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Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

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51–60 of 212 posts

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dosage was likely too high. I had the same issue using the smallest dose I could find at the pharmacy (5mg) and it was totally fixed by going to a pill one fifteenth of the dosage that I procured online.

I bite off tiny pieces of 5mg pills. One pill lasts me about a week and a half

I did this too. Someone had told me at one point the best thing to do to ingest it is to crush it somehow and keep it under your tongue for 30 seconds. And I also knew I wanted very small amounts of the pills I had. So I would take the tiniest nibbles of the chalky pills and leave them in my mouth for a while, until I could feel the effects slightly come on. Grew weirdly fond of the taste.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#52
post #47

On a youth camping trip, one morning a boy found his (contraband) snacks had been raided. A raccoon (probably) had chewed through the tent, into his backpack, eaten various snacks, and opened his bottle of melatonin and eaten quite a few pills. I wonder what the effects were of a massive overdose of melatonin on an animal the size of a raccoon...

It probably took a nap? I'm not sure about raccoon biology but in humans melatonin is one of the least hazardous things. I'm not sure you can overdose on it practically speaking

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#53
post #8

Melatonin is very interesting because it is believed that all living things (bacteria, fungi, etc) have it [1]. Calling it a "sleep aid" is somewhat off because in humans and other animals it is compound heavily involved in modulating circadian rhythms. It is not a "drug". And a little personal anecdote about it: I have gone through a period of bad sleep and depression and was taking melotonin to help with sleep. On…

I had much better results with tryptophan than melatonin in sleep quality.

Taking melatonin for me resulted in top many random grogginess or waking early in the middle of nights.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#54
post #37
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those studies suggest that melatonin plays a critical part in your circadian rhythm, which kind of implies that adding it to your food would also screw with your circadian rhythm. That alone seems like a good enough reason to caution against adding it into the food supply. Additionally, there are receptors for melatonin in a number of systems in the body, and we don't have much knowledge on what those receptors d…

Once I took melatonin to get a better afternoon nap. I never felt so groggy in my life. Completely screwed up my internal clock. I’m very careful with it since then. Taking it at night time doesn’t quite show how powerful it is - since you’re sleepy anyway.

My understanding is that melatonin is useful for adjusting one’s internal clock. As an example, if you were to change time zones you could use it to more quickly adjust to a new bed time.

That’s how I try to use it now, only when I want to adjust what time I get sleepy. For the same reason, I only take it for one or two nights. It doesn’t make sense to take it continuously to me.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#55
post #40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dosage of melatonin you can buy over-the-counter in the US always surprises me. In the UK I believe it’s only 2mg with a prescription, but I was seeing 5mg+ just in a grocery store.

Part of the problem historically (into the 2010s) was that MIT had a patent on doses of melatonin under 1mg[1]. So manufacturers could only avoid the patent by selling larger doses. That patent is expired but to some extent customers probably still think more is better. Personally, I use a fairly large dose of melatonin daily without ill effect; and it works better for me than smaller doses. [1]: https://patents.goog…

I've seen few better examples of what's wrong with the patent system than this.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#56
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chronic sleep disorders Wow. It's been a long time but I've definitely taken melatonin and if I felt any effects at all they definitely weren't strong if even noticable. Here (USA) Ambien is prescribed often for chronic sleep issues and that drug absolutely terrifies me. I've had friends addicted to it who wound up in a lot of criminal trouble for trespassing and wandering around beaches naked and things like that…

And what to think of this book, where the author literally persuades people to megadose on the hormone: https://www.amazon.com/Melatonin-Transform-Melatonin-resilie... It's mindboggling that this is freely available.

Yes, the absolute mind boggling horror of free people being able to decide for themselves what to ingest.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#57
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chronic sleep disorders Wow. It's been a long time but I've definitely taken melatonin and if I felt any effects at all they definitely weren't strong if even noticable. Here (USA) Ambien is prescribed often for chronic sleep issues and that drug absolutely terrifies me. I've had friends addicted to it who wound up in a lot of criminal trouble for trespassing and wandering around beaches naked and things like that…

And what to think of this book, where the author literally persuades people to megadose on the hormone: https://www.amazon.com/Melatonin-Transform-Melatonin-resilie... It's mindboggling that this is freely available.

That book screams things such as conspiracy, pseudoscience, crazy guy, cult leader and anything in between, to me.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#58
post #8

Melatonin is very interesting because it is believed that all living things (bacteria, fungi, etc) have it [1]. Calling it a "sleep aid" is somewhat off because in humans and other animals it is compound heavily involved in modulating circadian rhythms. It is not a "drug". And a little personal anecdote about it: I have gone through a period of bad sleep and depression and was taking melotonin to help with sleep. On…

Isn’t a drug just anything that affects how your body functions? It doesn’t have to be something that your body wouldn’t have in it anyway

Sugar affects how your body functions too.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#59

If you have IBD / Chrohn's be careful with melatonin https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/melatonin-used-to-...

As mentioned in the article, there's also studies where it may improve things. This particular one is a mouse model with induced DSS colitis, which I kind of wish would be erased from methodology forever across literature.

Not only is it mice rather than humans, but it is focused on replicating the end symptoms without mirroring the underlying causes.

For example, what if IBD/Crohn's had to do with decreased gut melatonin production, leading to bacterial changes in the gut leading to autoimmune attacks leading to gut inflammation/ulcerations? Without replicating the casual factors, simply inducing ulcerations using a chemical agent without also replicating the autoimmune attack isn't very helpful.

And anecdotally, my own disease is in complete remission with a surprisingly light medical treatment particularly after comparing dietary interventions inducing remission in two meta-analyses and finding the one key shared factor was reduction in processed sugars and introducing the same in my own diet.

But that's with me taking 20mg of melatonin for a sleep disorder. And when my sleep is disturbed too much (as occurs if I don't have the melatonin to use), the resulting physical stress can sometimes induce small flares.

In my own experience and in having looked at studies looking at melatonin use in human IBD patients, I'm fairly skeptical of the findings in the DSS mouse study are enough that anyone with sleep issues helped by melatonin should avoid it.

Especially given there's a 2-fold increase in risk of disease activity in humans with poor sleep:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659204/

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