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Melatonin – Quality Sleep Yes – But So Much More

For most, Melatonin is synonymous with “sleep”.  And for good reason.  This hormone, naturally secreted in your pineal gland in your brain, helps regulate your circadian rhythm (your body’s 24 hour clock).  It also encourages deep, restful sleep.  

This can have concrete and well-understood benefits in a variety of cases:

• Jet Lag:  One of the worst side-effects of long distance travel is the disruption in your circadian rhythm, where it’s daytime in your current location but your body “thinks” it’s the middle of the night.  Our bodies never had to evolve to deal with this rapid change in timezones, and since melatonin peaks only when it’s dark, your body experiences daytime drowsiness, impaired cognition, digestive problems, and restless sleep.  Taking Melatonin at the right times of day can help encourage your body to calm down and go to sleep faster than adjusting naturally.  Learn more about Jet Lag about how melatonin can help.  
• Delayed Sleep-Wake Phase Disorder (DSWPD): People suffering from this condition have trouble falling asleep and waking up at “natural” times.  Instead of going to bed before midnight and waking at 8 or 9am, people with DSWPD much prefer going to bed between 2am-6am and waking at 10am-1pm.  Society can misunderstand or hand-wave away this condition that 7-16% of adolescents, calling them “night owls”, and societal pressure to stay out late at night can actually encourage this abnormal sleeping schedule.  Taking Melatonin is one of the ways you can break out of this cycle, to gently prompt your body.  Learn more about the negative effects of DSWPD and how to fix it.  

But Melatonin is so much more than just a simple sleep hormone.  Hang tight:  How about a potential Fountain of Youth?  An exaggeration?  Read on.  

 

Studies have shown that natural melatonin production starts to decline by the age of 30 – and at a pretty rapid pace of approximately 2% per year.  This goes hand in hand with a number of other aging mechanisms that kick into our organs and body tissues as we age.  Research also shows that the disruption of melatonin production is a characteristic feature of Alzheimer’s that can be observed early as in the very first preclinical stages of this debilitating neurological disease. Many of these benefits have already been confirmed for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Since the age-induced decline in melatonin production may well play a significant role in aging processes, it follows that taking a melatonin supplementation could in turn delay the aging process.

Melatonin Fights to keep you Youthful and Healthy:

• Antioxidant Supercharge:  Oxidation is the natural and essential process by which the cells in your body are supplied with oxygen.  But the process is not totally without side effects.  Molecules with one or more unpaired electrons, called “free radicals”, are generated during oxidation.  These unstable molecules will often “steal” that electron from nearby cellular membranes and other structures, damaging them over time.  Antioxidants prevent some of the harmful effects of free radicals by neutralizing them.  Powerful antioxidants include vitamins A, C and E, and the minerals copper, zinc and selenium.  But, Melatonin has been found to possess 10x more antioxidant power than vitamin E!  It’s a major antioxidant boost, and can help suppress a variety of diseases caused by oxidative stress (too much free radicals in your body), including heart disease and certain cancers.  

• Increase Insulin Sensitivity and Suppress Diabetic Complications:  This follows directly from the last benefit of antioxidant boosting, because it’s been shown that people with type 2 diabetes experience alterations of their melatonin secretion.  This in turn can lead to a free radicals getting too high in the body.  There is very promising research showing many of the debilitating complications of diabetes are reduced with Melatonin supplements, including nephropathy, retinopathy, and cardiovascular disease.

• Delays Alzheimer’s Disease:  Melatonin has the great benefit of being able to cross the blood-brain barrier; a protective screen set up by your body that most chemical compounds do not get to bypass.  Once in the brain, its antioxidation superpowers get right to work, repairing and preventing oxidation in critical cellular components of your brain, like mitochondria.  Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative diseases are all strongly linked to a breakdown of the brain’s chemical infrastructure.  

• Combat Obesity:  Obesity is a complex and multi-faceted disease, and two of the known drivers are sleep deprivation and emotional over-eating (often in the form of late-night eating binges).  These two can often exacerbate each other, because eating late at night forces your body to digest the food, meaning it cannot shut down properly for sleep, leading to even more sleep deprivation.  Melatonin can help you break out of this cycle by encouraging you to fall asleep at a reasonable time, meaning you aren’t staying up late, bored and looking for something to eat.  This in turn, can cut out thousands of calories a week from your diet!  Melatonin has also been implicated as a regulator and controller of brown, i.e. fat burning adipose tissue mass and activity.  It is obvious that the pineal hormone is already touted as the most promising “naturally occurring substance with no reported toxicity” that may serve as a novel approach for the treatment of obesity.  

Other Benefits of Melatonin

• Energy homeostasis   —  prevent weight gain, promote fat loss
• Insulin action   —  increase insulin sensitivity
• Glucose and lipid control   —  reduce risk of dyslipidemia & type II diabetes
• Liver function   —  reduced risk of NAFLD and related diseases
• Adipose tissue function   —  reduced body fat storage and increased fat loss
• Skeletal muscle function   — faster recovery, higher performance & glucose uptake

The Melatonin MaximizeHQ Patch Advantage

Why bother with our MaxmizeHQ Patch when you can just take melatonin as a supplement?  There’s two big reasons: Increased effectiveness and gastrointestinal wellness.  When you take anything as a supplement, it goes into your stomach and through your digestive tract, where it’s eventually absorbed through your intestinal walls into your bloodstream.  Along the way, a significant amount of the supplement is lost, either due to your gut bacteria consuming it first, or just the inherent inefficiencies in digestion.  So when you see the pill dosage on the bottle, just know that you are only getting a percentage of that amount.  Also, for people with sensitive digestion systems, some supplements can cause stomachache or other symptoms, as a large concentrated amount of a certain compound is suddenly introduced to their gastrointestinal tract.  

Our MaximizeHQ Patch on the other hand, is a small postage stamp sized patch that you apply to dry skin and forget about it.  The recommended areas to apply are in the middle of your stomach next to your navel, or the inside of your elbow/wrist.  These areas of skin are thin and have high blood vessel traffic.  The patch completely circumvents the digestive system, and infuses melatonin directly through your skin and into your bloodstream, where it promotes rest, relaxation and anti-oxidant boosting throughout your body.  The patch is also time-release, regulating your dosage for 6-8 hours, so you can put it on in the early evening and experience all the benefits of melatonin throughout your night’s rest.