13 ms·

Melatonin as a treatment for food waste

152 points by WallyFunk 3y ago

insanitybit 3y ago
Not loading for me. web archive link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230804183727/https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2023/08/melatonin-a-sleep-aid-is-a-surprising-treatment-for-food-waste/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230804183727/https://www.anthr...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lcnmrn 3y ago
...and IgY for animal products.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Didn't see anything in the article about how much melatonin a person would get from eating food treated this way. I sometimes take small doses of melatonin during the summer months when my sleep pattern tends to drift if I don't actively keep it under control but wonder if consuming it through diet would end up making lots of people groggy during the day.
- Arrath 3y ago
  Forget groggy, melatonin generally works as a sleep aid for me but also gives me wildly trippy and fucked up dreams. I stopped using it specifically because of that.
  - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
    Your dosage was likely too high. I had the same issue using the smallest dose I could find at the pharmacy (5mg) and it was totally fixed by going to a pill one fifteenth of the dosage that I procured online.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised, they were plain OTC 10mg pills but as I read in an article posted fairly recently on HN I learned that the required dose is often much, much smaller than that. My foray with melatonin was a few years ago and I'm not having trouble sleeping now so I haven't dipped my toes into it again.
      - Zetice 3y ago
        Just to confirm, my limited understanding is that 10mg is an incredibly high dosage.
        Arrath 3y ago
        As is mine, now. Back in the wild days of 2016 or so advice online said "just go get some melatonin and you'll sleep!" and the bottle said to take 1 or 2 an hour before you want to sleep, so off I went.
        neteresy 3y ago
        Wait until you read this: "Oral administration of 1,000 mg a day of melatonin to five adults for 25 to 30 days resulted in drowsiness being noted as an adverse effect. There were no severe and/or irreversible impacts on clinical parameters (blood pressure, heart rate, ECG, serum chemistry, urine analysis) in these people." Source: Nordlund JJ, Lerner AB. The effects of oral melatonin on skin color and on the release of pituitary hormones. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1977
    - npunt 3y ago
      I take 300mcg time release and it gives me more vivid dreams. Stuff is powerful
    - bestcoder69 3y ago
      0.3mg is the dose you want, apparently https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    That's the best part, great way to induce lucid dreams consistently.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Melatonin causes wild dreams for me, too, but I actually enjoy them. Free cinema.
- scythe 3y ago
  Good question. The paper says 0.1 mmol per liter, i.e. fruit is sprayed with a solution containing about 23 milligrams per liter of melatonin. It's possible that the amount retained would be less than a few milliliters of solution equivalent — less than 100 micrograms under practical consumption patterns — so having little activity. But if the melatonin is absorbed by the fruit, the effect could be significant and particularly problematic since people often eat fruit in the morning. In any case, I think that a more likely goal of this research (vs actually spraying commercial fruit with melatonin) might be to identify compounds able to produce the same beneficial effect on fruit without causing any adverse effects in humans.
maltyr 3y ago
I'm not sure we should cover our food in melatonin. People would recoil at the thought of pretty much any other hormone being added to our food supply. It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone. The article suggests it's safer than current food additives, but I find that statement questionable. We don't understand the full effect of Melatonin on the human body, so I don't know how you can make that conclusion.
- rat9988 3y ago
  There are many many studies on melatonin, it's not like we know nothing.
  - maltyr 3y ago
    And those studies suggest that melatonin plays a critical part in your circadian rhythm, which kind of implies that adding it to your food would also screw with your circadian rhythm. That alone seems like a good enough reason to caution against adding it into the food supply. Additionally, there are receptors for melatonin in a number of systems in the body, and we don't have much knowledge on what those receptors do.
    - Void_ 3y ago
      Once I took melatonin to get a better afternoon nap. I never felt so groggy in my life. Completely screwed up my internal clock. I’m very careful with it since then. Taking it at night time doesn’t quite show how powerful it is - since you’re sleepy anyway.
      - maksimur 3y ago
        The point is taking it in the night if you're not able to get sleepy, especially if you fucked up your circadian rhythm. Taking it in the afternoon is going to fuck up the circadian rhythm if it wasn't already. For that you're better off taking chamomile and valerian.
      - 3y ago
vvpan 3y ago
Melatonin is very interesting because it is believed that all living things (bacteria, fungi, etc) have it [1]. Calling it a "sleep aid" is somewhat off because in humans and other animals it is compound heavily involved in modulating circadian rhythms. It is not a "drug". And a little personal anecdote about it: I have gone through a period of bad sleep and depression and was taking melotonin to help with sleep. On some mornings I would wake up completely emotionally destroyed, barely able to function. After observing the patterns for a few months I notice that this happened only on days after melotonin intake. Looking around the internet I've found stories of people describing exactly the same symptoms as I've had mornings after melotonin ingestion. Long story short I am likely not taking melotonin ever again and regret ever doing so. Sometimes I even wonder whether it generally exacerbated or even caused my condition at the time. I think research on this is scant atm. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6481276/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6481276/
- circuit10 3y ago
  Isn’t a drug just anything that affects how your body functions? It doesn’t have to be something that your body wouldn’t have in it anyway
  - speak_plainly 3y ago
    I’m no doctor but I think the difference between a drug and a hormone is that a drug is a foreign substance you take to affect the way your body functions while a hormone is something produced endogenously to regulate various processes in the body. People need to understand that melatonin is a hormone and that comes with different risks and issues than a drug.
    - delecti 3y ago
      Drugs and hormones aren't separate groups either. Melatonin is a hormone which is also sold as a drug. Additionally, some hormones are wholly artificial; many of the estrogens and progestins which are used for birth control fit that description.
    - 3y ago
clumsysmurf 3y ago
If you have IBD / Chrohn's be careful with melatonin https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/melatonin-used-to-promote-sleep-may-worsen-inflammatory-bowel-disease-symptoms https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/melatonin-used-to-...
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  One of the publications they cite says melatonin is good for IBD: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0300908422003315 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03009... Too lazy to see if that's backed by a study on actual human health outcomes instead of rat models like the thrust of your article.
- kromem 3y ago
  As mentioned in the article, there's also studies where it may improve things. This particular one is a mouse model with induced DSS colitis, which I kind of wish would be erased from methodology forever across literature. Not only is it mice rather than humans, but it is focused on replicating the end symptoms without mirroring the underlying causes. For example, what if IBD/Crohn's had to do with decreased gut melatonin production, leading to bacterial changes in the gut leading to autoimmune attacks leading to gut inflammation/ulcerations? Without replicating the casual factors, simply inducing ulcerations using a chemical agent without also replicating the autoimmune attack isn't very helpful. And anecdotally, my own disease is in complete remission with a surprisingly light medical treatment particularly after comparing dietary interventions inducing remission in two meta-analyses and finding the one key shared factor was reduction in processed sugars and introducing the same in my own diet. But that's with me taking 20mg of melatonin for a sleep disorder. And when my sleep is disturbed too much (as occurs if I don't have the melatonin to use), the resulting physical stress can sometimes induce small flares. In my own experience and in having looked at studies looking at melatonin use in human IBD patients, I'm fairly skeptical of the findings in the DSS mouse study are enough that anyone with sleep issues helped by melatonin should avoid it. Especially given there's a 2-fold increase in risk of disease activity in humans with poor sleep: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659204/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659204/
kbutler 3y ago
On a youth camping trip, one morning a boy found his (contraband) snacks had been raided. A raccoon (probably) had chewed through the tent, into his backpack, eaten various snacks, and opened his bottle of melatonin and eaten quite a few pills. I wonder what the effects were of a massive overdose of melatonin on an animal the size of a raccoon...
- burnished 3y ago
  It probably took a nap? I'm not sure about raccoon biology but in humans melatonin is one of the least hazardous things. I'm not sure you can overdose on it practically speaking
  - scotty79 3y ago
    Not even that. Melatonin works best as a sleep aid in small doses. Larger one have less effect.
  - kbutler 3y ago
    Apparently you can: https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/sleep/melatonin-overdose https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/sleep/melatonin-over... A study of poison control calls in the U.S. found the number of melatonin poisoning–related calls increased six times from 2012 to 2021. Of these calls, more than 4,000 teens and children were hospitalized and two died. Signs of melatonin overdose include excessive sleepiness, vomiting and trouble breathing. Other side effects of both low and high doses of melatonin can include headaches, excessive sleepiness, blood pressure changes, gastrointestinal problems, changes in other hormone levels and mood problems,
raun1 3y ago
Melatonin disrupts circadian hormonal cycles. One of the key ways being delay of morning secretion of cortisol and other hormones. It really should not be ingested except on rare occasions.
pfisherman 3y ago
I don’t think sprinkling all the produce with a pharmacologically active molecule is a good idea. Side effects can and will be a big problem.
tracker1 3y ago
This just sounds like a bad idea. Not least of which, is that we have enough food to feed the world, and food waste has a usefulness and that is in creating new live soil.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Terrible title. ...melatonin could also be a vital tool to help fresh produce survive its own journey from farm to fork, reducing the monumental amount of food loss that occurs each year. I interpreted the title to mean it would be applied to food after it was deemed "waste" as a form of "waste treatment" of some kind. I am not thrilled by the proposal. Melatonin impacts the immune system in ways not yet understood. This could be kind of like adding more antibiotics to the food chain.
Havoc 3y ago
Take care with the stuff. Thought it's safer than other sleeping tablets (and it is), but when they say don't use long term it's for a reason. Ended up with strange continuous low key chest pains. Was fine, just had to stop
denverllc 3y ago
Speaking of fruit preservation: has anyone bought prepacked/sliced fruit from the grocery store / Costco that has an "off" flavor to it? Almost like they added some preservative. (The different fruit had the same flavor, which makes me think something was added). I have, and nothing was on the ingredients, so I am wondering what could have been added.
- delgaudm 3y ago
  Could it be lemon juice? That's a common think to add to preserve color and prevent oxidation in a home recipe.
- callalex 3y ago
  Powdered citric acid or liquid lemon juice is a common and harmless preservative.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
Most people know melatonin as extracellular melatonin, released by the pineal gland, which acts as a hormone to promote sleep. Melatonin is also a powerful intracellular antioxidant that protects cells against oxidative stressors made in mitochondria as byproducts of ATP production. Aside from the pineal gland melatonin, melatonin is produced directly in mitochondria by cytochrome c oxidase upon exposure to near infrared. https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?t=404 https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?t=404 That seems more relevant to this discussion.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
You will take the drugs. And you will be happy.
jimbobimbo 3y ago
Upper dose for melatonin has not been established, generally considered safe. https://ajac.substack.com/p/melatonin https://ajac.substack.com/p/melatonin for references. I'm on 40mg every night, gives me deep restful sleep.
- deprecative 3y ago
  As an insomniac I am jealous. I take prescription medication for it but nothing I've tried (both prescribed and over the counter) has ever been very restful.
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  That's pretty high, I would not risk it due to the slight correlation with dementia later on.
  - jimbobimbo 3y ago
    Interestingly, the opposite might be true: https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/accolades-honors/melatonin-alzheimers-disease-link-clear-thoughts-foundation https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/accolades-honors/melatonin-alz...
r00fus 3y ago
Just reading through this - if I were a producer or distributor of food I'd suddenly be thinking about not only preventing food waste, but simply extending food storage times. This could mean a lot more profit for large food corporations.
hnfong 3y ago
Pretty funny wording: > fruit fared better with melatonin treatment than did vegetables, which remained more susceptible to the cold (though, chilling injury was still reduced in some vegetables such as bell peppers and cucumbers by up to 24%.) I wonder whether this actually only works on biological fruits (bell peppers and cucumbers are fruits biologically).
ciconia 3y ago
Some low-tech (and IMO better) solutions for food waste: * Buy food locally, support your local farmers. * Grow your own vegetables (some are really easy: potatos, onions, garlic, zucchini, corn, beans, etc.). Even tomatos, peppers and eggplants are not that hard. * Compost your food waste - put it back in your garden. * Learn how to preserve food when there's an abundance. * Also, learn to eat better. I think it's a real shame that so much food waste ends up in landfill instead of being composted locally. If you compost your leftovers, you turn your waste into a resource, and use that to fertilize your garden.
seri4l 3y ago
I don't think I've ever bitten into a pear or plum with "unappetizingly soft or gristly bits".

152 points by WallyFunk 3y ago

Not loading for me. web archive link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230804183727/https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2023/08/melatonin-a-sleep-aid-is-a-surprising-treatment-for-food-waste/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230804183727/https://www.anthr...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lcnmrn 3y ago

...and IgY for animal products.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

Didn't see anything in the article about how much melatonin a person would get from eating food treated this way. I sometimes take small doses of melatonin during the summer months when my sleep pattern tends to drift if I don't actively keep it under control but wonder if consuming it through diet would end up making lots of people groggy during the day.

Arrath 3y ago
Forget groggy, melatonin generally works as a sleep aid for me but also gives me wildly trippy and fucked up dreams. I stopped using it specifically because of that.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
  Your dosage was likely too high. I had the same issue using the smallest dose I could find at the pharmacy (5mg) and it was totally fixed by going to a pill one fifteenth of the dosage that I procured online.
  - Arrath 3y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised, they were plain OTC 10mg pills but as I read in an article posted fairly recently on HN I learned that the required dose is often much, much smaller than that. My foray with melatonin was a few years ago and I'm not having trouble sleeping now so I haven't dipped my toes into it again.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      Just to confirm, my limited understanding is that 10mg is an incredibly high dosage.
      - Arrath 3y ago
        As is mine, now. Back in the wild days of 2016 or so advice online said "just go get some melatonin and you'll sleep!" and the bottle said to take 1 or 2 an hour before you want to sleep, so off I went.
      - neteresy 3y ago
        Wait until you read this: "Oral administration of 1,000 mg a day of melatonin to five adults for 25 to 30 days resulted in drowsiness being noted as an adverse effect. There were no severe and/or irreversible impacts on clinical parameters (blood pressure, heart rate, ECG, serum chemistry, urine analysis) in these people." Source: Nordlund JJ, Lerner AB. The effects of oral melatonin on skin color and on the release of pituitary hormones. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1977
  - npunt 3y ago
    I take 300mcg time release and it gives me more vivid dreams. Stuff is powerful
  - bestcoder69 3y ago
    0.3mg is the dose you want, apparently https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  That's the best part, great way to induce lucid dreams consistently.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Melatonin causes wild dreams for me, too, but I actually enjoy them. Free cinema.
scythe 3y ago
Good question. The paper says 0.1 mmol per liter, i.e. fruit is sprayed with a solution containing about 23 milligrams per liter of melatonin. It's possible that the amount retained would be less than a few milliliters of solution equivalent — less than 100 micrograms under practical consumption patterns — so having little activity. But if the melatonin is absorbed by the fruit, the effect could be significant and particularly problematic since people often eat fruit in the morning. In any case, I think that a more likely goal of this research (vs actually spraying commercial fruit with melatonin) might be to identify compounds able to produce the same beneficial effect on fruit without causing any adverse effects in humans.

maltyr 3y ago

I'm not sure we should cover our food in melatonin. People would recoil at the thought of pretty much any other hormone being added to our food supply. It's strange to me how Melatonin is so uncontrolled in usage, dosage, etc., despite being a hormone. The article suggests it's safer than current food additives, but I find that statement questionable. We don't understand the full effect of Melatonin on the human body, so I don't know how you can make that conclusion.

rat9988 3y ago
There are many many studies on melatonin, it's not like we know nothing.
- maltyr 3y ago
  And those studies suggest that melatonin plays a critical part in your circadian rhythm, which kind of implies that adding it to your food would also screw with your circadian rhythm. That alone seems like a good enough reason to caution against adding it into the food supply. Additionally, there are receptors for melatonin in a number of systems in the body, and we don't have much knowledge on what those receptors do.
  - Void_ 3y ago
    Once I took melatonin to get a better afternoon nap. I never felt so groggy in my life. Completely screwed up my internal clock. I’m very careful with it since then. Taking it at night time doesn’t quite show how powerful it is - since you’re sleepy anyway.
    - maksimur 3y ago
      The point is taking it in the night if you're not able to get sleepy, especially if you fucked up your circadian rhythm. Taking it in the afternoon is going to fuck up the circadian rhythm if it wasn't already. For that you're better off taking chamomile and valerian.
    - 3y ago

vvpan 3y ago

Melatonin is very interesting because it is believed that all living things (bacteria, fungi, etc) have it [1]. Calling it a "sleep aid" is somewhat off because in humans and other animals it is compound heavily involved in modulating circadian rhythms. It is not a "drug". And a little personal anecdote about it: I have gone through a period of bad sleep and depression and was taking melotonin to help with sleep. On some mornings I would wake up completely emotionally destroyed, barely able to function. After observing the patterns for a few months I notice that this happened only on days after melotonin intake. Looking around the internet I've found stories of people describing exactly the same symptoms as I've had mornings after melotonin ingestion. Long story short I am likely not taking melotonin ever again and regret ever doing so. Sometimes I even wonder whether it generally exacerbated or even caused my condition at the time. I think research on this is scant atm. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6481276/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6481276/

circuit10 3y ago
Isn’t a drug just anything that affects how your body functions? It doesn’t have to be something that your body wouldn’t have in it anyway
- speak_plainly 3y ago
  I’m no doctor but I think the difference between a drug and a hormone is that a drug is a foreign substance you take to affect the way your body functions while a hormone is something produced endogenously to regulate various processes in the body. People need to understand that melatonin is a hormone and that comes with different risks and issues than a drug.
  - delecti 3y ago
    Drugs and hormones aren't separate groups either. Melatonin is a hormone which is also sold as a drug. Additionally, some hormones are wholly artificial; many of the estrogens and progestins which are used for birth control fit that description.
  - 3y ago

clumsysmurf 3y ago

If you have IBD / Chrohn's be careful with melatonin https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/melatonin-used-to-promote-sleep-may-worsen-inflammatory-bowel-disease-symptoms https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/melatonin-used-to-...

hombre_fatal 3y ago
One of the publications they cite says melatonin is good for IBD: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0300908422003315 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03009... Too lazy to see if that's backed by a study on actual human health outcomes instead of rat models like the thrust of your article.
kromem 3y ago
As mentioned in the article, there's also studies where it may improve things. This particular one is a mouse model with induced DSS colitis, which I kind of wish would be erased from methodology forever across literature. Not only is it mice rather than humans, but it is focused on replicating the end symptoms without mirroring the underlying causes. For example, what if IBD/Crohn's had to do with decreased gut melatonin production, leading to bacterial changes in the gut leading to autoimmune attacks leading to gut inflammation/ulcerations? Without replicating the casual factors, simply inducing ulcerations using a chemical agent without also replicating the autoimmune attack isn't very helpful. And anecdotally, my own disease is in complete remission with a surprisingly light medical treatment particularly after comparing dietary interventions inducing remission in two meta-analyses and finding the one key shared factor was reduction in processed sugars and introducing the same in my own diet. But that's with me taking 20mg of melatonin for a sleep disorder. And when my sleep is disturbed too much (as occurs if I don't have the melatonin to use), the resulting physical stress can sometimes induce small flares. In my own experience and in having looked at studies looking at melatonin use in human IBD patients, I'm fairly skeptical of the findings in the DSS mouse study are enough that anyone with sleep issues helped by melatonin should avoid it. Especially given there's a 2-fold increase in risk of disease activity in humans with poor sleep: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659204/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659204/

kbutler 3y ago

On a youth camping trip, one morning a boy found his (contraband) snacks had been raided. A raccoon (probably) had chewed through the tent, into his backpack, eaten various snacks, and opened his bottle of melatonin and eaten quite a few pills. I wonder what the effects were of a massive overdose of melatonin on an animal the size of a raccoon...

burnished 3y ago
It probably took a nap? I'm not sure about raccoon biology but in humans melatonin is one of the least hazardous things. I'm not sure you can overdose on it practically speaking
- scotty79 3y ago
  Not even that. Melatonin works best as a sleep aid in small doses. Larger one have less effect.
- kbutler 3y ago
  Apparently you can: https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/sleep/melatonin-overdose https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/sleep/melatonin-over... A study of poison control calls in the U.S. found the number of melatonin poisoning–related calls increased six times from 2012 to 2021. Of these calls, more than 4,000 teens and children were hospitalized and two died. Signs of melatonin overdose include excessive sleepiness, vomiting and trouble breathing. Other side effects of both low and high doses of melatonin can include headaches, excessive sleepiness, blood pressure changes, gastrointestinal problems, changes in other hormone levels and mood problems,

raun1 3y ago

Melatonin disrupts circadian hormonal cycles. One of the key ways being delay of morning secretion of cortisol and other hormones. It really should not be ingested except on rare occasions.

pfisherman 3y ago

I don’t think sprinkling all the produce with a pharmacologically active molecule is a good idea. Side effects can and will be a big problem.

tracker1 3y ago

This just sounds like a bad idea. Not least of which, is that we have enough food to feed the world, and food waste has a usefulness and that is in creating new live soil.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Terrible title. ...melatonin could also be a vital tool to help fresh produce survive its own journey from farm to fork, reducing the monumental amount of food loss that occurs each year. I interpreted the title to mean it would be applied to food after it was deemed "waste" as a form of "waste treatment" of some kind. I am not thrilled by the proposal. Melatonin impacts the immune system in ways not yet understood. This could be kind of like adding more antibiotics to the food chain.

Havoc 3y ago

Take care with the stuff. Thought it's safer than other sleeping tablets (and it is), but when they say don't use long term it's for a reason. Ended up with strange continuous low key chest pains. Was fine, just had to stop

denverllc 3y ago

Speaking of fruit preservation: has anyone bought prepacked/sliced fruit from the grocery store / Costco that has an "off" flavor to it? Almost like they added some preservative. (The different fruit had the same flavor, which makes me think something was added). I have, and nothing was on the ingredients, so I am wondering what could have been added.

delgaudm 3y ago
Could it be lemon juice? That's a common think to add to preserve color and prevent oxidation in a home recipe.
callalex 3y ago
Powdered citric acid or liquid lemon juice is a common and harmless preservative.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

Most people know melatonin as extracellular melatonin, released by the pineal gland, which acts as a hormone to promote sleep. Melatonin is also a powerful intracellular antioxidant that protects cells against oxidative stressors made in mitochondria as byproducts of ATP production. Aside from the pineal gland melatonin, melatonin is produced directly in mitochondria by cytochrome c oxidase upon exposure to near infrared. https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?t=404 https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?t=404 That seems more relevant to this discussion.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

You will take the drugs. And you will be happy.

jimbobimbo 3y ago

Upper dose for melatonin has not been established, generally considered safe. https://ajac.substack.com/p/melatonin https://ajac.substack.com/p/melatonin for references. I'm on 40mg every night, gives me deep restful sleep.

deprecative 3y ago
As an insomniac I am jealous. I take prescription medication for it but nothing I've tried (both prescribed and over the counter) has ever been very restful.
piuantiderp 3y ago
That's pretty high, I would not risk it due to the slight correlation with dementia later on.
- jimbobimbo 3y ago
  Interestingly, the opposite might be true: https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/accolades-honors/melatonin-alzheimers-disease-link-clear-thoughts-foundation https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/accolades-honors/melatonin-alz...

r00fus 3y ago

Just reading through this - if I were a producer or distributor of food I'd suddenly be thinking about not only preventing food waste, but simply extending food storage times. This could mean a lot more profit for large food corporations.

hnfong 3y ago

Pretty funny wording: > fruit fared better with melatonin treatment than did vegetables, which remained more susceptible to the cold (though, chilling injury was still reduced in some vegetables such as bell peppers and cucumbers by up to 24%.) I wonder whether this actually only works on biological fruits (bell peppers and cucumbers are fruits biologically).

ciconia 3y ago

Some low-tech (and IMO better) solutions for food waste: * Buy food locally, support your local farmers. * Grow your own vegetables (some are really easy: potatos, onions, garlic, zucchini, corn, beans, etc.). Even tomatos, peppers and eggplants are not that hard. * Compost your food waste - put it back in your garden. * Learn how to preserve food when there's an abundance. * Also, learn to eat better. I think it's a real shame that so much food waste ends up in landfill instead of being composted locally. If you compost your leftovers, you turn your waste into a resource, and use that to fertilize your garden.

seri4l 3y ago

I don't think I've ever bitten into a pear or plum with "unappetizingly soft or gristly bits".