Coming up on today's show.

People really need to know about melatonin, and they don't know.

They have half-truths.

There are thousands of published articles on melatonin.

That's why I can't understand why melatonin isn't getting truly the traction that it needs to.

I'm going to cover a lot of different ground here.

What is melatonin, the functions of melatonin,

how do we create healthy melatonin levels in the body naturally? How do we do it through nutrition

and lifestyle? Think of melatonin as the Swiss Army knife of functions. There are six main functions

that I see for melatonin. When we look at the ability of the body to produce

melatonin, it is peaking during childhood. We start to see that melatonin starts to decline

for puberty. By the time we get to our mid-50s, we start to see negligible amounts of melatonin

produced by the pineal gland. Some people say, how many tart cherries do I have to have to give me a basic dose of melatonin produced by the pineal gland. Some people say, how many tart cherries do I have to have

to give me a basic dose of melatonin that would take 2,718 fresh cherries in order to get

0.3 milligrams of melatonin. I never want to portray that health is just one thing, but I do think

melatonin is really essential.

Most people think of melatonin strictly as a sleep hormone. Explain why that's only the tip of the

iceberg. It's so much more than a sleep hormone. In fact, I don't even know if I would call

it a sleep hormone. It is a circadian

hormone with the byproduct of sleep. So I think because people don't understand the fuller

context of what melatonin is about and how it works, like we just reduce it to something like,

oh, it's for sleep. But it's a whole lot more than that. And that's what we're going to talk about.

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