#380 Melatonin for Anti-Aging and Longevity - Deanna Minich, PhD

Deanna Minich (0:00)

I do think that Melatonin can justifiably be a nutrient. We need it. Similar to like vitamin D being used for so many different things, we need to sometimes correct our levels of vitamin D, very similar with Melatonin. And from puberty on, it starts to go down, down, down, down. It doesn't go back up.

Siim Land (0:18)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Deanna Minich. Deanna is a nutrition scientist, author and certified functional medicine practitioner. She serves as the chief science officer at Symphony Natural Health, which offers the world's first plant melatonin made of phytomelatonin. Herbatonin has been demonstrated to have 470% stronger antioxidant properties and 640% greater anti-inflammatory effect than synthetic melatonin. Herbatonin is my go-to melatonin for better sleep and the longevity benefits of melatonin. To try out herbatonin, head over to symphonynaturalhealth.com and use the code SIME10 for a 10% discount.

Deanna, welcome to the show.

Deanna Minich (1:00)

Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here with you.

Siim Land (1:03)

Yes, I'm excited to have you on the podcast because I've been talking a lot about melatonin on my channel and a lot of the longevity and health benefits of that as a hormone and as an supplement. But there's so much, let's say, misconceptions about melatonin.

And for sure, there's a lot of problems with the melatonin industry, if you can call it like that, or the melatonin market. It's not very well regulated. So I'm glad to have you on the podcast as a very knowledgeable and expert on melatonin and just share people about everything related to how do you supplement that and what are the other things people need to know about.

Deanna Minich (1:45)

Yeah, as a scientist, I feel really comfortable talking about the scientific mechanisms. We can talk about clinical applications. And then of course, what you just mentioned, like the practicality of it, like how do you actually supplement? How do you choose a supplement? What's the dose?

Are you going to stop your body's production? All of those things that I've had so many questions about over the past year.

Siim Land (2:08)

But we can start, how did you get into this, what made you interested in melatonin and some other things related to your background?

Deanna Minich (2:17)

Yeah, great question. So I'm Chief Science Officer at Symphony Natural Health. So I began working with Symphony about a year and a half ago, and they have a plant melatonin. And so by way of understanding melatonin through the work that I was doing with them, I got even more intrigued. But I would say it actually went back even further during the pandemic, I was monitoring a lot of the nutrition science as related to the immune system, noticing that there was a lot of discussion about vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, quercetin, and melatonin, which I thought was really fascinating.

And so in my nutrition science mind, I began to look at melatonin as a nutrient, like a circadian nutrient.

So that resulted in the publication of a long review article looking at melatonin as the next vitamin D. And that we published as a team back in September of 2022 in the Nutrients Journal. So that has been my trajectory into all things melatonin.

Siim Land (3:26)

I actually found that study as well that you authored, melatonin as the new vitamin D, which is an interesting concept. And I personally think that as a hormone, vitamin D is a hormone, actually another vitamin, but melatonin as a hormone is equally as important as vitamin D. Vitamin D is like the master hormone inside the body, but melatonin is like the master antioxidant in some ways. And I think it's more even powerful than glutathione, for example, in terms of the antioxidant properties.

Deanna Minich (3:57)

Yeah, I think that's spot on. And what I think is so interesting in the health field is that many times we just want to pigeonhole a compound like melatonin or like vitamin D or like quercetin or like polyphenols. And then we soon come to realize, wow, they're pleiotropic, they're doing lots of different things. They're not just doing one thing. And I think that melatonin has been pigeonholed into being a hormone and then people are fearful of it. They feel like, oh my gosh, we should be really cautious about it.

But yet, it's everywhere. It is in nature, it's in animals, it's in the human body.

So I think that there's greater nuance and complexity as it really relates to understanding melatonin and all of these different nutrients.

Siim Land (4:44)

Yeah, so we can start like, you know, what is melatonin or, you know, what's the role of melatonin in the body, like, besides just, you know, some of the things that we talked about already?