>Can you elaborate or provide any specifics? Which brands or packings
>of commercial melatonin are misbsranded, adulterated, or of
>substandard potency? Which are not?
Sorry, I do not know which are synthetized with high quality controls or not.
What I can say is:
-First: I went to a congress last month, and one researcher told us that he
has measured the amount of melatonin contained in three different capsules
from the US. I some of them, he was'nt able to detect any melatonin, in the
other, he found 8 fold the amount claimed by the firm. I must add that some of
the capsules sold seems to contains no chemically synthetized melatonin
,but only bovine pineal extracts (the pineal gland is the gland that secrete
melatonin), and it seems to me very dangerous as we still not know if the
bovine encephalopathy ( the illness called the "crazy cow") can develop or not
in human beings.
-Second: Even if you wre sure that the melatonin you take is
correctly synthetized and purified, at this time, we only
know very little about the long term effects of melatonin on the human beings
and animals. It may be good for the health, it may be not. So, it seems very
hazardous to take chronically such a substance. Don't forget that melatonin is
not a vitamin, it's an hormone! you wouldn't even imagine to take something
like growth hormone or insulin daily without a clinician advise, don't
you? You must have the same reaction about melatonin. Moreover, the fabulous
effects of this hormone described in the best seller "the melatonin miracle"
are pure lies for most of them. To date, only two effect are recognized by the
scientific community: melatonin helps to avoid the effects of jet-lag , and it
is a sleep enhancer. There is no scientific proof that it cures cancer or
helps you to stay forever young and so on....