Hello and welcome to Series Inquiries. Only this is episode 336. I'm Thomas. That's Lindsay. How you doing? I'm fantastic. How are you? Doing better. And this time I won't regale you with hours of talk of Arlo being waking up too early.

He's gotten slightly better. We're working. Interesting. Yeah. It's, well, it's hit and miss. It's gotten the point where like some days it's okay, but the other days it's not. It's like 50-50 now instead of every single morning. So that's nice.

Well, it's been, it's been a few years since we recorded part one. I know. I guess it's an age effect. It's been a minute. Yeah. But yeah, no, it's still still solidly a morning, dude. But it's just a question of whether we can get him to occupy himself during the morning.

But yeah, it's time for this part two. I think the last cliffhanger we left on was I'm curious if one might be able to effectively use melatonin to regulate sleep. I know that, you know, people do that for jet lag. People do that to try to like reset their sleep. And then I saw a headline recently that was something about like it being really bad for kids. So it's related to this whole thing. Give us a melatonin explainer.

Yeah, yeah. So with the caveat that I have never delivered a baby and I'm not a real doctor. My understanding like prior to actually going and looking at stuff was that melatonin does in fact work. And that is still that is still my impression from looking at recent meta analyses and stuff.

So yeah, so there's there's lots of research demonstrating its efficacy in reducing jet lag. As you just said, treating sleep onset insomnia, improving sleep quality and a number of different types of populations. And that goes for both adults and kids. So that's a thing. And in terms of so it is efficacious. Right. I mean, like in other countries, it's actually medicine that you get a prescription for.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So the US is kind of behind the times in terms of this still being an over the counter supplement, which is part part of the problem that will come back to you in just a second.

So it does work for those things. And in terms of of safety, there was actually a review that was published in just 2021 about they did a review looking at the serious adverse events in studies that specifically have used very high doses of melatonin.

To sort of see like if it's well tolerated, even at high doses. And this is an adult sample, by the way. So there's that. But that review suggested that even in significant doses, melatonin is is pretty well tolerated.

Like there were not any records of significant adverse events. And again, I don't take medical medical advice from a podcast.

Correct. We're not liable for any melatonin overdoses.

No. But yeah, it is apparently well tolerated, even in high doses, according to this. Right. So it actually was interesting. So apparently the reason that they published that review last year was because, and I don't know if you'd heard of this, but I had not they were evaluating it at least at one point as a potential treatment and preventive for COVID.

Oh, why did that work? It's apparently an antioxidant. So they thought it might. Yeah. And I don't have a really good sense. I didn't have time to look into this piece of it very much. So I don't have a very good sense of like how strong the evidence is that it actually works. But there's still things being published on it now. So why didn't they go. Okay. Why didn't the idiots go with that one? That would have been, you know, because they last onto the like they're hiding the real thing melatonin actually cures whatever. And then they could have all overdosed on that and been asleep.

And we wouldn't have to hear them. That would be nice. Yeah, exactly. Why did today instead they pick the horse D warmer weird things go. I know it's terrible. Yeah. So that was why they published the review because calls to poison control increased by like 70% after this was in the headlines or whatever, which is interesting because I didn't even hear about it. But. So that's adults safe for adults, even in high doses. And there was a study or a paper that came out in 2020.

On the efficacy and safety of melatonin for sleep onset insomnia in children and adolescents. And so this was a meta analysis that they did of randomized controlled trials.

And the evidence there to suggest that melatonin is well tolerated in children and adolescents and is effective for the short term treatment of sleep onset insomnia. But so one caveat that I think is maybe what you were reading about you can tell me from wrong.

I found a paper and it was a response to an analysis that had been done of melatonin in Canada. And essentially the the crux of this paper is is looking at the poor quality control of over the counter melatonin.

So again, like in the UK and Australia and many other countries melatonin is just medicine, you get a prescription. But in the US currently and in Canada up until a few years ago, we can just buy it over the counter, right.

And as folks are probably aware, the downside of that is that over the counter supplements are not regulated by the FDA. So the actual content of what you get in melatonin supplements and any supplements bigger than melatonin can vary really widely.

So yeah, so this study that this response I read was was talking about this study analyze products purchase from grocery stores and pharmacies in Canada and found that the actual melatonin content of products varied from between 83% less to what was on the label to nearly 500% more.

That was on the label. So yeah, like if it says you're getting five milligrams, it's actually 25 milligrams are up to that. That's nuts. Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that this was in the supplement section actually for me was why I didn't think it was real. Right. You know, which was just, you know, that's kind of a cognitive error on my part like it doesn't necessarily follow.

Because yeah, like everything in there is fake. So, you know, the odds are so I was like, oh, it must be fake if it's available there. And if I had I lived in Europe, where it's like you get a prescription for it, I'd be like, oh, okay, I must be medicine.

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