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Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

anthropocenemagazine.org

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Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#91

Post by inglor_cz »

vidarh wrote: post #63
mallomarmeasle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about the dosage you might’ve been taking. Many, many people take much more than needed, and higher doses are more likely to have adverse effects. 250-300 µg is an appropriate dosage for most adults. Note that common over-the-counter dosages are 10 to 25 mg. There is a Cochran collaboration meta-analysis supporting this. I work in a pharmacy school in the US. One of my colleagues told me a funny anecdote abo…

10-25mg seems really high. UK NHS advice is 2mg for sleep, 3mg for jet lag, w/advice it can be increased to up to 10mg if you don't get the desired.effect at lower doses. For my part, 3mg leaves me totally ruined (exhausted, lethargic, worse than being ill) the following day. 1mg seems to improve my sleep, but I can totally believe less would work too. I will certainly not go higher. UK is weird with this - I can ord…

I can tolerate 3 mg very well, 5 mg seems to be the bridge too far, where I wake up exhausted and lethargic.

I experimented with higher doses, such as 15 mg. They worked like sledgehammer to the forehead, with a weird feeling the next day. Not recommended. A good sleep mask and ear plugs are better than increasing dosage of melatonin, at least for me.

Here in CZ, melatonin is OTC.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#92

Post by orev »

89vision wrote: post #34
tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #9

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

It seems like that would be very hard to get a consistent dose with such a small amount. Those cuts would need to be extremely precise. It would be more reliable to buy the 1mg children’s dose and cut them in half.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#93

Post by wnevets »

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…

> It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone.

You can thank Mel Gibson and industry lobbying [1][2].

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/supplements-a...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV2olDA0w8U

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#94

Post by inglor_cz »

Arrath wrote: post #6
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

Didn't see anything in the article about how much melatonin a person would get from eating food treated this way. I sometimes take small doses of melatonin during the summer months when my sleep pattern tends to drift if I don't actively keep it under control but wonder if consuming it through diet would end up making lots of people groggy during the day.

Forget groggy, melatonin generally works as a sleep aid for me but also gives me wildly trippy and fucked up dreams. I stopped using it specifically because of that.

Melatonin causes wild dreams for me, too, but I actually enjoy them. Free cinema.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#95

Post by denverllc »

Speaking of fruit preservation: has anyone bought prepacked/sliced fruit from the grocery store / Costco that has an "off" flavor to it? Almost like they added some preservative. (The different fruit had the same flavor, which makes me think something was added). I have, and nothing was on the ingredients, so I am wondering what could have been added.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#96

Post by kevinh456 »

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…

Ambien makes me wake up screaming at the top of my lungs. Every time. I never remember but it scares the shit out of my wife. No Ambien for me. Lol

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#97

Post by metadat »

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.

I hadn't heard of this before!

After some digging here are some interesting discoveries related to melatonin and doxylamine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/insomnia/comments/spoaec/anyone_hav...

https://www.reddit.com/r/insomnia/comments/spoaec/anyone_hav...

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#98

Post by brianpan »

mrguyorama wrote: post #82
speak_plainly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Nor is there a concrete definition of hormone.

Drug: Chemical that affect you (by ingesting), but isn't food.

Hormone: Chemical that affects you.

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#99

Post by jurynulifcation »

temp0826 wrote: post #89
swozey wrote: 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…

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

Ethanol is also a GABA-A agonist if I recall correctly

Re: Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

#100

Post by droopyEyelids »

Most people know melatonin as extracellular melatonin, released by the pineal gland, which acts as a hormone to promote sleep.

Melatonin is also a powerful intracellular antioxidant that protects cells against oxidative stressors made in mitochondria as byproducts of ATP production. Aside from the pineal gland melatonin, melatonin is produced directly in mitochondria by cytochrome c oxidase upon exposure to near infrared.

https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?t=404

That seems more relevant to this discussion.

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