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Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

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Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#81

Post by mrguyorama »

vvpan wrote: post #36
ac29 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Melatonin in the US is frequently found in 5 or 10 mg doses, which is a huge amount and can cause adverse reactions in people. A better dose is 0.3mg (300 mcg) or 0.5mg (500 mcg).

General problem with "supplements" I imagine.

Also, a supplement being labled "500 micrograms" has no requirement to be correct. The FDA has handwaved away the entire industry, and broadly there is zero quality control for actual active ingredients. Many supplements will claim that they've been tested, but there's no legal requirement to do so, the labs are usually owned by supplement makers, and there's no penalty for lying about any testing as fraudulent marketing claims largely go unpunished because the US judicial branch chooses to interpret the law stupidly conservatively

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#82

Post by mrguyorama »

speak_plainly wrote: post #18
circuit10 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m no doctor but I think the difference between a drug and a hormone is that a drug is a foreign substance you take to affect the way your body functions while a hormone is something produced endogenously to regulate various processes in the body. People need to understand that melatonin is a hormone and that comes with different risks and issues than a drug.

There is no concrete definition of "Drug". Most working definitions are "Something that affects you, but isn't food".

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#83

Post by Havoc »

Take care with the stuff. Thought it's safer than other sleeping tablets (and it is), but when they say don't use long term it's for a reason.

Ended up with strange continuous low key chest pains. Was fine, just had to stop

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#84

Post by mbernstein »

swozey wrote: post #64
amelius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Dr John Lieurance is a Chiropractic Neurologist and Naturopathic Physician I had never heard of a Chiropractic Neurologist. Interesting. Welp reading about him was a wild ride. To save people a click - > After becoming severely ill with Lyme, EBV and Mold illness, Dr John Lieurance began to explore ways to improve health at the deepest cellular level. His journey brought him to discover Melatonin as the core anti-o…

You haven’t heard of it because it’s unfortunately pseudo science.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#85

Post by orev »

jrockway wrote: post #79
skybrian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with a lot of medicine the dosage matters a lot. I will take .5 mg of melatonin when going to bed earlier than usual and the effect is fairly subtle. But it's commonly sold in 10mg doses which seems very high.

My understanding is that melatonin has an inverse correlation between dosage and effect. 10mg won't make you as sleepy as 1mg. I take 1mg of melatonin every night, and it does immediately make me sleepy. I used to buy 10mg at the drugstore and it just makes me feel like shit for the next day.

The optimal dose is 0.3mg, so I would cut the 1mg tablet in half to get close. You’re still doing better than most people who are essentially taking a horse-sized dose at 10mg.

The 10mg makes you feel bad because it’s still in your system the next day. At the recommended (lower) doses, your body fully clears it out by morning, so you feel alert and also have much lower risk of long term effects.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#86

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

maltyr wrote: post #5

I'm not sure we should cover our food in melatonin. People would recoil at the thought of pretty much any other hormone being added to our food supply. It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone. The article suggests it's safer than current food additives, but I find that statement questionable. We don't understand the full effect of Melatonin on the human body…

I think it was here, where I read that the optimal dosage for melatonin was 0.3 mg (300 micrograms).

The smallest OTC dosage you can get, is 1mg, and they sell 10mg pills.

When I switched from 10mg to 0.3mg, my sleep improved drastically. Also, I stopped getting those really weird dreams.

But I don't like taking stuff, and ended up stopping completely, a long time ago.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#87

Post by orev »

RyJones wrote: post #74
teamonkey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be uncontrolled in the US but not everywhere. It’s not allowed to be sold without a prescription where I live, and even then it’s only prescribed for chronic sleep disorders. I always ask anyone travelling to the US to bring back a bottle.

I asked a pharmacy in Reykjavik if they sold it, or Tylenol PM, and the pharmacist reacted like I'd asked to buy a brick of cocaine.

Never take Tylenol PM to sleep, unless you also have a reason to need a painkiller (acetaminophen). Acetaminophen is toxic to the liver and can cause liver failure if overdosed. A regular diphenhydramine (Benadryl) is the just the PM part without the extra risk (except that has its own risks).

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#88

Post by worldsayshi »

jrockway wrote: post #79
skybrian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with a lot of medicine the dosage matters a lot. I will take .5 mg of melatonin when going to bed earlier than usual and the effect is fairly subtle. But it's commonly sold in 10mg doses which seems very high.

My understanding is that melatonin has an inverse correlation between dosage and effect. 10mg won't make you as sleepy as 1mg. I take 1mg of melatonin every night, and it does immediately make me sleepy. I used to buy 10mg at the drugstore and it just makes me feel like shit for the next day.

>inverse correlation between dosage and effect

That sounds quite magical. Wouldn't it be more likely that the uptake characteristics were very different for the two variants? Not sure if possible but maybe the 10mg variant were still being digested the day after so it would make you sleepy then instead of during the night?

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#89

Post by temp0826 »

swozey wrote: post #45
teamonkey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be uncontrolled in the US but not everywhere. It’s not allowed to be sold without a prescription where I live, and even then it’s only prescribed for chronic sleep disorders. I always ask anyone travelling to the US to bring back a bottle.

> 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…

Fun fact, both ambien (zolpidem) and muscimol (in amanita muscaria mushrooms) act as a GABA-A agonists.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#90

Post by diego_sandoval »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #86
maltyr wrote: post #5

I'm not sure we should cover our food in melatonin. People would recoil at the thought of pretty much any other hormone being added to our food supply. It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone. The article suggests it's safer than current food additives, but I find that statement questionable. We don't understand the full effect of Melatonin on the human body…

I think it was here, where I read that the optimal dosage for melatonin was 0.3 mg (300 micrograms). The smallest OTC dosage you can get, is 1mg, and they sell 10mg pills. When I switched from 10mg to 0.3mg, my sleep improved drastically . Also, I stopped getting those really weird dreams. But I don't like taking stuff, and ended up stopping completely, a long time ago.

I can attest to having weirder dreams and more nightmares when taking melatonin (3mg)
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