It’s not ONLY a powerful antioxidant and free radical scavenger that helps combat inflammation…In fact, melatonin is so integral to your immune system that a lack of it causes your thymus gland, a key component of your immune system, to atrophy.
Melatonin may even have a role in slowing the aging of your brain…
If you look at the picture above, the Pineal Gland is a small pinecone shaped endocrine gland located near the center of the brain. In the spiritual world it’s referred to as the “Third Eye”. Its primary function is to regulate the sleep-wake cycles.
The Pineal Gland is NOT the only organ that produces Melatonin. Many cells in the body produce Melatonin. The Pineal Gland is however the ONLY organ that releases it into the blood to provide “Circadian Information” to ALL CELLS that can read the message and ALL CELLS seem to be capable of reading the signal.
What Is The Role Of Melatonin?
For example, consider your Urinary Bladder or your Liver. There’s no way your bladder or liver would know if it’s light or dark, your liver can not “see” so how does it know when it’s day or night unless there’s some Melatonin message its receiving. The PROBLEM IS…humans are relatively Melatonin deficient.
Why is being “Melatonin Deficiency” a problem? It’s a problem because it’s Melatonin that runs the clock in our brain.
ALL species have a biological clock in their brain, you have one, I have one, your dog has one, even rats have one.
Your biological clock resides in the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus of your brain, let’s call this the (SCN), which is part of your hypothalamus. Based on signals of light and darkness, your SCN tells your pineal gland when it’s time to secrete melatonin.
This is an extremely important point. Light comes in through your eyes and travels up your optic nerves to the SCN, which is exquisitely sensitive to cycles of light and darkness and may we remind you, dark is NO LONGER DARK if you live anywhere in a city throughout the world.
Sleep-Wake Cycle Can Be Easily Disrupted
Natural daylight is blue-rich light. Bright artificial light is blue-rich. Your body cannot tell the difference between natural & artificial light. So don’t confuse it at night.
If you must get up to use the restroom at night… do your best to navigate that trek in the dark! Melatonin emits a circadian rhythm.
Melatonin is not unique to humans. It’s not unique to mammals, it’s in amphibians, birds, reptiles, insects, unicellular organisms, bacteria, plants…every organism contains melatonin even a blade of grass.
There is no species that has been identified that does not contain Melatonin – Plant or Animal. (* Dr. Russel Reiter)
Circadian Rhythm
As mentioned, Melatonin emits a circadian rhythm. As you look at the picture exhibiting a 24-hour circadian body clock, notice functions of the body that happen during daytime hours are distinctively different than what happens at night. All these functions at night are regulated by Melatonin in your bloodstream.
That’s the reason you don’t have a bowel movement at night because Melatonin sends your body a signal to suppress certain body functions that normally occur during the day, to NOT occur while you’re asleep. Hence the Miracle of Melatonin!
Since humans evolved in the glow of firelight, the yellow, orange and red wavelengths don’t suppress melatonin production the way white and blue wavelengths do. Moonlight does NOT affect Melatonin production.
The Problem is White Light; when you turn on a white light you are in fact getting blue light wavelengths, which are impacting your circadian biology.
Light At Night May Be Killing You
Light at night suppresses Melatonin levels proportional to the brightness. Usually, Melatonin levels go up and remain elevated for the duration of darkness. Your BRAIN is not stupid. It recognizes light when it sees it and tells your pineal gland to stop the production of Melatonin and the lack of Melatonin de-synchronizes every cell in your body.
When you turn on a light at night, you immediately send your brain misinformation about the light-dark cycle. The only element your brain interprets light to be is day. There are consequences, numerous consequences to your body when you do this.
No matter what you do, AVOID turning lights on in the middle of the night and NEVER sleep or allow your children to sleep with the TV on.
A 2-hr exposure to light from electronic displays suppresses Melatonin by about 22%! Melatonin promotes sleep but sleep does not promote melatonin.
ONLY DARKNESS promotes melatonin.
The End of Night
For the past century or so, the developed world has been performing an open-ended experiment on itself by lengthening its days and shortening its nights to become a 24-hour per day productive society. Artificial lighting disrupts your biological clock and melatonin production, with unfortunate effects on your health.
As Dr. Russel Reiter says, “light may be killing you.” If we didn’t have artificial light, we would be producing much more Melatonin than we are now. In just in the last 5 years, recent studies have revealed that tumors grow rapidly during daylight hours versus during the night the same study revealed that tumor growth was suppressed when in Melatonin saturated blood.
Furthermore, these studies suggest that supplementing with Melatonin also increases the effectiveness of drugs used to combat cancer. It’s fascinating! Melatonin delivers a one-two punch!
Dr. Reiter is known as the Godfather of Melatonin education. In his book, “Melatonin – Breakthrough Discoveries That Can Help You” according to Dr. Reiter, there have been more studies done on Melatonin than Vitamin C. This book is a must read!
Everything including the study on Melatonin and Cancer is presented in Dr. Reiter’s lecture video called, “Melatonin – Better Than Expected”. This is a must watch video!
