REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News

Melatonin

by Raymond Francis

Synthetic melatonin is literally flying off the shelves. This, the result at least four published books on the subject, plus a front cover story in Newsweek and numerous other media exposures. Some suppliers are touting melatonin as a magic bullet that reverses the aging process as well as helping with everything from cancer to insomnia. When people think they have found the fountain of youth, products fly off the shelves. So what about melatonin? Is it something you should be taking?

Whether or not you put something into your body is a personal decision, but like any important decision, it should be made with knowledge and intelligence. Melatonin is a hormone. Hormones are chemical messengers that are essential to the body's self-regulation. For instance, if you have too much sugar in your blood, the hormone insulin tells your cells to take up sugar. If you have too little sugar, the hormone glucagon tells the liver to release more sugar. In this way the body keeps itself in the delicate balance that is essential to good health. Just a few molecules of a hormone are capable of having a significant effect.

Medical evidence indicates that melatonin is effective in treating certain sleep and body-clock disorders such as jet lag, ordinary insomnia, and maladaptation to shift work. However, there is virtually no scientific data to support that melatonin will reverse the aging process, or for a number of other claims which are being made.

If one were to take melatonin occasionally, for instance to overcome jet lag on a trip from San Francisco to Moscow, it would provide a practical benefit while probably not doing much harm. However, if taken at the wrong time, melatonin can make jet lag or insomnia worse. But, taking melatonin often or on a daily basis is taking a chance. We already know that melatonin can cause nausea, headaches, nightmares, worsening of existing depression, and drops in body temperature, which can increase the risk of developing viral infections. Dr. Richard Wurtman, director of the clinical research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that widespread use of over-the-counter melatonin is "scary".

We have to remember what hormones do. They work like thermostats. They turn things on and turn things off to keep the body self-regulated within the biological parameters essential to good health. Because our knowledge of what roles melatonin and other hormones play is limited, we should use them with caution if at all. Taking a hormone pill, upsets the body's delicate control mechanisms. It turns a whole bunch of things on and a whole bunch of things off, temporarily putting the body out of self-regulation. Taking hormones on a regular basis will throw your body out of balance full time. Tampering with the body's delicate system of checks and balances is not a good idea. Absolutely no one knows the consequences of taking melatonin on a long-term basis.

Further, given the way our physicians take medical histories and their current state of knowledge of these matters, it would be extremely difficult to trace medical problems back to supplemental melatonin. People could develop diseases, and we wouldn't know that melatonin was the cause.

Currently, no one really understands all the things a hormone does in the body. No one knows how melatonin is eliminated from the body, so frequent doses could build up in the system. No one has a clue about all the ways hormones interact with each other, or with other medications or chemicals we may be taking in. Our lack of knowledge is not encouraging.

Given all the above, wisdom would dictate not playing games with this kind of complex chemistry because odds are you will lose the game. And that goes for any hormone, not just melatonin. Women on hormone replacement therapy need to be especially aware of this. To take melatonin or to not take melatonin, that choice is yours, but beware.

Raymond Francis is an M.I.T.-trained scientist, a registered nutrition consultant, author of Never Be Sick Again and Never Be Fat Again, host of the Beyond Health Show, Chairman of the The Project to End Disease and an internationally recognized leader in the field of optimal health maintenance.

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