JET LAG
Melatonin tablets help reduce the effects of jet lag. Often, after a long flight, jet lag leaves you feeling overwhelmed with fatigue, sluggish, irritable, disoriented or nauseated. By regulating the time your body produces melatonin, you can lessen these symptoms.
MELATONIN BOOKS AND MAGAZINES
All the publicity and hype about melatonin began with a book entitled The Melatonin Miracle, Nature's Age-Reversing, Disease- Fighting, Sex-Enhancing Hormone. The authors, William Regelson, MD, and Walter Pierpaoli, MD, are said to be leading medical researchers and key scientists at the forefront of melatonin research. The book was first published by The National Academy of Science and the New York Academy of Science.
In April of 1996, Pocket Books published The Melatonin Miracle as a mass market paperback. Some readers commented that the book read more like a public relations advertisement for melatonin instead of a scientific treatise on the hormone.
In the fall of 1996, Simon & Schuster published a second book on melatonin by Dr. Regelson entitled Superhormone Promise, Nature's Antidote to Aging. In this book, Regelson claimed that the hormone could reverse aging and extend life expectancy.
In a third book, Melatonin: Nature's Sleeping Pill, written by Ray Sahelian in 1997, the author, an authority on melatonin, attempts to separate the grains of truth from the chaff of hype in the melatonin publicity.
Magazines were quick to jump on the melatonin band wagon. "It's the hot sleeping pill, natural and cheap," Newsweek said in an August 1995 article. However, Salon Magazine, in July 1997 article said, "The hottest new wonder drug since Prozac is not a drug at all, but a mere dietary supplement with absolutely no proven medical applications, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration."
In an article entitled Melatonin Mania, Scientific American states some critics warn that the high doses of melatonin sometimes found in health food stores could be dangerous to some people. "Many researchers point out," the article continues, "that startling claims made for the substance are unsupported by studies on patients."
In Priorities, the magazine of the American Council on Science and Health, Dr. Victor Herbert and Dr. Ruth Kava call melatonin "the latest in a long series of alternative medicine miracles."
RESEARCH
Researchers are indeed studying melatonin. Fred Turek, neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, in the February 1996 issue of Time Magazine is quoted as saying that some researchers have stepped over "the truth in advertising line." He also says that people are always eager for "quick snake-oil cures."
Richard Wurtman, a researcher at M.I.T. has spent many years in the study of melatonin. Although he sees "no controversy" about the hormone's ability to promote sleep, he says there is "no evidence" that it increases life expectancy.
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