Indicates 2mg and 5mg were given along with the placebo. While these are common dosages available in the US, these are higher dosages than recommended by at least some sleep experts. The thesis doesn't seem to differentiate between the dosages when evaluating cognitive processes.
Now I want to evaluate my sleep stack against morning cognition.
I read a while back that our brains produce roughly 0.3 mg of melatonin when signaling us to go to sleep. When I occasionally do use melatonin I split a 1mg pill into half or thirds. I find that it works well enough to help me fall asleep. Wondering how the study would look if hwy used 1/2 mg doses.
Go to the Netherlands, to the Kruidvat (or Etos or something similar) and just buy a lifetime worth of supply of Melatonin. It's 0.1 mg.
I'm Dutch and live here. But my wife is American. If I ever happen to live in the US (chances are there in my lifetime). I'm going to employ this strategy.
I don't trust the US with this and the Netherlands has proven itself to me in this sense. There are probably many more European countries that do this well. I'm simply not changing a winning team.
But I'd love to hear from other people that believe they found a good melatonin supply in a country. I'm curious.
Drugs are regulated with the same care in the US, the problem is you are comparing a drug in Europe with a dietary supplement in the US. You can’t expect to grab a high quality of any dietary supplement from say Walmart. It’s the same in Europe. In the US there are labs making high quality dietary supplements, but you usually don’t find them at retail stores or even Amazon, so it needs a bit of research.
Walmart typically carries a large selection of supplements from the 'Nature Made' brand (yellow label), which tests/certifies most of their products through the independent 'U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP)'.
While that may not help with the arguments over the correct dosage, it at least means you can trust the ingredients and dosage on the label isn't a lie. A random mail order supplement or bulk powder seller on Amazon...not so much.
Fortunately, it's the former. It's a 200+ year old nonprofit founded by a group of physicians in 1820 that developed the modern drug standards that most of the world actually relies on.
Towards the bottom of the page at Delta's careers page you'll note that Delta's headquarters in Atlanta has a Walmart Pharmacy in it. Delta is essentially signalling to its constantly moving employees that you're more likely to find a Walmart near an airport than a CVS or a Walgreens (especially in super-rural America) and that pharmacy is a constant stream of pilots and flight attendants grabbing refills on their way through.
You seem to be beating around some kind of bush by intentionally neglecting to define your definition of "high quality" in this context. Are you saying that 1mg of melatonin from Walmart or Amazon do not actually contain 1mg of melatonin?
If they aren't sold in retail stores or Amazon how are they sold? Private websites?
Amazon requires random sampling confirmation for supplements from independent labs though, so anything officially listed in a supplement category should be reliable.
So much for a good faith discussion here. I don't appreciate that you tell me to "get a grip". You're not steelmanning. Instead, your reaction comes off as a knee jerk reaction. There are enough communities where I have to come up with defenses to deal with that nonsense. Don't do it here please.
US melatonin measured dosage can be 4x as much as what is reported [1, 2].
Also 0.3 mg is the recommended dose [4]. A lot of doses in the US are way higher than 0.3 mg. In the Netherlands it's stupidly easy to find 0.1 mg doses (e.g. at the Kruidvat or at the Etos). It's in part why I never looked further.
And since you're new here (55 days ago, 13 karma as of writing). I strongly recommend you to read the HN guidelines [3]. All people who are on HN should follow them, not knowing them degrades the community experience that we're having here.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive
There are a few others that apply as well.
[1] Cohen PA, Avula B, Wang YH, Katragunta K, Khan I. Quantity of Melatonin and CBD in Melatonin Gummies Sold in the US. JAMA. 2023;329(16):1401–1402. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.2296
(referring to melatonin) yeah this is valid. I used to take melatonin every night, found out about the problems with us supply, couldn't find anything nearing 1/2 mg, and gave up. I took kids gummies for a few weeks, but I still think they were 1mg.
I can Google very well. The smallest dosages I found were 0.5 and 0.25 for kids (against AAP advice!)
The discussion was about 0.1 for finer grained control and implied ability to experiment with dosages rather than stick with third party selected dosage regardless of needs.
> You literally said you can't trust the US for this. Okay.
Refute my sources, I gave you sources. You're ignoring it. If you're ignoring the studies I provide, why have a discussion at all?
I've been getting melatonin at 0.1 mg for the past 15 years in the Netherlands. I first got wind that it was different in the US on a Huberman podcast. He got it from studies. I cited some.
Pharma and Healthcare was the implication I believe. The US approach to these things has a bad reputation internationally though I am informed that it’s an amazing system if you’re rich.
Let’s not conflate US pharma with their healthcare more generally.
The US is dominant in pharmaceutical and biotech, and FDA is generally excellent as a regulator, despite (IMO) sometimes being too conservative and resistant to any ideas not gestated within the agency. There are weird quirks (like the wide and wacky dosages of melatonin available over the counter, in this example) but most countries have such quirks.
US melatonin measured dosage can be 4x as much as what is reported [1, 2].
Have you never looked into stuff like this? It's all over social media and the claims are relatively easy to verify. I'm asking because I need to know if I'm in a bubble or not.
[1] Cohen PA, Avula B, Wang YH, Katragunta K, Khan I. Quantity of Melatonin and CBD in Melatonin Gummies Sold in the US. JAMA. 2023;329(16):1401–1402. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.2296
I used to do this too, but I learned that will give you inconsistent dosage as the pills aren't guaranteed to have the active ingredient spread uniformly.
Long ago when I paid attention to this, the wisdom was to watch out because most melatonin pills are targeted to geriatric patients. Old folks need a significant boost to their melatonin to deal with eroding sleep quality, not a little hit of it. So as a 30 year old or younger you want a fraction of what grandad is taking.
For sleep aids this is often not the case. I'm in my early 50s and tried Doxylamine Succinate 2 years ago for the first time - an innocent Costco "Sleep Aid".
I was beyond groggy - quite nonfunctional - until the following afternoon and would not have trusted myself with operating a car even then.
Doxylamine succinate is a fairly powerful antihistamine. I only take it when I'm sick, and I take a half -dose. It has closer to a 12-hour half life, which is why you felt so groggy. I have to basically take it at 7pm if I want to be operational by 10am the following day.
You wouldn’t, if you remembered that medically speaking, younger people “needing” melatonin pills has been pretty fringe until very recently, and the number of young people who need it is still comparatively small.
You can find smaller pills. But you might have to try several chains or order online to get them.
It's been the standard recommendation for dealing with jetlag in the last 15-20 years. And usually people who regularly experience jetlag due to repeated international professional trips are not elderly.
Last time I was in the US the lowest dose melatonin gummies I could find in a CVS were 1mg — kids gummies.
That's more than 3x the actual recommended dose for an average adult based on the research others have shared in this thread. So no, they're not starting from a sensible starting point.
Were they packaged as kid gummies or are you presuming that gummies = kids? Because that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Those vitamin D gummies I buy because I will take them instead of might take them consistently, are not child doses either. They’re marketing gummies to adults here.
There is a rumour that the high doses are because the correct dose was under patent.
I can only find that in a comment here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th... but I could have sworn it was in the main article when I first read it. (If so that makes it less likely, because the author revises his articles for correctness)
That (albeit long) article is worth reading. For example, it explains that melatonin is a phase signal, so being saturated with too much melatonin actually makes the signal less clear (as well as potentially causing other issues).
That's not a "rumour", it's conspiracy theory. Because everything is a conspiracy theory now.
No, the dosage is not patented. It doesn't even make sense. How would it work? "Oh, 0.5mg is patented, so let's put 1mg in the tablets and never sell 0.5mg".
I can get all kinds of dosages from the pharmacy. However, most of what they stock is "too high", probably because there's very little research/wisdom/knowledge around the supplement.
You could actually look at the sources before dismissing them as a conspiracy theory. It took less than 2 seconds to click through to the patent, of which the very first claim is:
- 1. A method of reducing the period before the onset of sleep in an individual comprising administering to the individual a single dose of melatonin of less than 1 mg, said single dose effective to raise the peak plasma level of melatonin in the individual to within physiological nocturnal levels of normal untreated individuals.
"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out."
I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend the modern world isn't meaningfully different. Artificial light is a big factor, yes. So are odd and constantly changing work hours from a world that now operates 24/7. So is the common expectation of monophasic sleep in general. So is travel and jet lag that we now have to endure, and dietary changes, and stimulants especially for folks who just don't even have 8 uninterrupted hours available for sleep. So are dramatic global temperature changes. The list goes on, and there is more data in this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11152632/
I can hardly blame anyone for wanting to "hack" or "optimize" their sleep. It seems more necessary now than it has ever been.
I suspect their point was that optimising sleep is relatively simple. Go to bed in a timely manner, keep your bedroom cool, use blackout blinds and sunrise lamps. Don't drink caffeine in the afternoon or evening. It's not rocket science.
I end up biting a lot of pills to get around that dose. I definitely always felt groggy until I dialed down the dose to just right, and it works perfectly: I fall asleep far quicker and more assuredly, and I don't feel to groggy. I can't believe they sell pills as large as they do, what other medication varies in dosage as much?
Vitamin B12 supplements can be found in a range covering about 4 orders of magnitude. The RDA is 2.4 ug/day and the Costco daily multivitamin provides 6mcg, but here is someone selling 10,000 ug supplements: https://www.hartzells.com/b-12-10000mcg-90960
It's easy to find any other order of magnitude between those if you like. A half-pound of beef liver would give you about 186 ug.
I suspect the dosage and absorption isn't fully understood yet or very individual. For me some 2mg pills work fine and other 3mg pills don't; currently I use 4mg time-release and it's mostly fine. 1 mg is definitely not enough for me.
I would be groggy a few hours after taking the pill but not in the morning.
Since they're not regulated as medication, melatonin pills have no guarantees about actual melatonin content. In studies, the vast majority of supplement labels are inaccurate.
Would it not be easier to not drink so much caffeine late in the day? Unless you're jetlagged, there's not much evidence AFAIK that melatonin will induce sleep better than a placebo.
Not OP, but I’ve had horrible sleep over the past year. I had taken melatonin a while back before stopping, so on a whim, I decided to bite off a bit of one of my old 5mg pills before sleep. Didn’t give it any second thought — didn’t even think it would do anything. But I slept like a baby for the first time in months. And it’s completely reproducible.
I apologize for not reading the full study before submitting it on Hacker News and for the misleading headline on the frontpage given the context of the dosages used, I really should have noticed that the link only contained an abstract.
And having a 0.3mg (300mcg) group - the dose many meticulous online self-experimenters have found sufficient, a mere 15% of their lowest-tested 2mg.
Would a headline "morning coffee found to cause stomach problems and anxiety" be reasonable, if the smallest dose tested was 7 cups – and that dosage fact was omitted from the attached abstract/story?
As someone who (foolishly) only drank decaf until my early 40s, I can tell you that the mental difference when you start drinking caffeine is just amazing.
It is wonderful stuff. And not only can you finally think in the mornings, but provided you don't get heart issues from it, it appears to reduce your risk of Alzheimer's substantially.
Everyone is different. I'm in my 40s and throughout my while life have found that caffeine only has two effects on me: 1) If I have any later than afternoon, I can't fall asleep when I want to, 2) If I have too much at once (like a single diet pop), I get the jitters.
Otherwise, literally no effect. I sometimes drink tea in the morning for breakfast (a London fog) and it doesn't affect my cognition or mood at all.
I take a 3mg every night, but I've read that independent labs have studied the common OTC brands and found wildly different Melatonin content than advertised.
83% less to 478% more than the dosage advertised on the label, based on these studies.
Because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates melatonin as a dietary supplement rather than a prescription drug, manufacturers have less strict oversight.
I assume this is with tablets? In which case I think maybe try liquid solution instead? Sounds like either the tablets aren’t being absorbed at all or they are wildly off in the concentration (which is common because it’s so unregulated)
Just 1mg in liquid form is plenty for me, and that’s as someone who has had severe sleep onset difficulty for as long as I remember before I started using melatonin. I was told to hold the liquid under my tongue to absorb for a while before swallowing. I get it in 10mg/mL and it comes with a little oral syringe that you draw up 0.1mL with.
Yeah, tablet. Though medication is highly regulated in Australia, I might try liquid form next time I go for a prescription (anything over 2mg is regulated here). Thanks!
https://d.lib.msu.edu/etd/51312
Indicates 2mg and 5mg were given along with the placebo. While these are common dosages available in the US, these are higher dosages than recommended by at least some sleep experts. The thesis doesn't seem to differentiate between the dosages when evaluating cognitive processes.
Now I want to evaluate my sleep stack against morning cognition.