Melatonin is a precious master hormone
Melatonin = C13H16N2O2 and is produced in the pineal gland, which is just below the hypothalamus, just below the two hemispheres of the brain. It is very difficult to get at in a 'live' human patient. It is about the size of a pea or kernel of corn. The Greeks discovered it over 2,000 years ago in crude battlefield autopsies, but ignored it because of not seeing a purpose for it. They named it after the Greek name for a pinecone because it resembled a very small pinecone, thus 'pineal' (of the pine), then they dismissed it for lack of knowledge as to its purpose. One Greek called it the appendix of the brain (useless); if he had only known….
In the last few decades, the pineal gland has been declared a 'master hormone gland'. It does not get much bigger than that of the human body's ten-trillion-plus cells. Recently it has been declared the 'aging clock' of the human body. Its origin goes back a billion-plus years, in the brain's effort to literally 'see' outside its captive bone-hardened skull. Through one of evolution's greatest creations (successful mistakes), the pineal gland probed forward using its own brain cells, through the eons, until it could sense light. In some lower forms it stopped there, glad for some fuzzy sense of light and dark; as in worms.
Nevertheless, Mother Nature never stops experimenting in her quest for 'a better light bulb'. Almost every type of animal species on earth now has some form of eyesight, unless their existence is totally lived in a cave or underground. From the single-celled amoeba being able to sense 'light changes' around it, to the quadrillions of symbiotic and pathogenic microbes in and on every human body, probing our dead or living cells to eat, to the millions of follicle mites hiding in your skin pores during your shower, to the spider with multiple eyes/lenses that not only senses crude light changes with some of its eyes, to focusing as sharply as humans with others. Then there is the peregrine falcon that dives and refocuses their telescopic eyesight as it approaches its dinner at nearly 200 miles per hour. (The raptors, i.e.: falcons, owls, eagles, condors, etc., have better eyesight than humans because they're so far away from their prey, high in the air; a 'forced' evolutionary skill - or starve. For example: eagles are able to focus on a moving field mouse many times farther away than a human.)
Normally, the intelligence of a species is determined by its brain size and how long it stays with its parents, learning much more before going out on its own. The hom*o sapien's ancestral tree can be genetically traced directly to the tree shrew-like mammal of seventy million years ago (our beginning). Some may not choose to believe this 'fact' but every court in the land now accepts DNA as 99.98% accurate, so we too must also accept that a tiny tree mammal, not much smaller than the common house cat of today, gave us our mammalian genetic beginnings.
The 'proven' genetic tree then moved on to their prodigy (the primate family tree). Their vast roaming of the tree tops lengthened their appendages and developed a perspicacious eyesight for observing the ground far below for predators; the keen eyesight that we enjoy today. (Raptors were higher off the ground and needed even keener eyesight. Their sharp claws developed from a need to grab food (pierce their prey), and lift it off the ground to safely eat it without being disturbed by other animals.) For us, the needed gripping of the tree limbs, from our ancestors, gives us our gripping finger ridges of today (fingerprints), and 'left-over' survival tactics such as a healthy fear of heights. If you did not have such 'healthy' traits, you died off and did not propagate....
The primates, or rather our early split-off from them, had the ability of the brain-case to expand to accommodate the evolutionary expansion of needed brain cells would be the future human of earth that is not satisfied with the restrictions of earth itself, and continues to reach for the stars themselves (we already touched the moon). The wet savannas of a long past Africa allowed our ancestors to walk through now extinct swamps and develop an up-right stance. Millions of years later, this now 'taller' biped species had a brain casing further off the hot savanna, and thus a cooler, more logical thinker began to survive for millennias as they improved their diet with fish (higher quality protein), and weapons (sticks & long-bones like our femur).
At first, dead fish washed up on shore (better protein than bugs), then this better reasoning alerted them to fresher 'live' fish in the water. Now, with a faster way to travel and higher protein-rich foods, their ancient quest began. Their roving got them to Asia 150+ years ago, and Europe 100,000+ years ago (only stragglers at first then more), evolving a lighter skin and less hair because they needed to cover themselves to stay warm in the harsher northern climates; full-body hair was then evolutionarily useless. (This roving would not stop until man literally walked on the moon, now looking toward Mars in 2021.) The rumored ten percent of brain cells that we use today is a fallacy, with the other 90% obviously serving a purpose or it would be lost to evolution (but only using about 10% at any one time, which is where the 10% comes from), causing our brains to keep expanding through the eons! Evolution would not have brought the other 90% of our gray matter along for the ride if it didn't serve a real purpose; it does. Our eight human skull brain-plates have expanded much faster (with a better protein diet), the female pelvis evolving slower, thus humans are the only species on earth to have a truly painful birth. (This is because a simple skull can grow and shift exteriorly much easier than an entire pelvic regain change design interiorly.)
Of all the cornucopia of evolutionary 'trial and errors' (besides the brain), eyesight has proved to be the most successful 'sense' to advance each and every species of consequence. The eyes sit in the zygomatic orbs of our skull (among the fourteen facial bones), peering out onto the earth and all its wonders, allowing man's advanced brain to think in the abstract, and it allowed hom*o sapiens to dream of walking on the moon long before they did so.
The only part of the brain to literally be exposed to the world, our eyes, our sense of vision, came from a gland that the ancient Greeks thought was of no consequence.... When the pineal gland is dissected and examined, it is found to be mostly made of the same cells as the retina in our eyes, with the ability to sense literal light from dark. We all see the TV commercials and cartoons with the light bulb going off on top of someone's head when they get an idea, yet the pineal gland is literally that, deep inside the very basic primordial part of our still existing human reptilian brain of our long ago ancestors, long before our tree shrew cousins (the crudest and oldest part of our brain which performs mostly autonomic system activities like breathing, heart pumping, reflexes, etc., five hundred million years before our ancestral tree shrew!). Still earlier, as the first fish left the oceans, amphibians slowly developed into reptiles, their eyes were developing and clueing them in on how to survive better by using their eyesight. Now we use our eyes to call a few twisted pieces of iron in a museum 'modern art'.
Who could have predicted that such a precious gift of over three billion years of evolution, from algae to man, would be used to sooth the savage beast in all of us? (The latest scientific thought is that microbes far below the surface of our earth were the first life form (even before algae), starting from clay molecules which hold an electrical charge that can merge molecules with an end result of amino acids, the beginnings of life. Life has repeatedly been 'sparked' to life in the lab with electrical stimulus, like lightning. The clay-based microbes seeped into the oceans and over another few million years, upon surfacing (best results for life advancement would be on a damp beach, or in a shallow tide pool) flourished with the electromagnetic radioactivity of our sun & lightning; becoming algae. (When our solar system drifted from one arm of the Milky Way to another, we were exposed to massive amounts of radiation [usually blocked by galactic dust particulates] and this period of time spawned the Cambrian explosion of life forms [including reptile to mammalian to us].)
Other forms flourished and evolved near lava vents, never to surface, yet 'Alvin', a deep-sea submarine has taken pictures of millions of sea creatures thousands of feet below the ocean surface living in 250°F degree water! (At these depths water does not boil at 212°F degrees.) These direct observations are supported by gold mines in Africa having living microbes at 10,000 feet below the earth's surface, and oil wells (even deeper) having plentiful microbes that have never been within a mile of the earth's surface! Some of these life forms do not live on oxygen (usually sulfur-based).
In case you sit up at night wondering, our bodies are 63% hydrogen, 25% oxygen, 10% carbon, 1.5% nitrogen, plus another 1.5% of 21 other elements (some combining for about 65% water of our body's total weight). Remove just 'one' of these essential elements and over time you die! The oddest of the odd is that your body cells do nothing whatsoever with that 1.5% of nitrogen, so why is it the fourth highest quantity of element in the human body? Why has evolution carried its 'need' forward for eons? Would you die without nitrogen? There are quadrillions of animals within you that need nitrogen to survive, and for other organisms within you it is their byproduct! hom*o sapiens are a walking zoo!! "What the….?" you ask. Some of the microbes that live miles below our earth's surface feed on and expel nitrogen. They also live in our bodies and some of them process (breathe-in and/or expel) nitrogen. Our bodies depend on internal microbial methane byproducts!We live because trillions of microbes and trillions of bacteria within our bodies expel nitrogen (to be polite).
Externally, you have over two square meters (more than two square yards) of skin, your largest organ. You average over 200 microbes on or hiding in each sweat pore or hair follicle shaft on every square centimeter of your back! (That's thousands in less than a three-eighth inch square.) Follow the smell; you have over 200,000,000 microbes per square centimeter in your armpits (The odor is decayed bacteria carcasses that turn to a sulfur-like compound). Then you have the 'specialized' microbes, like Propionibaclerium granulosum that is only found in the crease on both sides of your nose - on almost every human on earth! (Every mother passes on this beneficial microbe when she first rubs her nose on her infant's nose.) Millions of Malassezia furfur live in each of your ear canals and eat your earwax. They consume your excreted lipids (fats) and waxes to get nutrients for their own survival. You'd be in serious trouble if your earwax didn't 'chunk up' (dry up) from this process and fall out of the auditory canal. (Ear wax is produced through sebaceous glands to lubricate the eardrum, keeping it flexible. It also works as a bug repellant, chemically blocking creatures from entering the brain). The ONLY time that a human can be void of microbes is within the placenta, and many still get through the filters within the umbilical cord.
During birth, as the 'water breaks', microbes in the uterus and vagin* attach to the exiting fetus even before the fetus turns into a baby! Plus, with every single touch, kiss, hug, or any contact whatsoever, the baby picks up microbes and they stay and multiply on their human host for the rest of the life of that carbon-based unit. Even after death, microbes will eat/thrive on all viable 'moist' parts of your body. If the coffin breaks open or leaks, fungus, mildew, bacteria, and additional 'dirt-borne' microbes will soon invade the corpse and leave nothing but dust behind. They will have consumed and processed almost ALL of the star dust that made you what you were as a hom*o sapien, as in the Bible, 'dust to dust', is very accurate.
If you're really microophobic (afraid of microbes), you could be cremated to destroy all of the viable microbes within your body, 'but' the microbes in the urn will get to you, not to mention every time Uncle John opens the urn to say 'Hi', thousands of air-borne bacteria and microbes, per cubic foot of expelled breath, will attach to and thrive on you…. Not to mention that these 'dust' particles leave the body and are absorbed by other life forms, staying in them for the rest of their lives (except in nuclear bomb detonations and Black Holes, atoms are never destroyed). Every person that you have ever kissed, and everywhere else that your mouth has been, are gathered, grown in your mouth, and are then shared microbes, bacteria, and viruses with 'every' person that you kiss on the mouth for the rest of your life; then theirs.
By now you should be asking, "What do microbes have to do with Melatonin?" Smell! The higher the concentration of microbes or bacteria, the more 'you' smell, because they cause the smell in the first place, i.e.: sweat, arm pits, between your toes, crotch (you get the idea). Oh, what the heck, let us talk about what nobody dares ask….
Decaying fungi, bacteria, and microbes are at their highest concentrations in your feces. On average, 30- to 55% of human fecal material is living and/or dead fungi, bacteria, and microbes 'doing their evolutionary thing' to keep YOU alive! Somewhere in the back of your mind you're wondering about the other 45% of your….. It consists of putrefacted bile & proteins and peptides from the small intestine, water, undigested food fiber, mucous lubricant, bacterial & microbial putrification byproducts, intestinal flora, excess ions of magnesium, iron, phosphorus, bile, bilirubin, and cholesterol (which clings to fiber). You weren't eating dinner were you? By having a healthier/younger body with Melatonin you can many times cut down on the bodily decay that bacteria and microbes feed on, i.e.: a side effect - less smell.
The 'light bulb' cartoon is so close to the real thing that it seems to be a joke on the cartoonist! Your eye's retina sends a signal through your optic nerve directly to the brain, registering what it sees, and literally transfers 'light and dark' signals to the pineal gland (very similar to today's fiber-optic cable). Literally within the center of our brains a little light is 'on' during daylight, the retina cells within the pineal gland literally seeing light, or what they perceive as light (imagining that your optic nerve is fiber optic cable isn't far off). Then with darkness, the brain is literally told to become sleepy; you yawn.
A fascinating thing is that while the 'light is on' in the pineal gland, it is shut down during the day! When darkness falls and the light goes dim within the pineal gland, it comes alive, manufacturing Melatonin from tryptophan and serotonin, pumping it into the bloodstream. ***This action tells the 'repair cycle' of each and every body cell in your body to speed up its repair work now that it has more energy, more priority (the secret to making you look and feel younger is more sleep). With a strong melatonin signal, the body shuts down your digestive system (among many others) and uses all that extra energy to repair cells, making you healthier!
Anytime we sleep, food eaten late at night is not easily processed as nutrition and more easily turns to fat, being stored and ignored, thus it is stockpiled in fat cells, expanding them. For those of us trying (struggling) to loose weight, the worst possible time to eat (snack), especially starches/carbs, is after your environment goes dark! No matter how nutritious the late-night food is it is going to be fat once the 'sleep' signal hits the bloodstream after dark, assuming we are asleep and not active. An ignored problem is that if you live in a dark environmental (dark-paneled house, dimly lit work place), the pineal gland can start producing small amounts of Melatonin during daylight hours, after all, it thinks it's nighttime and it's doing its evolutionary job.... (Worse yet, if you are a blood-type O (the first blood type for hom*o sapiens), you have a hibernation gene that might be making you over-weight.) To speed up your digestion (slightly), simply light up your life to stop the production and seepage of Melatonin into the bloodstream during the day. A brighter home, more lights in the work place, walking on a sunny beach or in the park will not only get your heart going faster, but it 'will' shut down the 'daytime' pineal gland production of Melatonin and keep your digestive system working at full capacity. Over-weight people many times shut themselves away from society, usually indoors, drapes closed because of depression, and this promotes the production of Melatonin and fat during the day (drossiness, when your stomach and intestines have food in them). Red walls, red carpets, and red decorations will make the mind more aggressive and salivation & digestion is not far behind. Restaurant chains have spent millions to figure out which colors make us hungry, i.e.: bright red, dull red, maroon, then orange. They also found out that blue and purple slow down the digestive tract, making you sleepy, not as hungry, so you purchase less food in their restaurant or grocery store. You will NEVER see a restaurant or grocery store (that knows what it's doing), using a lot of blue and purple in their color scheme! If you're having trouble sleeping, try using blue/purple on your bed covers, sheets, bedroom walls, drapes, and carpet.
'Aging' studies are now 'repeatedly' linking the pineal gland to being THE aging clock of the mammalian body. With proper Melatonin production (at night), the body rebuilds itself and boosts ALL bodily systems! No, Melatonin will not rebuild an arm like the star fish is capable of, but it DOES boost the human immune system, and the immune system is among the most important for a longer life, in that if it is strong and active it can usually fight off diseases 'before' they take a strong hold on the body. What most people may not realize is that the human body is constantly being attacked (thousands of times per second), but in most cases the immune system successfully fights it off. (Every breath that you take in has thousands of air-borne microbes, bacteria, and viruses.) Melatonin greatly boosts the immune system's fight by properly repairing the body during the night.
With less 'physical' stress on the cells, the body lives longer. Of course, less 'mental' stress in daily life can also contribute to a longer life for the same reasons. The more energy that ends up fighting 'for' the body is that much less energy fighting 'against' the body, i.e.: higher anxiety equals drinking, smoking, anger, stress, confusion, bad relationships, fighting, bad work attitudes, a loss of job and even more stress - a vicious circle that no amount of proper food or vitamins can protect you from.
The free radicals that our bodies are exposed to through excessive tanning, chemicals, and the white flour that bog down the intestines are leading causes that have infiltrated the cancer and heart disease statistics of the twentieth century! All cells within your body already have the precursors to cancer within them. A weak immune system allows them to take hold….
Informed parents know that children's hearts grow faster than their bodies, their heart out proportioning the need, so they have extra oxygen in their bodies, so they have more energy, i.e.: get into more trouble. It took brain autopsies to prove that infants and children have the largest pineal glands (thus highest production), thus they sleep the most. After puberty, the pineal gland starts to shrink; after all, once the body hits puberty, it is supposed to propagate and the parent dies (as in all of nature). After the adult pineal gland shrinkage, women still have a larger pineal gland than men, thus they produce more Melatonin; women live longer. Even from the start, men have a smaller pineal gland than women and usually do not live as long as women (stress a major factor). It could be argued that men need more Melatonin supplements than women to equalize the life spans, or even higher supplements to increase the life span.
Over three billion years of evolution takes a while to compensate for the 20 years of extended humanoid life (in the last two centuries alone), because humans are resorting back to 'fungus, mold & bacteria', (from which we came) for prevention and to stop diseases once they start, i.e.: it is being discovered that mushrooms extend life (fungus for example), and of course penicillin (from mold) can cure many ills of mankind, and anti-bacteria's from cultures for flue vaccines (three of hundreds of examples). Didn't you ever wonder why these things help us, i.e.: they are from which we came.
What would you pay to literally 'tell' your body to step up its cellular repairs? Or tell the body to step up free radical removal? i.e.: fight cancer. Or tell the body to step up digestion so that less food is turned into fat? Or tell the body to put you into a deeper sleep so that more energy can be put into boosting the immune system, not to mention ALL of your body systems? A dream? No! By taking Melatonin supplements you can hormonally 'tell', 'order', 'demand', 'flip a switch', and it is done! There has been extreme research into what foods help the body, i.e.: milk thistle for the liver, walnut oil for memory, Omega-3 fatty acid (fish oil) for the brain, red wine for the blood, cinnamon for infection, garlic for the immune system, veggies for antioxidants, and on and on for an entire library! Would you like to memorize 'that' or take a Melatonin supplement and chemically 'order' the body to fix itself with a master hormone that's not harmful to the body (plus decent nutritional intake of course). The sun's ultra violet rays put wrinkles on the face, turn Mars red, and it slows down the rebuilding of cells in your body - all caused by oxidation, the number one cause of aging! (Good and bad, every living human cell has oxygen.) There are literally hundreds of helpful chemicals in a single 'fresh' apple, and you should eat at least two every day according to new research (vitamins, minerals, micronutrients, fiber). Even better than the fabled apple, a Melatonin supplement 'will' trigger every single system in the human body to start repairing itself! (And for less than the price of a single apple per day!) F.Y.I. - there were no apples in the Garden of Eden, supposedly 6,000 years ago (they did not exist back then), it was an apricot (known as an apple back when the Bible was written).
Apples actually came from the rose family, from the Tien Shan Mountains, Central Asia; then to the Middle East, then Europe, and finally to North America.
I once read a complete chemical breakdown of what is in a common apple (it was three paperback pages long!); these are just the biggies - Vitamin A, riboflavin (B-6), thiamin (B-1), calcium, iron, potassium, zinc, phosphorus, folate, vitamin B-6, niacin (B-3), pantolhenic acid, fiber, protein, etc.
The pineal gland is one of the first glands to develop at about three weeks after conception, however, as with our eyes (remember that the pineal gland is made of the same material), it is not 100% functional until several months after birth. Melatonin is passed to the fetus (through the umbilical cord) so that the fetus sleeps when the mother does (we hope). At about three months of age (after birth), the pineal gland kicks into gear and starts each human on a 24-hour cycle of life, effected by daylight - working during the day, repairing the body at night; Melatonin controlling it all. If a baby is colicky, they're not producing Melatonin yet (or not getting it through nursing). Our 24-hour cycle will continue all of our lives, even though the moon that controls it (earth's 23-hour, 59-minute, 58-second rotation cycle), is moving away from earth at one and one-half inches per year. This has been measured so accurately because one of the twelve men that walked on the moon installed a special mirror that faces earth. A laser on the third planet from our five-billion-year-old sun projects a laser at the mirror and it returns to earth - Jeff Vincent, CML, MA.
Based on the speed of light, 186,282 miles per sec., the moon is increasing in distance from us. The moon is just outside earth's gravitational belt. Any object within the belt eventually falls back to earth (or its respective planet). Humans, or any life at all, would not be on earth if a large section of the Pacific Ocean had not torn away from the earth 4 billion years ago, caused by an extremely large asteroid or small planet impacting earth when earth was Earth Mark I (no moon). Part of the future Pacific Ocean ended up just outside our own gravitational belt, causing Earth Mark II (Earth with a moon [satellite]), as its spinning molten state rounded itself out over the eons and cooled off, dead, no iron core.
Earth's molten center and rotating keeps us alive with a slower revolving center of molten rock that creates friction and magnetic poles. This 'friction' creates a magnetic and electrical field very similar to giant generators inside dams that spin brass windings and create electrical fields that are siphoned off and sold as electricity. Our large mass of 6.6 sextillion tons (6.583 x 1021 tons [that's 21 zeros after the decimal]), creates six times the moons gravity because the earth is six times the moon's mass. Our lunar moon, stuck in earth's gravitational force, not large enough to break free and rotate (yet); thus it stays frozen in position, facing us. Our moon is slightly egg-shaped because when it was forming, earth's gravity tried to pull it back towards earth. The pointed end of our moon faces earth, while the blunter end, which we never see, faces directly away from us. With no atmosphere to burn up meteors (like earth does), our moon is pockmarked with billions of years of collisions. With no atmosphere, our moon has no chance of holding the small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen (water), that are contained in some asteroids (ending up as meteors, then called meteorites upon impact); any water simply drifts away unless it's frozen and hidden from the sun within craters, or at its poles. The moon has larger craters than earth because it has no atmosphere to partially burn them up before they strike the moon's surface.
Our moon and Mars have ice at or near their caps, and if reasonably obtainable, it could be used to produce hydrogen fuel. The moon rocks that have come back to earth consist of meteors from space and basalt. Basalt is never found in large quantities on the surface of our earth. Basalt is mostly at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and that is why it does not have a granite bottom like ALL other oceans and landmasses on earth! This sudden 'removal' of so much mass began the Pangaea (our original 'one continent'), to later separate and eventually create the hardened granite tectonic plates that we know today.
This movement is Mother Nature's attempt to compensate for the large mass removed during a collision in earth's semi-molten stage. It is THE cause of the seven separate smaller continents, and the earth quakes of today slightly shifting to 'fill in the hole' caused over four billion years ago, much larger than the Gulf of Mexico collision that took out the dinosaurs 65-million years ago. (This asteroid obliterated what would be our northern hemisphere and life advanced greatly in Africa because of this, otherwise man might have evolved first in what we now call Central America or Mexico.) The odd thing is that with no moon we had a fast-spinning earth (spinning fast enough to throw-off such a large mass when disturbed by outside forces, our equator then rotating at 6,222 mph) with only a four-hour day.
Now with our moon in place, Earth Mark II, we have slightly less than a 24-hour day (1,037 mph at the equator, each day getting longer as the moon drifts away, and the earth's rotation deteriorates, slows [caused by our tides sloshing back and forth with the moon's pull as the earth rotates toward and then away from the moon]). The farther the moon drifts away the more Earth Mark II slows and destabilizes. We are now at a 23.2+/-degree earth axis tilt and increasing. By the time we get to 40 degrees, another billion years, the earth will wobble so much that the oceans will spill over the land like a spilt glass of milk. Long before that, we will have had such crop failure and flooded land, from melting polar icecaps, that man and every other living thing as we know it will be long gone.
Long before that, only a few decades from now, man will have outgrown his planet's food supply, wars will break out, China will over-run Russia for more crop land (and to purposely thin out their population with a war), then the map makers will once again draw new lines as only war will end the struggle for food on Earth Mark II, only a few decades from now….
You have only to study the earth's population growth charts and declining-usable-cropland to come to no other conclusion. Pollution, population growth, chemical waste, and the burning of the tropical forests (that gives us oxygen to breath, plus forests give us unlimited potential for cancer fighting drugs), won't even be a concern after nuclear war (if nothing is done about population growth and declining food supplies). Thousands of plant medicines and foods, like aspirin and cinnamon, will never even be discovered when logging is a higher priority than the oxygen that we breathe. The odd thing is that man will 'only' survive 'if' we have a nuclear war to thin out the population (because we won't listen to anything else….). The world's population will be over 18,000,000 in less than 30 years, and we cannot possibly feed that many people by any known way now (maybe Soilant Green).
All the medical research in the world won't matter one bit if we don't listen, i.e.: cigarette packages have printed warnings directly on them (for thirty years), that smoking is dangerous to your health - who listened^ Our outer 'dead' skin protects us from viruses.
We live in a perfectly balanced walking zoo of over a quintillion human cells and other life forms in a perfect environmental suit, yet we suck nicotine poison into our bodies by way of cigarettes. BUT, we've discovered that the prepuce (foreskin) of uncircumcised men have living skin cells on the undersurface of the 'uncut' foreskin, six to eight cells thick, all being 'living' cells, that directly absorb and transfer the AIDS virus to the cervix of women, causing Cervical cancer, or it is passed back to the male resulting in penile cancer under the intact foreskin (kept living under the cl*toral hood and passed back to the male later on). We've discovered the main AIDS transference point but circumcisions are going down around the world for religious, political, or 'style' reasons. (The dead skin, the outer two or three layers of dead skin covering our live epidermis (living skin), our largest organ, protects us from viruses like AIDS, but intact penile foreskin is one of a very few human locations having 'no' hardened outer dead skin to protect it from the absorption of viruses. Open cuts, tear ducts, underneath the eyelids, orifice insertions, urethra, and the male foreskin are 'the' entry points for AIDS. The prepuce is six to eight layers of 'live' skin cells, with 'none' of the normal dead cells on the outer layer' to protect itself. It readily absorbs viruses when in the vagin* or rectum. The condom is shunned by some religions and uncircumcised males have a much higher percentage of penile cancer, plus they pass it on to their mates; AIDS is skyrocketing. It also comes about when the male goes in raw, then before he climaxes he puts the condom on - didn't help, as the AIDS virus already passed to the mate when the foreskin pulled back and was pushed in.
Circumcised males having penile cancer are hardly in the medical books at all because of its rarity, uncircumcised is higher because of the problems involved in cleaning under a tight foreskin. AIDS is going through the roof in Africa, where almost all males are not circumcised, and now American and European uncircumcised statistics are go up - as is AIDS!
My point is that even with the best of research results given to the public, we ignore a billion dollars in condom ads and the plain-English warning on cigarettes for two generations. Will this change with Melatonin? Will we spend millions to find a surprisingly cheap answer to the aging clock - Melatonin - then ignore it?
Humanity may have a second chance at life…. Once Melatonin's value was realized, it was sought out and found in ALL animals and even plants (sensitive to light)! Evolution has passed it on, generation after generation, for a very special reason! A soybean in England has Melatonin in higher than normal concentrations and has been processed so that synthetic Melatonin, n-Acetyl-5-Methoxytryptamine, can be extracted from it. The magic 'on switch', if you will, to slow the aging process, has been discovered and Ponce de Leon's 'Fountain of Youth' is now as close as popping a pill! Now you can 'activate' all of the 'good' body systems to help you. Sure, a balanced diet, high fiber foods, cut the sweets, lots of 'live' fresh vegetables, avoid processed foods, no white flour, no fatty meats, and vitamin & oil supplements can help, but then there's Melatonin! Moreover, even though we will all die someday, a Melatonin supplement at night 'will' add years to your life if you combine it with the above mentioned life style changes.
A baby's colic can sometimes be solved with 300mcg's (micrograms) of Melatonin. This little trick is because its own pineal gland has not yet started production, or is not at full production yet. Melatonin is also passed along during breast-feeding, not with bottle-feeding (colicky infants are almost always bottle-fed). Once the body is fully functional, at around three or four months, Melatonin (added to bottle milk) shouldn't be needed.
Colicky babies get less sleep and one report says that very young infants (in trouble), may dream of being back in the womb, for emotional protection. In the womb fetuses don't breathe, so the body's autonomic system shuts off its breathing reflex during this stressed dream-state (again very important - because fetus' do not breathe in the womb), causing SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).
To put less strain on a very young baby they should not have drafts or a fan on them to cause gulping of air reflexes, and get as much 'restful' sleep as necessary to avoid such emotional strain. Keep in mind that at two or three months of age a baby still has more memories inside the womb than outside, and dreams could very easily direct it back there when stressed. You dream of happier places; why can't a baby^
At around age forty the pineal gland starts to calcify(medically nicknamed 'brain sand'); causing decreased amounts of the production of Melatonin from tryptophan and serotonin (in milk & turkey for example). According to evolution, the human body should have propagated by age forty, then Mother Nature starts to play a cruel trick, the clock starts to slow down with less Melatonin production.... Calcification literally hardens the pineal gland and Melatonin wanes, triggering aging, gray hairs, osteoporosis, atrophied muscles, the body slows rebuilding itself, not getting as much 'chemical signal' to sleep deeply, slowing down the signal for systems to rebuild during the night. This is the direct reason that the elderly sleep fewer hours.
The organs and cells start to strain at attempts to repair themselves with less sleep, adding stress and a catastrophic slow-motion failure of the body results over the next few decades. It would be like trying to change a flat tire by reaching out the car window to do so. The body genetically knows what to do, the DNA chemical strands are still intact (though deteriorating at their ends), held to the DNA helix by carbon atoms - the body doesn't get the proper signals to carry out repair orders with ebbing hormonal Melatonin signals. If, at age forty, you start taking a 3 mg Melatonin supplement just before you go to bed, the body will 'receive' the chemical signals of a younger person and begin to repair organs, skin cells, tissue, bone, etc., thinking it is younger! By age sixty you should be taking 5- to 10 mg as mentioned in many books (I take 20 mg at age 55).
In lab experiments, for the last thirty years, mice (mammals like us), have had their life spans increased by 25-percent just by adding Melatonin to their water; no other supplements were involved. ALL mice increased their life span, not just a few.... They have also removed the pineal gland from a 6-month-old mouse and placed it in the brain of a two and one-half year old mouse. Instead of living to the normal age of three years, it lived to be almost four-years-old; a 25 percent increase in life span!! To prove it further, they removed the pineal gland of a two and one-half year-old mouse and placed it in the brain of a six-month-old mouse and it died within six months! It died according to its pineal gland 'age', not the age of its own body! This 'proof' could extend the life span of humans by roughly the same mammalian time-span percentage. The problem, the pineal gland is easy removed from a mouse's brain, the pineal gland in humans is very deep, under the hypothalamus in the lower center of the brain (under the two main hemispheres), and deep micro-connective surgery in that area is risky at best.
In this age of the homeless waking up missing a kidney (illegally sold for transplants), hopefully it won't get to the street stealing of pineal glands - the result would be death for the donor. (It is rumored that people are receiving 'natural' Melatonin doses but little is known about the sources). Natural melatonin should be avoided, as it can retain DNA from the donor. Only 'synthetic' Melatonin from the soy bean is recommended by this author. (European soy beans are the best at this time.)
Are there side effects to Melatonin? Can extending our age cycle (life span) be considered a 'bad' side effect? Cancer patients have been prescribed up to 80 mg's of Melatonin per day. At 300mg's each, that would be 266 pills (two and one-half bottles) of the 300 microgram pills. Accidental over-dosing would be rather difficult. Of course at 80mg's you're in a hospital bed (hopefully not driving or operating heavy machinery). In medical prescriptions, pills are more concentrated and only a few pills would equal the 80 mg's required to force the body into high gear to repair itself. (Placing pills under the tongue is even quicker and isn't partially destroyed in stomach acid).
The first side effect is sleepiness, which is obvious, so only take it just before bedtime. Melatonin is not habit forming, having no withdrawal symptoms like heavy-duty 'knock-out' sleeping pills do. Melatonin does NOT force the body to sleep like commercial sleeping pills; it relaxes the body, calms the heart rate, cools the body, and prepares it for sleep and body repair at the cellular level.
Melatonin can also be used to fight jet lag on long trips. Take Melatonin an hour before your new bedtime at your new destination (after you arrive). A few books say to take it a week before the trip (an hour before the new time zone sleep time), but in that situation you might be driving and it could tend to mess up a nice vacation before you ever get started.
The second side effect is that it has been known to cause dreams that are more elaborate. I've personally experienced this in some rather odd and colorful dreams. When the body receives larger doses of Melatonin than it's normally producing, usually due to a calcifying pineal gland and you add a synthetic form of Melatonin, your sleep seems to be slightly deeper, allowing the brain to relax and 'play mind games' if you will, with its new found relaxation. My dreams have on occasion been more detailed, more colorful, and more memorable upon awakening. I rarely had 'scary' dreams before starting my Melatonin regiment and that has NOT increased at all. (Keep in mind that people have died from frightful, stressful dreams. Melatonin removes the stress.) My dreams 'now' seem to be normal and commonplace (as before), but more as if an observer rather than the object of the problem. You can magnify a dream (while on Melatonin) by immediately going back to sleep if you set your alarm clock to awaken you early. Turn off the alarm clock and put your head back down (do not get up and eat or use the bathroom or you lose the effect), Jeff Vincent, CML, MA
For example: I dreamt that I was walking down a sidewalk admiring the colorful leaves. (A pleasant dream to be sure, so I went back to sleep and thought about the same dream, trying to start it up again.) Suddenly a bird falls out of a tree and 'thuds' to the sidewalk in front of me, belly up, dead. I noticed a 'seam' down its feathered belly so I unzipped and opened the hinged doors and found that there was a pair of batteries inside the bird. It was either a battery operated toy or something out of The Twilight Zone! Either way it was not scary and it had my curiosity peaked (not bad for being asleep).
I was above myself staring down at the bird on the sidewalk, pondering the shock of discovering the batteries in the bird when I woke up normally in the morning. I wasn't scared or frightened, just curious, very curious, fully remembering the colorful dream, even the fact that they were 'copper topped' batteries (but no pink bunny showed up). This second 'side effect' of Melatonin is simply ALL the bodily processes kicking into a higher gear (including the brain), or a more youthful gear than I was used to.
At 20mg's (four - 5mg pills, age 55, 260 pounds), I wake up ready to go with no grogginess. I do notice an occasional yawn an hour after I take the pills at night, fighting the pills when a good movie comes on the television, but NO sleepiness in the morning.
My 'most' elaborate dream, to date, after being on Melatonin for six years (as of 9/17/2008), was of me sitting in my grandmother's living room, in Idaho. A person was sitting next to me but I couldn't make them out. (The form represented the people in my life.) A great thunderclap encouraged me to go to the window and look out. (It represented the shock of my life's problems.) My grandma and granddad had about twenty fruit trees in a lush orchard that the cattle & calves ate from. (I woke up in the morning and successfully tried to go back to sleep even though the sun was now coming through my window.) Now, the orchard was only a baron field, with one huge tree, as large as all twenty of the other trees. (It represented all the fruits of my labors.) Suddenly, a bolt of lightening struck the base of the tree; a fireball blinding me. I looked to the other person, still unknown to me. (This represented my not knowing whom my true friends were.) The tree exploded at its base and crashed to the ground. (It represented destruction in my life.) I ran back into my grandparent's house to get my camera, to prove to others what had happened in my life, but could not find it. (This represented others abandoning me.) I ran back outside to talk to the other person, to share with them, but they were more shadowy now and none-responsive. (This represented my friends fading away from me when I moved.) I looked at the tree again and the entire field had turned to a paved parking lot as far as I could see. (This represented my life ending with no remembrances, wiped clean of me.) The storm grew as I tried to find others to tell them of my experience, but I could find none. The storm's rain rushed over the pavement, erasing, washing away everything. (This represented a second chance, maybe, to rebuild once again.) A bright light shown above me, and I considered if I was dead, but it was only the sun coming through the window (thank goodness), so I wrote down the details of the most elaborate dream of my life! It is said that our subconscious dreams about what we last thought of before falling asleep. My mother had sent me a picture of my grandparents a few months ago, and I 'did' glance at it just before brushing my teeth and going to bed. It is also said that we only remember the last dream, of the last REM (rapid eye movement) cycle, just before waking (this knowledge helps you 'magnify' your last dream).
Several medical books have mentioned that if you do wake up groggy, to take less Melatonin the next night - no biggy. It won't repair a major disease, but it may trigger the needed defenses that your body should have had if it's not too late! Start a regiment by age forty before things get out of hand.... Melatonin 'will' give out the signal to try to repair the body as if it were back in its twenties or thirties when the pineal gland produced more Melatonin. It is also one of the strongest free-radical scavengers and antioxidants that you can take in pill form! Melatonin signals ALL body systems (cells) to rebuild themselves; some side effect!
Melatonin can also be taken when caffeine-overdose 'shakes' appear. If you have a hyperactive child after they drink four caffeine-loaded soda pops (which are heavily advertised). A few milligrams of Melatonin might calm them down (but they probably won't take it voluntarily or they lose the 'buzz' they were looking for in the first place).
If you find yourself with a caffeine nervousness at work, that might be the time to take 1- to 3 mg's of Melatonin. I've never read in any of my research about the overly 'natural' hyperactive child taking synthetic Melatonin hormone instead of the other harsh chemical 'dumbing down' drugs of today, which also slow them down in school. I think that parents of very hyperactive children should try Melatonin instead; also keeping an eye on caffeine consumption. Kids talk among themselves and they know 'exactly' what soda pop to drink to get that 'buzz'. Even if you 'ban' caffeine-loaded pop from the house (like we did), they buy it on the way home from school, or at school. One of the worst habits of today's family setting is to allow minors to start drinking coffee. A bad habit to start, even decaffeinated, because if you believe that marijuana leads to harder drugs (which is supposedly why we do not legalize it), then coffee's 'rush' leads to craving that addictive morning 'wake-up' rush, leading to the rush/buzz in alcohol, drugs, smoking, etc.
Coffee can be almost as addictive as other drugs. In denial? Are you drinking coffee on a regular basis? Try stopping 'cold turkey' with no coffee for a month! You'll come up with a hundred excuses to start up again, totally denying that there's a caffeine addict inside you...and those migraine headaches during caffeine withdrawal will have you reaching for a cup….
Always keep in mind to ask a doctor about such experiments (I am not a doctor), i.e.: stopping the use of prescription mood-altering drugs (sleeping pills), to try a natural hormone found in your body. At this time synthetic Melatonin is very inexpensive and easily found 'over the counter' at only four cents per 300mcg pill, or five cents per 3 mg (which is ten times more for one cent more per pill). Melatonin prices won't go up much, it is unpatentable because it's a natural hormone in the body and found naturally/cheaply in soybeans, which are very plentiful.
All books seem to make the same statement as far as dosage, i.e.: 2 to 5 mg's an hour before going to bed. At age forty start taking 2 mg per night, moving up to 7 mg by age sixty. My old supply came in 300 mcg pills. To consume 2 mg you would need to take seven pills, and at 5 mg's you would need to take sixteen 300 mcg pills. If a source could be found at 1mg per pill it might be easier to calculate, but at 300 mcg's each, it leaves more room to find that happy balance between good sleep and no grogginess in the morning, which I have never experienced. (My supplier offers 3 mg pills at the same price as 300 mcg pills [a pill 10x stronger], proving that it's the bottling and packaging that you pay for.) Infant to teen use is not recommended (on the bottle), however studies are on-going that deal with it and no serious side effects are reported so far, probably because it 'is' naturally found in the body (in fact if you have a low count of melatonin you are probably depressed or suicidal).
Fetuses have been receiving it since conception in the uterus, during nursing at night, and since lab animals are successfully taking 50,000mg's without side effects (a pill the size of a brick to the human body). It seems the next logic choice to calm down hyper teens who may not have the proper level of Melatonin production in their bodies (a blood test would tell).
Another critical area (to ask your doctor about), would be if your teen has attempted suicide or is very depressed. Blood-work studies show that most suicidal teens have a low Melatonin level and that teens that have actually tried (and failed) to commit suicide have VERY low Melatonin levels in their blood. A logical conclusion would be to give these teens an evening supplement of Melatonin, and even during the day if they are talking about suicide or very depressed. (They're asking for help when they talk about doing it - so give them some help!) Check with your doctor first…do your own research. If my children were depressed I would immediately give them Melatonin.
Several books emphasize, for best medical benefits, based on age and weight, to keep increasing the dosage until you 'do' get groggy in the morning, then back off 1mg. I still usually wake up once in the middle of the night, every night, but fall back asleep within minutes (which is when the best dreams come). This 'wake up' may be an indication that the Melatonin has worn off, my natural sleep taking over at that point, but then why the elaborate dreams?
Before Melatonin, I woke up three or four times each night because for the last three decades I had jobs that got me up in the middle of the night for service calls. Since synthetic Melatonin is in its infancy (to the public), one book suggests that a 'time-release' synthetic Melatonin pill would stop the 'middle of the night' wake ups (at least for me), however, if a timed-release is used, I suspect that the last residues might make you sleepy in the morning (so that might explain why time-release has not been pushed).
As yet, I haven't found a cheap source for time-release (it is available), but I'll keep looking, after all, Ponce de Leon trotted all over a continent to find the Fountain of Youth, silly him, it was at his local health food store all the time (he was just in the wrong place and in the wrong century for his fountain of youth).... These are only my opinions after five years of actual Melatonin use and research. Your local drug store should have melatonin.
*A doctor should always be seen before a lengthy regimen of Melatonin is begun,
