while you're asleep at night, I actually, any night I'm using a suppository, even though if I'm not using one, I like to sleep naked because I just like to stay super cool when I'm asleep and just like the feeling of sleeping combat style. But I do, I do wear my boxers if I'm doing a suppository just in case, just so I don't have to like, wash the sheets in the morning if a suppository comes out and keep my wife happy that I'm not getting like, you know, suppository dye on the sheets or whatever. So.

Right.

It's a couple practical tips for you guys at all.

With all those plant polyphenols, I mean, they will definitely stain.

I know my wife, one night, she was like, are you eating turmeric in bed? I'm like, oh, that's what that was. She's like, yeah, you should put on underwear. So yeah. Anyways, tips from the trenches folks. Sorry for the inside baseball. Well, this has been super duper helpful, John. I know the book is jam packed with so much more, but both practical and research based information on melatonin on high dose melatonin, on melatonin for mitochondria, for anti aging, for the immune system. I mean other benefits we kind of just scratched the surface on during this podcast, but it's a really good read and what I'm going to do is I'll link to the book which just came out in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MelatoninMiracle I'll also link to the Mito Fast Protocol article that John wrote in case any of you want to try that fast out. And then I will. I'll just link to the to John's website as well if you guys want to go get any of his stuff. And I'll also link to the first episode that I did with John if you're like, who is this cat? I want to hear his background story because he flew up to my house and we spent a few days together before I decided he actually wasn't batshit crazy and was actually really smart about this stuff and I want to interview him. So. So I'll link to all that if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Melatonin Miracle it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com melatonin Miracle John, thanks for coming on the show, man. This has been fascinating.

Yeah, Ben, it's a pleasure. Pleasure.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield and I am grateful and honored to have shared with you how to put things up your butt for an hour. Signing out along with my friend Dr. John Lieurance from Sarasota, Florida from BenGreetfulFitness.com this is a really long outro. Have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate a income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.