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.
