Explore the Myths of Melatonin, with Dr. Deanna Minich

Melatonin has a lot of other functions that people aren't so aware of. For example, it's anti inflammatory. It is an antioxidant. It's very potent when it comes to its free radical scavenging activity. People have started to bring it into protocols for immune health.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Five Journeys Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. Ed can't be with us today, so we're going to do this without him and he's going to miss the best episode because we have Deanna Minick here and you all know she's been on the podcast before. I love her to pieces. She is, is, she's super smart. So, MS, PhD, CNS, certified functional medicine practitioner. She's a nutrition scientist, international lecturer, educator, author, and has over 20 years of experience in academia in the food and dietary supplement industries. Through her talks, workshops, groups and in person retreats, she helps people to practically and artfully and that's the part you really want to pay attention to. Not just practically, but artfully transform their lives through nutrition and lifestyle. Deanna, welcome back. I'm so psyched to talk to you today.

Yeah. Oh, it'll be great. Wendy, it's so good to catch up with you.

Totally. I know we're going to talk about melatonin today, so I think we should start with tell me the top myths, like do some myth busting for me on melatonin.

Okay. You know, there are many circulating and the biggest one is melatonin is a hormone, so it should never be taken as a dietary supplement. That if you take it, it is dangerous. So let's just talk about that because, you know, first of all, what is melatonin? Melatonin is a compound that's found widely throughout n nature. It's found in plants, it's found in animals, it's found in our own human bodies. And our bodies can make melatonin. And it is true that melatonin can act as a hormone. So the pineal gland produces melatonin at the peak of darkness. So there is that. We do know that melatonin is acting as a hormone. However, melatonin has A lot of other functions that people aren't so aware of. For example, it's anti inflammatory, it is an antioxidant. It's very potent when it comes to its free radical scavenging activity. So that's why it's had. You and I were talking a bit about COVID before we jumped on, and that's why people have started to bring it into protocols for immune health. So it has a lot of other functions. It's like saying, well, vitamin D is a hormone, so we shouldn't take it. It's dangerous. You know, I draw that as a parallel because we now know that vitamin D is very, very hormone, like in its action. And in fact, we published a paper back in September of 2022 in which we likened vitamin D to melatonin and said that basically that melatonin is like the next vitamin D because of many similar actions.

So, okay, so how did it come to be this thing about it's just a darkness hormone?

Well, I think because it was first isolated from the pineal gland of animals. And this is back in the late fif. So then there was a connection to the pineal gland circadian rhythm and then enter in sleep. And in fact, if we look at the data on sleep and melatonin, I would say that that's some of the weaker research, some of the stronger research is actually in immune health, in mitochondrial regulation, in brain health. And the way I see melatonin is it's a circadian nutrient. A circadian nutrient. You know, me as a nutrition scientist, I'm kind of stepping out there by being disruptive with calling it a nutrient, because what defines a nutrient? Right? We have some kind of need state in the body. And much like vitamin D, which can go down through the lifespan, we see that with melatonin.

Can you get it from food too?

You can. So when you look at. And we reported on this in the review paper, we looked at all the different food sources, and what's really interesting, Wendy, is that first of all, you find it in plant foods, a lot of different plant foods. You find it in nuts and seeds, more the reproductive portions of plants. So even fruit, you find melatonin a fruit. Like people talk about cherries and tart cherries and pistachios. The only thing is, you know, as I sat there calculating the amount of melatonin in a pistachio and then equated that with how many pistachios you would need to get 0.3 milligrams, we're talking thousands of pistachios so you need to take a bathtub.

It's similar to, like, when you take broccoli seed extract. You would need to eat, like, a bathtub of broccoli in order to get the equivalent clinical relevance. So you do. Yeah, you need a bathtub of pistachios, which would be thousands.

You need a lot. Yeah, you need thousands. Well, in eating so much, especially if you take it before bedtime and if you're not supposed to have anything to eat before bedtime, that's where it becomes challenging. So while I don't want to dismiss. This is another one of those myths that does need to get busted, I think, because many people will say, oh, I just drink some tart cherry juice before bedtime. That gives me my melatonin. Well, tart cherry juice actually contains a lot of different things. It contains polyphenols, which are incredible for reducing inflammation. It does contain minute amounts of melatonin, but not in the proportion per se, to give us the replenishment level that we need. So while I wouldn't dismiss taking in a lot of those plant foods, I think we need to be conscious about how much we take in the sugar amount, you know, the absolute amount before bedtime and all of those things. But we're getting small amounts of melatonin in our food supply for sure.

So what's higher dose of melatonin? What's baseline? What's higher? Where should people be? This sounds like a myth that needs to be busted, honestly.

Well, this is a myth on the other side of the coin, where people are taking extremely high doses of melatonin, and there isn't a lot of science around that. Right. So if I just base a clinical protocol or a dosing regimen on the published science, what we see from the early work of Dr. Richard Wortman and others is that a low dose, a low physiologic dose of melatonin, which would coincide with replenishment of levels, which we see that dip in our fifth and sixth decades, you know, in order to get those levels back, we're looking at about 0.3 milligrams total dose. Yes.

Not. Not like per mgs, per kilogram, just.

Literally 0.3 milligrams, 0.3 milligrams. In fact, I was talking with a friend of mine who's a health practitioner, and she had listened to me talk about melatonin, and then she tried Erbaton, which is one of the products, which is plant melatonin at 0.3, and she did not think that she would see a result of that. And she was so surprised. She's like, okay, maybe less is more.

That's so funny. So you're talking tiny doses.

Relatively tiny. But that's a studied dose. I mean, that goes back to the early 2000s, where, you know, they were using, like, physiologic doses, and they were using supraphysiologic doses. And they did find much more of a benefit with these lower doses for things like helping with sleep and other things. So. But for some people, let's talk about the personalized nuance as well, because what most people don't realize is that melatonin is metabolized much like caffeine is. So when we take in caffeine, you know how some people do really well with coffee and they have no issue. I'm one of those people, by the way. I metabolize.

Not it. I don't do well. It makes me crazy while I sleep. I'm like, but sleeping?

Okay, so you're a slower metabolizer of caffeine, right? So you might be somebody who needs less melatonin because it's going through that same pathway, which is Cytochrome 1A2. For me, as a fast metabolizer, I might need a little bit more because my body just works very quick on that. On the level of that particular enzyme. So I found when I started having vasomotor symptoms at night, when I started having night sweats and hot flashes and sleep disruption, I was like, you know, I have to go up in my melatonin. I cannot just take the 0.3 anymore. That's nice just for filling the potholes, so to speak. But now I need, like, my potholes are deeper.

You have no pavement.

I have no pavement in certain areas. So I began taking 3mg bid and so just taking it at night. So I was taking a higher dose, and that suited me better for helping me to patch over a lot of. You know, sometimes it's not even sleep disruption. It's about inflammation that we have when we're sleeping that causes us to wake. And I think that melatonin.

Like what? Like what causes that?

Well, because. Let's think of the glymphatic fluid, right? The glymphatic fluid is now a newer. You know, now it's more of a. It's a concept that has rooted into sleep medicine as well as even brain health. The fact of, like, how our brain cells shrink as we're sleeping in order to allow for the better convection of fluid into the interstitial space. And so basically we're releasing a lot of these toxic amyloid metabolites and such from the brain into the glymphatic fluid, which then drains into the lymphatic vessels and then goes through our circulation. Right. So it seems that some of the research is showing that melatonin is helping in that process. Melatonin is helping to reduce that inflammation because if our brain is inflamed, and the brain can get very inflamed because it's very fatty, it's filled with lipid. So lipid can readily be in that state of high cytokines. It can be bathed in that cytokine milieu. So with melatonin being a very effective anti inflammatory, having that at night to help perimenopausal women with their sleep, with their glymphatic fluid, brain function, less brain fog. I mean, you start putting all the pieces together mechanistically and you can see where it starts to make sense.

So how do you know if you have enough or too much?

Well, there are laboratory testing methods. So a lot of the labs that are in our space have urinary and salivary melatonin. I'm a little bit on the fence about those methods, honestly, because if you start to look under the hood of what your measuring, there can be a lot of things that can interfere with the melatonin. And what you're measuring in the urine is essentially a metabolite, you're measuring that. So imagine that you had some exposure to light, you're going to be changing your melatonin. So I think, and what I have, and I can provide it for your listeners as well, is we put together, so I work on a team of people and essentially putting together a list of all of the many signs of insufficient melatonin and what that could look like. Now you're mentioning melatonin toxicity. I hadn't thought about that because I think more often than not you tend to see deficient or insufficient levels.

I mean, I've never seen toxicity, I've just never seen someone who ever got up to that level. Especially as it's water based, it's actually.

Unique, it's amphiphilic, it's water and fat soluble so that it gets into the brain, it gets into the blood. So you are actually, it can flip to both sides. It's called amphiphilic. So it just exhibits both characteristics.

Interesting. That's so cool.

So with your melatonin, just having a little bit of fat might actually be worthwhile, but not completely necessary.

How do people find the sweet spot for themselves? Thank you for offering to include that survey and we'll put that in the show notes for people. How would someone, I mean, certainly perimenopause, but there's a lot of people who aren't perimenopausal or menopausal. So if you're not in that bookend time, how would you know if you're taking too much? Can you suppress your melatonin by taking melatonin? This, I think is a myth.

That's another myth. That was one of the myths that I wanted to talk about because one of the things that gets circulated is, oh, if you take melatonin, you're just going to stop your body from making melatonin. And there have actually been prospective studies about four of them that have set out to answer that question of whether or not your body does stop. And they do not find a cessation of melatonin production by the body when you take even higher levels of melatonin. Now I do want to make a statement, a myth on the other side about extensive long term use at high levels. We don't have enough data. So when we start to think about more than 3mg long term, there just isn't data. And I know that some practitioners out there in the space, they're taking double digits of melatonin without having the data. But that is not supported by science. I'm just wanting to also look in that direction as well. And another thing, Wendy, that I don't advocate, this is another myth that children need melatonin. You know, when I see all of these melatonin gummies that are created for kids and kids are on their devices late into the night, they're in their beds, they're looking on their phone, they're on their iPads. I mean, we need to start with lifestyle. When it comes to children, I don't think it's appropriate to have long term high dose melatonin nor bringing in melatonin to children. But I do think it's appropriate to have lower dose amounts of melatonin throughout the life cycle as they start to naturally decline. We do not reduce endogenous production is what the studies would show. Kids produce a lot of melatonin. The most melatonin that your body is ever going to make is when you're a child between the ages of like three months to, you know, as you hit puberty and you start that decline.

It'S all downhill from Teenagers, it's all down there.

Yeah, absolutely. Which, you know, and if we look at the rates of chronic diseases and how the risk for certain types of diseases, whether cardiovascular, metabolic, neurological, they all start to somewhat coincide with that dip in melatonin. And I'm not saying that melatonin is the sole cause of that, but it might be contributory.

Wait, it doesn't help, right? It's like being hungry and tired and overwhelmed and stressed. One of those alone, they just don't help.

Yeah. And all of our hormones are coming down at about the same time. Right. Testosterone is going down, estrogen and progesterone and women are coming down at about the same time that melatonin is making that very steep decline as well. So lots of things to take away from this. Right.

Wendy, there's tons of action items. Deanna, tell me, where can people find you? Because I know people are going to want to find you.

Aw. Well, just on my website, deannaminick.com so D E A N N A M I N I C H and what I have on there is, you know, over the decades I've just as an educator, I've just been loading up the website with resources that people can download for free. And I even tell clinicians, just go and take that variety tracker, use it in your practice. Like everything on there is for people to use. It's just my give back to society and I want people to make these things actionable. And for the melatonin assessment, however, that I would have to send to you separately. That is not uploaded to my website as of yet.

Okay. So if you send that to me, we'll get that in the show notes for people.

You bet.

So thank you for the difference you make in the world, Deanna, and for your commitment to it and your commitment to being healthy alongside making a difference. Like it's very inspiring to watch.

Oh well. And I feel that you are on the same wavelength in so many ways. Right. We are in the same circles and we care about self care.

All right, so for the listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of the five Journeys Feel freaking amazing podcast. Deanna Minick, who I love to pieces, is our guest today. You should absolutely look her up@deannaminik.com we'll put that in the show notes. And Deanna, thank you for being here. This has been great.

Oh, it's been lovely as always, Wendy, it's a joy to talk with you.

Thanks. You too. Were you inspired and empowered today? Don't forget to follow so we can help you keep transforming your health. Until next time.