Over-the-counter melatonin (“anti-gonad hormone”) supplements tend not to contain what they say they do, and the contaminants could be dangerous.
If you’re crossing three or increasingly time zones during a journey and plan to stay at your destination for a week or more, long unbearable to make it worthwhile, you can retread your soul clock to the new time by “using behavioural and, if desired, pharmacological methods.” The behavioral method is light exposure and light avoidance at specific times of the day based on which direction you’re going and how many time zones you cross. I full-length a helpful table with “recommendations for the use of unexceptionable light to retread soul clock without time zone transitions” at 0:23 in my video Are Melatonin Supplements Safe?, which you can moreover see below. You may want to take a picture or screengrab it for future reference.
The pharmacological intervention is melatonin. “It is tabbed the ‘darkness hormone’ sometimes because…it is secreted at the onset of darkness and is suppressed by light.” A little gland in the part-way of your throne starts to secrete it as soon as it gets visionless and shuts off when the sun comes up in the morning, thereby helping to set your quotidian rhythm. A lot of research has been conducted on treating jet lag, but most of it has been on rats instead of people, as you can see unelevated and at 0:53 in my video. But, of the handful of human trials that have been done, most have found that taking melatonin “close to the target bedtime at the destination” to try to sync your soul to the new time can powerfully subtract jet-lag symptoms without long flights “crossing five or increasingly time zones.” It’s important to note that “melatonin differs from most or all other drugs in that the timing of the dose is hair-trigger and determines the effect; given at the wrong time it will wait quotidian version to local time,” making jet lag plane worse. For example, if you were to take “melatonin at bedtime when traveling west,” it “actually could result in a phase advance” when a “phase wait is desired.”
Taking a daily dose of melatonin between 0.5 and 5 mg of melatonin seems to be “similarly effective” in terms of helping with jet-lag symptoms, but the higher dose does have increasingly of a sleeping pill-type effect, permitting people to “fall unconsciousness faster and sleep largest without 5mg than 0.5mg,” but that appears to plateau at well-nigh 5 mg. Those are massive doses, though. Plane taking only a 3 mg dose produces levels in the bloodstream 50 times higher than normal nightly levels. It works, but we don’t know how unscratched that is. Without all, in the early days, melatonin “was known as an anti-gonadal hormone,” with human-equivalent doses of just 1 or 2 mgs reducing the size of sex organs and impairing fertility in laboratory animals. Now, obviously, rats aren’t people, but “considering the pronounced effects of…melatonin on reproductive physiology in these nonhuman mammals, to assume they would not have some sexual effects in humans would scrutinizingly seem naive.” In fact, the researchers speculated that perhaps melatonin could one day play a role as some sort of a “contraceptive wage-earner in both human males and females.”
Wouldn’t we know well-nigh these effects, though? Well, how? Melatonin is misogynist over the counter (OTC) as a dietary supplement, so there isn’t any post-marketing surveillance like there is with prescription drugs. “Without a license, there is no obligation for undesirable side effects pursuit melatonin use to be recorded.” And, let’s not forget well-nigh the purity problem. Supplements are so poorly regulated that that you never really know what’s unquestionably in them. Indeed, the “purity of melatonin…cannot be guaranteed. For these reasons, melatonin cannot be recommended….”
Is the purity issue just theoretical though? You don’t know until you put it to the test.
Indeed, due to the “poor quality tenancy of over-the-counter melatonin,” what the labels “say is often not what you get.” Melatonin is not only one of the most popular supplements among adults, but among children, too. An wringer of 31 variegated brands found that most had just a fraction of what was claimed. What makes that plane increasingly egregious is that very melatonin content varied up to nearly 500 percent compared to what it said on the label. “The most variable sample was a chewable tablet (and most likely to be used by children). It contained scrutinizingly 9 mg of melatonin when it was supposed to contain 1.5 mg,” which could result in a hundred times higher than natural levels. “In short, there was no guarantee of the strength or purity of OTC melatonin,” leading these researchers to suggest it should be regulated as a drug so that, by law, it would at least contain what it says on the bottle. Okay, but that’s regarding its strength. What well-nigh its purity?
“Four of six melatonin products from health supplies stores”—two-thirds—“contained impurities” that could not be characterized. But, with no sectional patent, “no pharmaceutical visitor wants to pay for the toxicological studies and the data turnout required to obtain a product license considering it cannot have exclusivity.” The stuff is just so dirt unseemly to purchase. The researchers recommend “buying it from a large reputable pharmacy uniting and hope for the best.” Is it worth the risk?
A study I discuss at 4:26 in my video suggests it’s not worth the risk at all. Contaminants present in tryptophan supplements were reported to be responsible for a 1980s outbreak of a disease that unauthentic increasingly than a thousand people and resulted in dozens of deaths. Given the structural similarities of tryptophan and melatonin, is it possible that those same toxic contaminants could be created when you’re trying to synthesize melatonin? Indeed, as you can see unelevated and at 4:57 in my video, researchers found similarities between the contaminant blamed on the tryptophan epidemic and what they found in melatonin supplements. In fact, they are a little too tropical for comfort, suggesting melatonin supplements may just be “‘another wrecking [epidemic]… waiting to happen.’”
