What is Melatonin?: Part 2 | El Paso, TX (2021)

Introduction

In today’s podcast, Dr. Alex Jimenez and Master Nutritionist, Ana Paola Rodriguez Aricienga are continuing what the beneficial properties of melatonin do to the body. This is part 2 of a two-part series on melatonin.

 

Melatonin Benefits To The Body

 

[00:00:00] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*:  Hello, Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega. How are you doing today?

 

[00:00:10] Ana Paola: I’m doing fine. How are you?

 

[00:00:13] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: We’ve got a good subject today. We’re going to talk about melatonin. We will complete the circuit, at least a little bit of the intro for the melatonin program. We’re going to be focusing today specifically on some subject matters that are important on the melatonin side of things. Now what I’m going to do here is, as I get a little bit ready here for you, what I’m going to do is we’re going to be discussing it a little bit more elaborately. With the focus that directly directs itself on how melatonin and aging are affected, a little bit of melatonin and the coronavirus, doing it with a detailed understanding of the difference between fighting melatonin or melatonin itself, test cases, as well as some literature review as to what the new concepts are in the melatonin arena. Now, as we discussed early on, we were going to present the screen here. We found out that melatonin is a recent addition to modern medicine now. It was first to segregate it in the 50s, and even plant melatonin, which is the fight of melatonin, as it’s called, was discovered later in the late 90s. However, we’ve heard about it precisely as it came into the world, and around the mid-80s, it was explicitly for, let’s say, jetlag and to reset our time rhythms. Since then, we’ve learned so much about human dynamics, and what has happened is is as we’ve been able to see those things are going to show up on my screen here, we’ve been able to understand the vast connection that melatonin has and brought upon the entire system now. Last time we discussed that melatonin is not only a product, it affects the brain, and its receptors are throughout the body, such as the eyes, the brain, the lungs, and the heart itself. It’s like almost a mitigating or an announcer of a new phase for a change when it elevates in the bloodstream, such as it launches into the night’s sleep. It also has receptors in the digestive tract. It has in the ovaries, in the sex organs, in the liver. So the entire body is like listening in, and melatonin seems to be the product produced from the pineal gland that tells the whole organ how to function. Here’s the crazy part now that we know that it’s in our body and the receptors. We understand the vast areas it affects; we’re also learning today, but we can see and discuss how it is in different parts of plants. Such other receptors, like let’s say, the Leaf has specific receptors. So the stock has roots that have different receptors for melatonin. So this is a bit essential chemical with an extensive, vast dynamic approach in the things it affects. Now we know that it starts at the early stages of a life cycle, and we’re going to discuss those particular dynamics. So as I do this, Ana Paola will be discussing a little bit as we interject here, and she’s going to go deep into it, not a little bit, but go deep into the subject matter as a master nutritionist and someone who individually works with a lot of patients, and she has a clinical practice. That’s why we were both clinicians, and we both deal with people, and we’re not someone that is stuck in a lab, though we appreciate that. But we have real-life experiences with live individuals and whatever we can do to help our patients and bring them a better or a more normal life in today’s crazy world. Well, we’re going to be making huge strides in there in their health processes. So welcome, Ana Paola. How are you doing again? You’re doing good.

 

[00:04:18] Ana Paola: I’m doing pretty good, and I’m ready to talk a bit about melatonin throughout the life cycle because it has a lot of information about it. And it is very, very well dated and in-depth, but actually, they have seen a lot of different reactions, and no one can tell you how melatonin works. Or how the secretion of melatonin is or if that’s like something constant around during the night. So that’s like the main thing that we have to take into account.

 

[00:04:56] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*:  You mentioned something significant. Aspirin. People do not know how aspirin works, OK? In many ways, we know it’s an anti-inflammatory, but the vast effects are different. Melatonin is the same thing we are at the beginning of the learning, understanding what it is. So bear in mind that we are no longer in the position where we’re new to us, but we are learning about it. So you’re going to hear it. Where do you want me to go? Do you want to use this graph here?

 

Melatonin Life Cycles

 

[00:05:22] Ana Paola: It’s OK. So I want to talk a bit about how melatonin expresses throughout the lifecycle. And of course, we have to start as a baby. So I don’t have any babies or anything. Still, I’m going through all of the studies with my lactation program, and it mentions that babies don’t secrete a lot of melatonin concentration or high levels of melatonin until the age of six months. But the melatonin that is linked to the baby through the mother, it’s great that the amount of melatonin inside of maternal milk raises from the first month of life throughout the third month of life. And right after the six months of life is where the baby starts to produce its own melatonin. So that is highly associated with the fact that a baby that’s like six months of age can begin to stay asleep for an extended period. So that’s actually where the mom and dad start to relax a little more in the night, and all of a breastfeeding pattern starts to slow down throughout the night. So that’s great.

 

[00:07:01] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*:  You know, Ana. This brings…

 

[00:07:02] Ana Paola: I think this brings…

 

[00:07:05] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: This brings a lot of great…

 

[00:07:06] Ana Paola: Lot of memories.

 

[00:07:07] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, a lot of memories of my daughter and I remember walking in the night, and she’s just looking at me just like walking in, and she’s looking at me like a radar. Just staring at me. And I’m thinking, it’s 3:00 in the morning, go to sleep. Do that. Just go to sleep, which is 5:00 in the morning, just staring at me. Man, she started screaming after about the third week, and we didn’t sleep till like six months after that. So at that point, it makes perfect sense that a baby does not produce as much melatonin. Where does the baby get the melatonin because they do get affected by the melatonin?

 

[00:07:41] Ana Paola: Oh, from the mother’s milk. So that’s like a massive part of why you should breastfeed a baby because a lot of I have never seen a formula that says it contains melatonin. How much melatonin? We don’t know because it fluctuates. And honestly, there’s a lot of information that says that melatonin starts to rise from the moment from the first month of the pregnancy throughout the ninth month. Then it slowly starts to decline after the mom gives birth. So that’s another thing. We don’t know what kind of concentration or excess concentration the mother’s milk has. And it fluctuates in the morning that the quantities of melatonin are not that high. And all of the setting in the night the breast milk has a little more concentration of melatonin on its contents, so that use the melatonin in the first months allowed the baby to fall asleep like briefly. So it might be a very high emotional connection or a different emotional connection. But chemistry plays a big part in how a mother can provide that calmness to their baby. So it’s crucial.

 

[00:09:19] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: When you mention that, it gave me a little bit of understanding as to the suprachiasmatic nuclei. I want to bring that in here a little bit here when we look at the anatomy of where the pineal gland is, which is the thing that produces it now, a lot of things that are in this area now, right in that area, right there. If I can look at that picture, I want to make it too big. But what happens is it sits right behind the optic nerve chasm. So it’s a suprachiasmatic nucleus. So it launches and is produced based on light lighting that comes in the eyes. So the reason I say that is because of what you’re talking about right now, specifically about maternal milk, OK? It’s important that as these studies reveal that women know this, they start, you know, doing at least getting the milk ready in the dark. And actually, it produces melatonin. Can you give some insights into that?

 

[00:10:20] Ana Paola: Yeah, that’s right. It is essential. And this is kind of basic for us to know and for everyone else to learn, to respect the way that light enters our lives. So we have to wake up in the morning, get sucked by all of the light from the sun, and start. And then slowly throughout the day, we have to turn the lights down. We don’t need to have all of these vast appliances with the light, and the screens turned on because that will mess up your melatonin production. You’re right. But what is recommended for the mother is that if they are using a breast pump, it is very recommended for them to differentiate the amount of milk expressed in the morning and the milk expressed in the night. And to give that milk in the morning or the night. Mothers need to respect those times when they are pumping, and if they choose to breastfeed, it’s crucial to make the last breastfeed at a calm, relaxed, and dark place, so do not turn on the lights. You don’t need to turn on the lights to give the last breastfeeding of the day, which is very important. That will allow the melatonin to come down from the milk thoroughly. Another thing is that milk production, milk suppression, and milk extraction are purely hormonal, and melatonin is a hormone. So we have to be very conscious about why the pineal gland is so close to the hypothalamus and how they work together to secrete all the following hormones to provide that lactation supply.

 

[00:12:25] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: So I got to tell you, you know what? I love these pictures because, as I mentioned earlier, I hear that the suprachiasmatic nucleus lives. That’s the eyeball. As soon as the light comes in, it stimulates its production. So it’s incredible how fast and how quickly the reaction is by, as you indicated, the lighting. Now, if someone’s having a tough time with lighting, I mean, we have simple, presumably just putting one of those covers that makes a big difference. Go ahead shed light on that.

 

[00:12:54] Ana Paola: Oh, I was going to mention that many studies include like-minded patients because they mustn’t have that modulation of melatonin because they don’t see very well. I don’t know how that works, but they have many sleeping problems due to their eyes’ bad suprachiasmatic signals. So it plays a big, significant role in how you’re going to secrete melatonin. How is your body going to react to all of the melatonin signals? Because as we see, it plays a vital role in sleep, but I feel like it’s the body’s agenda. So it says, Hey, I’m going to stop my secretion, but you need to work cortisol. You need to work glucagon. You need to work estrogen. So I’m going to fall asleep, but you get to work. So it’s the one that it’s giving the orders to all of the different tissues with either MT1 or MT2 receptors. So it plays a kind of multitasking hormone. And that’s the way that I see it as it called melatonin. It’s a multitasking hormone.

 

[00:14:27] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: It reminds me of the Ricola commercial, right? You hear the sound, and everyone in town kind of starts hearing, OK, this is it, we got to do something right. So as soon as you get that commando going off, we start a militia of metabolism that is going out throughout the body. This process shows how important it is from the beginning of life and how it adapts as we get older. Go ahead.

 

Puberty and Melatonin

 

[00:14:59] Ana Paola: Yeah. So actually, the highest level of melatonin was counting those babies from one year old to three years old, and then they too started to slow down. But that’s something that happens during those moments. The fact that the supply is kind of the same, but our body is expanding. That’s how melatonin works: how we can measure its supply or how it is simulating the body, right? So that is one of the most important things that we have to take into account the fact that while we’re growing, our melatonin receptors are not going to be able to grasp melatonin fully, and that’s where all of the different sleep disorders that come with age will start to develop. So this topic, it’s just from the first life; first, you are full of energy through maybe 30 or 40 years old because as age starts to develop is suprachiasmatic nuclei or, in our opinion, begin to boil, calcify, that’s what happens. And then it starts and stops it, creating those large amounts of melatonin.

 

[00:16:39] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: When you say that, I remember my grandmother; she was always up. I mean, she went to bed early. She is in bed by nine o’clock, and she’d be screaming at us for her to get some sleep. But she was always up at literally 5:00 in the morning. It was like, What’s up, lady? Listen, you need to go back to bed. But here’s what happens as you can see this, you can see that it’s producing at high levels, and we’re here measuring the peak of grams, which is a small amount. But here’s the production. But you can see that where most problems and most people start taking melatonin is somewhere in their 50s because the production is a little bit less, you can see the correlation here and the association of it causing more problems as we age and as we get into this kind of realm into the 60s and 70s. So when we see our patients, typically the people here in this area in the 30s and 40s…

 

[00:17:33] Ana Paola: They are having fun.

 

[00:17:35] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: They’re able to sleep better. But you know what, in today’s world, because of stress, because of COVID world, right? We are off-balanced because we don’t get the sunlight. People have been working from home for months. We spent inside indoors, and we didn’t understand what the effects were. We see the consequences of that. So it’s essential to see precisely the timelines as to what’s going on. Now in terms of melatonin, if we go back to this graph, and what’s important to see is that you can see that melatonin at a certain age somewhere around here is puberty, OK? There is a signaling process that the body immediately goes down. So there’s a lot of school of thought that discusses before puberty the effects of melatonin. Can you add a little bit of knowledge on that particular subject and drop some knowledge on us about melatonin in children? Because I think that’s important to understand that though melatonin is used, the studies don’t show that it causes it. But the body, by its nature, can say, OK, it’s time to stop that. It appears that there’s a timing that signals the pre-puberty to go through puberty. So there’s a school of thought that this delays puberty or not. So what’s your take on that?

 

[00:18:56] Ana Paola: Well, actually, melatonin is some meditation that did show any delayed development in children or prepubescent patients. So that’s what I think that we have to take into account. But as I said before, there are a lot of factors that play a massive part in this melatonin drop. And something that stuck out to me is that it has a lot to do with the fact that our body is expanding. So there is a lot more issue to covering melatonin, which is why many problems like sleep and difficulties come up around that age. Also, we have to consider that they are stressed out quickly, and it has a lot to do with school. So that can be emotionally tied to the melatonin supply or how our melatonin receptors act. But the only thing that relates to how melatonin plays a part in this specific time of life is that our body is expanding. It’s growing, and that shapes a lot of the activity of melatonin. But we’ve said before, and it’s a potent hormone and the fact that in that same state of life, we start to produce all the hormones that help the sexual development of a child, which stands up to me. And no one mentioned it. I don’t know if that’s like my particular input or what I take out from all the things that I’ve already read, but it has to do something about that.

 

[00:20:55] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Well, we see here that very few studies say it causes a pretty brutal delay of puberty. However, in just out of because one of the things is that we don’t want to, and it would be illogical or probably inappropriate and unethical to test the melatonin on children at this point.

 

[00:21:20] Ana Paola: So that’s another thing. All of their reports and their conclusions, all of the results have been taken from all their study. It was just like a precise result that they saw, and they wanted to talk about it in another report. But no one has stated or made reports or studies about that because it’s ethical, as you said before. Another thing is that it’s necessary or the only studies that intervene children with melatonin with the survey have objective research were in patients with ADHD or other cognitive problems. And they showed a lot of good results and those on those patients. But they use very little melatonin because we have to be careful when supplementing children or adults with melatonin. After all, it has like it’s multitasking or a hormone to work in different ways.

 

How Does Sleep Affect Melatonin?

 

[00:22:41] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: So, you know, it’s so powerful. And you would ask, why is this stuff this is so powerful, right? Why do they even sell it in stores like that? It should be off the market. But the reality is, is the FDA has determined that this stuff is in food, right? So it’s good so that it doesn’t get regulated because it’s part of the natural process when we’re dealing with children, specifical children in the pubertal era. One of the things that I like to do is use different types of protocols that will be like GABA or L-theanine or five FTTP as an option in this particularly tight window here. As for other options, now, when we get the kids with ADHD, they’re in teens and have issues that may be an area where we change our protocol, and we’d be more likable to use melatonin. But as you indicated explicitly, the lower the dose, the better. It’s fantastic. But you don’t have to take 20 milligrams of the stuff, so they sell it. Usually, time-release is going to be above five mg. There are two types: time-release, which kind of like, you know, whether they use excipients to make it last long and it doesn’t get digested through the body. It’s sitting and hovers in your intestines, but it keeps on producing. Those are usually between five and 10 mg. Now you have the fast-acting one when you just put it under your tongue or sometimes drops well, and your body just instantly absorbs it. Well, the effect is much sooner, much quicker. So there are two types of results depending on the issue and on the problem and the individual because maybe they have a beginning to sleep good or keep on waking up. So perhaps a time-release dynamic would work there in that dynamic. Every situation changes, but we’ve got to be very pragmatic. It affects every organ, and it typically involves the body differently in different regions. So I love that. I love that component. Now, the timing issue has not been proven out. In the life cycle of individuals perimenopausal, it’s like before a near perimenopausal period that women affect it a certain way. Menopausal women do. Now we’ve been able to see that, you know, certain hormones are lower in women, and that is getting perimenopausal. The hormones, the estrogens, the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the restart functioning. It starts being altered in that process. We have a flux of hormones. And one of these hormones is progesterone and progestin, so these hormones, as they get flexed into areas, you give a lady progesterone, and she’s going to sleep like a baby. It’s just one of those beautiful things that many people do to supplement it to stabilize hormones, depending on what an endocrinologist would indicate or want at that point or their specialist internist, whatever the doctor is. The fact is we’re trying to stabilize these dynamics, but you can see that early on in the pre-menopausal phase. It was fascinating that you would think that the perimenopausal-based progesterone, but it does affect many people at that time. Here you’re still producing progesterone. Over here, you’re not doing as much, but it alters. This indicates that the receptors probably become thirstier and more capable of functioning in more stabilized on the other side of menopause, correct? Because that’s a funky time. So that’s a very intense moment for most women. If you can see their body and how their hypothalamus and their pituitary do, it is in rage. And it’s a very angry hypothalamus. It’s a very angry pituitary. And it says ovaries do as I tell you, but the ovaries don’t want to do. And then, when we have the word of the day, is the shrew. An angry, ill-tempered woman is a shrew. The pituitary is the hypothalamus that turns into a shrew and commands the pituitary the adrenals to function. And in that process, what does a woman feel? A nightmare of heat flashes, hot flashes, sweating. The body is raging. Listen to me, ovaries. But all this kind of stuff happens in the pituitary right next to the pineal gland. So it’s a bit chaotic in its dynamics, and it tends to cause drama during these periods. So depending on the individual, you will see that during this period of the menopausal phase, you’ll have a lot of women suffering from what? What do you think?

 

[00:27:18] Ana Paola: I think many hot flashes at night and exhaustion, and that has to do with melatonin drops.

 

[00:27:24] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: So yeah, and usually women are pleased during those periods. Not really. But when did this all happen as we get out of biblical ways? God said he was going to punish us, right? So we shouldn’t eat an apple.

 

[00:27:43] Ana Paola: Oh man.

 

[00:27:47] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Or the males should have been responsible for saying, I ate the apple and not blame on Eve, right? So a lot of things happened as a result of this, right? So as we look at those dynamics, we can kind of go into Bible class about that. We’ll talk to crews on that, too. Aging and sleep. Let me ask you this question. In terms of this, we can see that as we age, melatonin fluxes and the circadian rhythm is altered, and sometimes even medicines that are used are or they cause problems as a result. Can you give us some insight on aging and sleep?

 

[00:28:25] Ana Paola: Aging, sleep, and chronic diseases most of the time, because many studies show most of them in hypertensive patients, that they lose their ability to have a great night’s sleep and sometimes what a medical professional use uses is benzodiazepines. And most of the time, this disrupts the circadian rhythm and the fact that melatonin supply from the pineal gland. So that’s something that stood out to me that we go and treat people in a very aggressive way instead; I’m going and playing along with the biology and how these things should be messing up the patient’s circadian rhythm. And it’s, as I said before, it’s natural. All of the melatonin supply tends to slow down throughout our life development and our life cycle. So, yeah, it will eventually slow down. We will eventually lose the ability to produce that same amount of melatonin or get our receptors to work. But we have to we can treat it quickly with melatonin supplementation and with just a small, small amount of bed. And you mentioned something before that is essential: melatonin supplementation comes up as a working kind of momentum right there, or they can either be with an excellent little supply of melatonin from that release.

 

[00:30:14] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Like a continuous release, right?

 

[00:30:17] Ana Paola: Continuous release. Yes, right. So that’s the thing that it’s essential, the fact that most of the studies support the continuous release of melatonin. So implementation works better for a better night’s sleep. It contributes to the quality of sleep, and it’s associated with the fact that it can protect the brain or mostly the brain from deranging from contributing factors that will end up being Alzheimer’s disease.

 

[00:30:57] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I love that word derangement because that’s how I feel when you don’t sleep if you don’t sleep, the brain doesn’t function. Your sleep and the stages of sleep are essential to go deep into the zone throughout the Beta-gamma, and those beta waves, different types of sleep are necessary for us. So to start the process to announce to the body, it’s time to start sleeping. So we got to go through almost a level of when we deal with melatonin and sleep. It’s not only hand in hand, but we’re learning that it has other issues, but it’s essential to understand how it affects the body in so many drastic ways. This is kind of like the mechanism that tells the body you need to bring it down. You need to get it to the point where you need to go to bed. And if you don’t, we’re going to start having a reactive oxygen species. We’re going to start causing inflammation. We’re going to make your night a living, whatever, and it’s going to be a huge dynamic change. So when we look at this, it alters temperature. It limits the body’s ability to raise its body temperature, it’s core temperature. So we know that the cooler we are, the better we sleep. So when you’re in a deep sleep, you tend to get cool. If the melatonin doesn’t reach its certain levels, you may increase your body temperature and wake up. So sometimes melatonin is even used, and we noticed that, and it continues released. It keeps the body temperature low, allowing you to go through the processes of just cleansing the body and going through the recovery stage. It’s a crucial thing now. You mentioned something about pharmacological agents from, you know, different types of medications and analgesics, pharmacokinetics, early-stage one PharmaCann psychotropic medications, psychological medications, second stage, and now the newest versions of those. They alter the sleep pattern. And many people come in as a result of our particular type of practice, an injury-based practice. So we have trauma accidents, and they start taking these pain medications, which, yes, what it does, it messes with areas from the deep chasms or the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Also, the reticular endothelial tissue, which is the Dula base, actually stimulates and controls a sleep pattern. If that happens well, then medications take away pain disrupt the circadian rhythm, creating drama. Guess what happens when you can’t sleep? You become psychotic. I mean, you lose your ability to focus. You can’t do natural things. And then you have a lot of drama in life. Not only that, but you become inflammatory and susceptible to many diseases. We’re going to be discussing the implications of what melatonin does even in the COVID dynamics. So we’ll talk about that in a few. So those are the kind of things. Why does melatonin start with age? Well, you were mentioned that you were talking about the calcification of the pineal gland. 

 

Melatonin Roles In The Body

 

[00:34:07] Ana Paola: Yeah, that’s right. Something that stood out to me. Melatonin played a massive role in the immune-modulatory sense way. So something that we have to take into account is that it is not only the pineal gland that secretes melatonin. There are a lot of other cells that might be able to secrete melatonin. One of these molecules, per se, is the mitochondria or other macrophages that can secrete this hormone. So it’s like we can say that it’s distributed throughout our body. Still, the central part of our body controls melatonin secretion only gets affected by calcification, it plays a massive role, and we can associate this with many things right now. Hence, it has a lot to do with the hormonal feedback, and I don’t know if that’s our limitation. That’s like the only thing they know about that something is going wrong with their hormonal effect, but they don’t know what will happen. Another vital role in immunomodulatory or inflammatory responses is that melatonin can play a role if it is a scavenger for reactive oxygen species. And once the desecration of starts to slow down, then reactive species will eventually stop to back into the matter. And all of these excitatory processes will come along. And this is something that it’s called inflammation that will subsequently trigger all of these detrimental effects and different tissues of the body, ultimately affecting the pineal gland. So this is going in a very close and molecular way, but that will eventually play a huge role in the calcification of this tissue, the pineal gland.

 

[00:36:34] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Now you remind me of when you said that, I’m thinking like, you know, you call it like scavengers, OK? So here you go. This is a picture here. This guy here, that guy in the air. That’s a reactive oxygen species. OK, right? That’s melatonin just totally knocking it out. That’s how we look at it. So when we see reactive oxygen species, it’s the enemy. It’s the thing that is used to keep the body from there’s tools that it uses. We need reactive oxygen species to get it right. Like our body fights are, macrophages use it to destroy other bacteria, right? But when they go crazy, they got to be put out, OK, just like that, man. Just that. And that’s what vitamin A, E, C, all the antioxidants. This is what happens. They take them out. We need to have a balance. Otherwise, our body becomes inflammatory. And that’s where we want to talk about this now. You mentioned that it has a multitude of effects in terms of it. If it’s not appropriately balanced out, sleep apnea, stroke is respiratory disorders. They increase these hypoxic areas in the pineal gland that also causes the calcification you were talking about; trauma to the brain also affects how the body produces melatonin. Alzheimer’s also impacts these individuals, and their sleep is off. So if anyone who’s got some neurotrophic or neurodegenerative disorder, it can be affected directly by that. So not only does it affect individuals in a usual way, but we have to be very mindful of the understandings of what we have found out that it causes. No, as you mentioned, even ibuprofen, these medications that we have here, you see certain alpha-blockers for blood pressure. All these medications here are diazepam, Valium, Xanax. People even take that to relax and sleep.

 

Cognitive Function

 

[00:38:27] Ana Paola: Yeah, and that’s the fact. Just imagine how the pathway goes for this cascade. You are diagnosed with hypertension, and you get recommended to take a hypertensive drug, and this drug takes away your sleep pattern, and then you go and take diazepam, which plays the same role. So you’re going to eventually have delayed or sleep pattern disorder or maybe just lose your quality of sleep. And that will subsequently come up with different factors in your life. You can either lose cognitive…

 

[00:39:22] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Function?

 

[00:39:24] Ana Paola: Cognitive function, yes.

 

[00:39:26] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: The truth is, we’re all suffering from that, but it’s perfect to understand that inadequate sleep at night is simple as covering your eyes. Just a simple something or an excellent little cover, you know? I look like a frequent sleeper with the night cover. My daughter sometimes takes my little sleep cover, and I take it back when she sleeps. And when she wakes up, she gets irritated. But I guess she gets mad when she doesn’t sleep. Insufficient exposure to light, you know, getting out and feeling the sun on our body not only produces a lot of hormonal reactions from our skin, but that light also sets the path and the pattern for our pineal gland to function that way. So if you live as a hermit and you work and their computers all the time, well, eventually they’re going to have some issues with sleeping. And one of the things that I don’t care who you are, I mean, most of the kids are today, even the college graduates. They love playing games at night, right? That’s how they met their friends. That’s how they keep in touch with their buddies from college worldwide, and they’re playing arcade games late at night. It’s funny watching lawyers and doctors playing at night with their computers. 

 

[00:40:57] Ana Paola: I have one of those at home.

 

[00:40:58] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, and they don’t sleep. And then what happens is they’re like 3:00 in the morning, and they’re angry at everybody else because it’s 4:00 in the morning, and they’ve won their game. But sleep matters. So it becomes a huge, important thing. Alcohol, though it’s a beginner of sleep because it relaxes people, messes up deeper sleep levels. So it causes some issues. Adrenaline, you know, when you have constant stress, cortisol suppresses melatonin. Well, if you’re getting chewed at or life is becoming problematic at work, and you’re always worried. Well, now you know why you need some assistance to reestablish the standard melatonin patterns. Now we’re going to discuss what we do in a few minutes to see the melatonin dynamics. And let’s take a look at it because one is my opinion. One is anyone’s efficiency, but one truth is with the best bloodwork says on a patient. At that point, we can give a much more logical point of view. Caffeine. Believe it or not, even the ailment affects the body. So if you take caffeine and I’m guilty of it too, right, I have about, you know, an average, normal amount of coffee, which is probably, I think, 16 espressos and about three cups of coffee because I want some more juice on it, right?

 

[00:42:15] Ana Paola: So that it’s totally fine. 

 

[00:42:20] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I wonder why maybe, you know, people have arrhythmias or not. So, cofactors, as we discussed in the first demonstration, there are a lot of stages from tryptophan to five HDP to the production of serotonin to, you know, to melatonin. Cofactors influence all these dynamics. These cofactors are things that assist the biochemical process to continue what we call a rightward shift. If it’s missing, it does not travel, or it delays, it backs up. Just like in Somalia. What was this boat that got stuck in the river? You saw that it wasn’t?

 

[00:42:59] Ana Paola: No, I don’t remember. 

 

[00:43:02] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Freddy’s River or something like that, right? Where the darn thing backed up and the whole world stopped, right? Because I mean, little communication, all the Middle East and all the medications stopped, right? So it shows you that if you don’t have the proper cofactors and the progression in an average direction, literally all systems stop producing. You know, one good example of a biochemical process is photosynthesis. For instance, you need light, you need water, you need energy, right? If you don’t have it, you don’t have photosynthesis. It doesn’t progress. Cut the water out. Not that much photosynthesis. Cut out the sunlight. It stops it, right? So we are dependent upon these cofactors. B3. We talked about that earlier vitamin C zinc, all these supplements that we talk from iron before seeing what it needs to do and how we can assess those to see if you’re missing that. Or now we’ve got to figure out where the process is theorized that melatonin supplementation can neutralize reactive oxygen species. Yeah. So what I’m saying is, we can take out those, take out that reactive crazy oxygen that causes decay, causing inflammation.

 

Can Bacteria Affect Melatonin Supplementation?

 

[00:44:18] Ana Paola: OK, so are either microorganisms or bacterial pests have been being stuck with melatonin supplementation? And another thing that we have to mention is that narrowed neurodegeneration goes and plays a massive part in our sleep cycles. So, whenever we have a night of disrupted sleep. We are susceptible to neurodegenerative processes that will improve or increase the fact that we’re producing those amyloid proteins in our brain, which will lead or be associated with Alzheimer’s disease. So that’s huge. Like when you said you wake up your daughter, be careful; you might be disrupting her sleep.

 

[00:45:17] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: She needs to be punished. You know, for months and years, I was the village idiot basically in the whole business because my brain wasn’t functioning because she prevented my sleeping pattern. My daughter caused so many neurodegenerative diseases. See, that’s the truth, and I’m just kidding.

 

[00:45:33] Ana Paola: And now, you are paying her back.

 

[00:45:35] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: We have a good relationship that she just has nothing but love and contempt for her father. That’s a good word. So between the shrew, the angry, ill-tempered woman, and the content, I live an exciting life, but I’ll tell you what melatonin family balance is a perfect thing. The picture here we can see here is the pineal gland. You can see when we look at bone; it’s very circular, and it’s calcification. These are mesenchymal cells here. We’re seeing that inflammation causes a protection mechanism to calcify the pineal gland. You can see that these pineal glands are functioning, and they’re nearly calcification. This is because it’s inflammatory. And when you see this kind of stuff, you can see that reactive oxygen species or chronic inflammation limits your body and prevents your body from functioning correctly. So I’ve got people that have had a constant enormous amount of stress. They eat every terrible food that you could probably do over time. The consequence is there, and it ends up being a problem when they’re in their 70s and 80s years old. So we’ve got to be very mindful of those things. So I know we were talking about pregnancy and lactation in terms of melatonin. And by the way, you’re a lactation specialist. Go ahead and tell me a bit about your certification?

 

[00:47:08] Ana Paola: All right. Certification and breastfeeding as a breastfeeding specialist.

 

[00:47:13] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: There you go. That’s right because it’s important things like that. That’s huge. So when we look at this, we start looking at the trimesters: the first, second, and third trimesters of melatonin production. You know, it’s almost as if the body goes through trimesters during pregnancy. No, there’s a whole new set of processes that happen at each stage. It’s just not like it just gets better. Not the body. Through these announcements of melatonin changes, changes in the dynamics of neurodevelopment and development of a child. So it plays a significant role in those components. Melatonin and fertility. Tell me a bit of what you have seen on this, particularly for the oocytes as well as in the works of Inositol, if you may.

 

Inositol

 

[00:48:08] Ana Paola: Inositol is a harmful compound that is very similar to glucose, so it’s kind of that molecule that will eat up or will donate all of the methyl groups, so that’s how it works. But a lot of the studies have found that melatonin has a lot of benefits with fertility. So I just can’t tell you how it works. It’s like a particular thing for me. But it was found that the fertilization rate was 50 percent higher with the melatonin treatment. And as you see a little bit down there, the doses were not that high as long as they were supplemented with melatonin; it’s all for three months. So that’s something that can work, and well, something that we have to consider is either the patient’s age. Is she thirty-five? Is she twenty? Is she forty? Something like that? And that will eventually be a blueprint of how to treat a sleep disorder or melatonin insufficiency that she might have. And this is something that we can apply to those patients who require extra help for their fertility problems. So this is how it works, that there are still more to be done.

 

[00:49:48] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: In the works of inositol, as you indicated correctly, it’s a blood sugar regulator as well, too. So in disease, disorders like fertility issues and conditions like PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome is used to establish this norm. So the use of oocytes when it’s producing the improved or cyte production. Well, too many oocytes are the the the the the follicles through as they go through the ovary cycle. And if you got more than twenty-five and can see these things on MRI or even ultrasound, you can see them expanding. If it’s that way, it’s a polycystic ovarian syndrome. So what happens is that one of its components is a good dynamic used in the past. However, this is one of those things that we have to every person has an individual dynamics that we have to see. Let me go over to melatonin lactation in newborns. We went over that, and let’s talk about the foods area. So let’s first understand that it’s a ubiquitous molecule in nature. It’s everywhere. And therefore, that’s the reason that there’s no control at the FDA level. It’s everywhere. It’s bio-identical to humans. Its vital melatonin is also produced in plants. That’s the version of the plants that are being discussed. Melatonin is from bovine. That was kind of or animal kind of base. In terms of this, we discussed earlier the dynamics of seeing how many areas affect the plant itself. So what type of diet has a lot of plants in it? Well, the Mediterranean diet. That’s why the Mediterranean diet is enormous, and it’s a type of diet that we recommend people establish the norms on. Do you have anything to add on that particular because we want to go ahead and make sure people know about the melatonin and plants?

 

Plants and Melatonin

 

[00:51:47] Ana Paola: Well, something about melatonin in plants is that it regulates the growth and spread of these plants. So it works very much like the same in a plant and humans. So when they say you’re a plant, take water, take your sunlight and everything, and melatonin has to do a lot of that. But yes, and something that stood out to me is that melatonin content is different in the leaves or the roots. And they fight radical species, and they can protect UVA from excessive UV exposure. So maybe we should try adding some melatonin to my plants to get some more growth from them. 

 

[00:52:45] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I was thinking the same thing myself, I’m a lover of plants, and I sit there and talk to my trees all the time. So you know what? I was thinking I’m going to throw a bottle or two at them whenever.

 

Melatonin In Food

 

[00:52:55] Ana Paola: Maybe that’s the way to go. But yes, actually, there is a lot of plants. Wine has been associated with high amounts of melatonin, and that’s why we said that. People can prevent or delay, ah, circadian rhythm, but we have to know that. Berries, plants and a lot of drinks, and many different foods contain specific amounts of melatonin. We can gather them not only from the pineal gland of a cow like the first study in 1958, but we can also get it from the strawberries; we can get it from nuts, mixed nuts, and walnuts. And actually, I think that the most important or the oldest product with the most melatonin is rice. So there you have it, you could have a gluten-free diet and have a good melatonin supplementation from your diet. So it’s great. It’s something that we can find.

 

[00:54:09] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, you know, my brother loves rice, and he would always come to the house. And if my mom made Arroz con polo or whatever the thing was, you know what? That little punk was in the corner eating my food. And you know what? My mom would give me a plate, right? Do you know what he would do? He would eat off my plate. Well, you know what, Gus? I remember that, and that’s why I didn’t sleep so well. But that’s OK. You can have all the rice you want, right? So sometimes we have to make sure that rice is very aware of. Now going back to this, sometimes if you’re on a ketogenic diet, for example, and you have a tough time sleeping right because the blood sugar drops, this is a side note it would be good to have some nuts on the side of the bed, you know, some walnuts and quality organic set of walnuts in that area, even even if you make it downstairs or to your refrigerator. Have some strawberries because those things do offer you the ability to continue your sleep so that you don’t disrupt it because our goal is to get your body back to a level to rest. To be able to clean. To be able to renew so that you can live a better life. Now, as we’ve discussed, we have different types of herbs. We have our favorite little herbs here, from chamomile to skullcap to even curcumin can produce and have its content of melatonin. In this respect, we look at all the dynamics and see how it affects now when we look at the measurement tool of seeing how melatonin functions. We do laboratory tests, and this is mainly one test that we do. It’s just the saliva test. And it’s cool because what we can do is we can do saliva in the morning. We can measure, and we can just like spitting out of the little tube. And then we just maybe three times a day at night and measure where the melatonin levels are. This is very interesting because what you get to see here is the usual pattern of it should be kind of in the mornings low. By evening, it goes down, but then it kicks in the right around lead after an evening, a period, to the point where it starts preparing you to sleep. This is a regular pattern. If he goes outside, that’s what happens now. This is a person who works the night shift or the third shift. Some people say they are working late at night on the contrary, in the evenings. This is kind of like how it alters the whole pattern. If someone has these high levels of, let’s say, melatonin in the body, you have to figure out what’s causing this. OK, maybe they’re taking food supplements at the wrong time, and then it causes a total disruption of their sleep pattern. So we will be able to see that this may be something that mitigates it now. That’s the job. Well, that may be what explains it, but it does have its consequences. And for those people with those third shifts, the reality is that when you alter the body’s dynamic to do that, you change the world in the body. I cannot tell you that people who have particular jobs, people who work for the government, people who work for water safety, people who have night jobs, and people who take on the world tend to have more inflammation. They tend to be very overweight. Yes. Angry, bitter, and swole in other ways. All right. So we need to be able to understand that sleep is crucial. So we said, nurses. Nurses. You said nurses, right?

 

Can Nurses Have Decreased Cognitive Function?

 

[00:57:33] Ana Paola: Nurses work that third shift. And actually, there’s a lot of studies that show that people who work night shift workers tend to have a little bit more risk of developing cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, or either has decreased cognitive function. So I mean, yeah, we need to do something. 

 

[00:58:01] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: We got to keep those people alive, too, because they nurses. And this goes out to my nurses. And by trade, I have a license in nursing too. So the thing about it is is that if we don’t get that by the time a nurse retires, they are destroyed literally.

 

[00:58:19] Ana Paola: What kind of life would they have?

 

[00:58:21] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: They will be destroyed, I mean, because they’ve given their lives. And here’s a side question what’s more important. The ship or the sailors, what’s more important? That’s a question for you.

 

[00:58:34] Ana Paola: I mean, I like the ship, but it’s the sailors.

 

[00:58:38] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Is it the sailor or the ship?

 

[00:58:40] Ana Paola: It’s the sailors.

 

[00:58:40] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Well, that’s probably correct from a health care point of view. So the reality is if the ship goes down, everybody dies, right? So the ship is critical. So as an individual, as a nurse, our jobs are our jobs, as health care providers, as parents, and as people who take care of individuals. And that goes for everybody. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we are the ship, destroying ourselves. And before you know it, we can’t take care of the sailor, which may be our children or our family or people dependent upon this. So we have to be mindful that we have to do what’s suitable for our bodies. So walking in the sun is essential. Maybe during lunch, instead of sitting inside the hospital, walk around the hospital with your buddy and talk about whatever of life. And then when you got, you got some sunlight and reset the whole mechanical by the rhythm that’s going on here. We promised here that we wanted to talk a bit about COVID and melatonin. So it’s a very, really important deal. We all know that we had this natural in America. We had this not too well-known President Donald Trump. He wasn’t you very popular, right? So what happened was what you did know about the guy. He’s just a freak when it comes to energy, right? He’s just he doesn’t stop. I don’t think there’s ever been or will ever be at this nearest dynamics. A person who has a burns it on both sides, literally at three o’clock in the morning, tweeting four o’clock in the morning, tweeting five o’clock in the morning. He doesn’t sleep. So it wasn’t a surprise that not only does he have a little bit of metabolic syndrome, you could tell he’s a little bit overweight, and I could say it. I can say that guy’s not going to come and tell me that. That, I can say, is a little thick on the waist there. 

 

[01:00:29] Ana Paola: But the reality is thinking about things.

 

Inflammasomes

 

[01:00:31] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: But we were all saying it right. So what happens is we start noticing these patterns, and this is where we start learning that inflammation and melatonin link to things like diabetes. And let’s say insulin resistance. And all these things cause issues that cause more reactive oxygen species. This cause is constant. Inflammation will disrupt our in our pineal gland as well. When President Trump, when he was sick, the first thing they gave him not only was a Moderna shot, right, but they also gave him vitamin D. And guess what they gave him, too. They gave him zinc and a hefty dose of excellent melatonin because they wanted to calm him down. They tried to mitigate or bring order to the inflammatory response, which melatonin tends to do. You know, we’ve learned a lot that it does affect the immune system. But as for the studies right now, we have a bunch of studies being in there and what they call the phase one, phase two, and phase three of their moment where they’re doing these randomized trial studies. And they’re very elaborate. So as they’re being done, they’re now entering into the third phase. However, how it mitigates the Cobridge and how it helps in its entirety are still confused. So it would be irresponsible to kind of say, OK, it does fix it, but we do know it does help through different ways. Now, in terms of this, we know that melatonin increases the political responses in lymphocytes of particular creatures, right, by increasing certain types of pro-inflammatory cytokines. If it’s diminished, it helps activate the immune system, so that kind of seems interesting. So it starts it, but it also works on NF Kappa B, which does immune dampening it. So it’s the word for that where it helps boost things. It’s got its hands on both sides inflammation, inflammatory, and stop inflammatory. So it becomes the modulator is a good word, I think. Multitasking may be immune modulation, right? So we do know that things like curcumin do the same thing with inflammation. Inflammation is important. Inflammation is necessary to live. However, it going gone the wrong way causes a problem. However, this particular dynamics is one where it does the same thing it modulates. So that’s where the studies are coming in, and you can see that we can cite it. We also know that this particular cell is immune, so it’s a macrophage, right? So it’s a monocyte, and it does it through peregrine effects. It produces melatonin. Oh, isn’t that crazy? Our body produces it at different areas of cellular metabolism. So this is very important to understand that even our immune system can produce melatonin. So as you can see, the World of 1980 was it helps you with sleep jet lag. Right now, we can see that it affects a whole lot of shebang, right? So as we started noticing, this is a thing that you love. Tell me a bit about the inflammasomes.

 

[01:03:51] Ana Paola:  P-3 inflammasomes. This plays a massive role in the pathogenesis because of the inflammatory response, or the planetary cascade that produces alpha-gamma and TNF alpha. So TNF alpha will trigger an inflammatory response that will lead to our respiratory condition that will end up being like this massive cytokine storm. It will track the patient and world-class action pulmonary response, so what happens is that melatonin can play a huge part as a scavenger of reactive oxygen species because that is like the thing that triggers then a lot of people being from that zone. So while their melatonin is taking out a bad, that aware situation, they and all our P-3 implements, we can say, inactivated inside of that of the cytosol in the cell. Then all of these material processes will be delayed or even blocked, as you, as you might say. But the fact that the. That the virus is still burying the body could be something, and this can explain the fact that people might be positive control patient patients, but they do not have this kind of storm effect. So this is what can cause that situation; something that helps with delaying or blocking that initial arbitrary inflammatory activation is the omega three and omega six ratios. Take it like having a good omega-six omega-three ratio can improve the situation, but it is a cascade.

 

Conclusion

 

[01:06:07] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, when when you were mentioning that to me, you know, there are now people who are getting the vaccinations, they see that there’s an association, no correlation yet, but they’re making it that people who have a good night’s sleep a few nights before they get the vaccination, they respond very well that people that don’t have a good night’s sleep, they don’t not only respond as well, but the immune reaction doesn’t rise to the level that it titrates enough to be able to give them sustained immune response for the future. So, in essence, the ability to sleep. Modulated by the modify and monocytes, macrophages, and T cells produce melatonin, right? This is a clear indicator of why the desire to learn about the associations of correlation and how melatonin affects the immune system is so important in today’s world. For years, we’ve known that it had to do a lot with like RNA viruses and how the body could deal with them. But now, with what has happened with us, we’re seeing what’s going on. So in terms of dynamics, we have seen trials with as much as 25 mg. Remember, we talked that most dosages are between three and five. Twenty-five, you’re given a huge amount of doses. And even with that, we’re noticing that pro-inflammatory cycles, as well as biomarkers of stress, are sustained. So even the high levels people do survive well. So sleep, inflammation, and mental health are not too much can be ascertained as this component. If I mean that seriously, you and sleep and inflammation recover a lot of disease processes. So not only does it help you with sleep, but it helps you recover and deal with how your body interacts with the world. As practicing individuals, we look for the cellular activity we associate. We correlate things that we do in body composition. We evaluate body composition and inflammation. If a person is, let’s say, a 40 or, let’s say, a 40 BMI or 50 BMI, or even the 70, you know, body composition levels at high levels of inflammatory markers are noted. We need to address the melatonin issue in those individuals. So not only do we look at cellular activity, but how cells are working together. So we use different techniques to phase angles, different body compositions, total water densities to assess these kinds of situations on individuals. So our goal is to see how the body responds to inflammation if we don’t have good rest. Well, we have inflammation. You have diseases, and we have diabetes, we have that psychosis, we have neurodegeneration, as you mentioned, right? So that’s what happens. Chronic systemic diseases, low-grade inflammation, pain all the time. How’s that sound, right? So we have an issue that started with Let me sleep better. But no, we’re stopping diseases. As you indicated, cancers, diabetes, inflammatory atherosclerosis, prostatitis. Arthritis, arachidonic acid production. As you indicated with the Omegas, there’s a lot that we can need to do and evaluate. But when we assess our particular individual, we start to see that not only does this stuff, we see how it affects the intestines. Believe it or not, serotonin and melatonin work together well. The gut makes it, too. So it’s one of those things where you can see it in the intestines. As you talked about, LPs were a lipopolysaccharide of bacteria. Those high inflammatory states are not kept in check without proper sleeping or proper cycling while the body gets disturbed and fatigued. This leads to disease and disorder, or an inflammatory reaction that goes awry because it was modulating. So it’s modulated. It stops it from going too far. So as that kid wants to go out and run into the track, well, mom is grabbing it. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. I don’t want you to be a little boy who doesn’t want to grow up because you will get run over if you go too far. That would be the cytokine storm, which starts inflammatory action, specifically in the pulmonary aspect. And you know what we have so far. So we have, you know, respiratory distress syndrome when all of a sudden inflammation brings in fibroblasts. Before you know it, the fibroblasts close off the ability of the alveoli to breathe. And then there you go, a person who cannot breathe. They’re just basically the oxygen cannot transfer fast enough. And because of the excessive amount, they have a problem surviving, and eventually, the lungs give out. And then we have the drama that we had before. So I know today we discussed a lot, but we can’t stop by looking at what we have to do the most. We have to realize that I feel sleepy after looking at the picture. So, you know, cats are one of those things that give a lot of good energies, but there’s no other creature that makes you understand or appreciate sleep as a cat does. It’s like it lives its entire life with sleep, and it makes it get it to enjoy its lifestyle because I’m sure a cat can teach us a lot about resting. So if you don’t have one, get one pet one, and if you have allergies, you will watch them on TV, and you can enjoy them that way. So I hope that made sense. I appreciate you, Ana, for going through this is pretty long, but it’s a pretty important dynamic as it presents, and I look forward to being able to chitchat with you, OK? So you have a go, and I’ll talk to you, stay there, and I’ll be talking to you a second.

 

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