How To Increase Fertility (For Males & Females!), How Much Sleep Is Too Much (Or Too Little)? & A "Minimalist" Approach To Increasing VO2 Max! Solosode #506

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. In this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, how to increase fertility for males and females, how much sleep is too much or too little, and a minimalist approach to increasing VO2 max.

Welcome to the Boundless Life, with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Well, howdy, howdy, ho, welcome to today's show. I'm sporting my blue light concentrating glasses. These are the opposite of blue light blockers. I don't remember what they're officially called, but basically they concentrate blue light rather than blocking blue light. They're made by a company called Raw Optics. And they're kind of relevant to the first thing that I wanted to share with you on today's show. That was a headline that I saw, entitled Long Term Melatonin Use Linked to 90% Higher Heart Failure Risk. So the summary of this headline was that people with chronic insomnia who used melatonin long term had a roughly 90% higher risk of developing heart failure over five years, according to a pretty large study. So what did they actually look into here? So this was presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions. As you know, melatonin is a hormone naturally made by our pineal gland, and it helps control sleep-wake cycles or your circadian rhythmicity. So levels of that hormone typically rise when it gets dark and then fall during daylight. That's why the glasses I'm wearing are relevant, because if I would have, although I didn't, if I would have taken melatonin last night and it would have woken up groggy, one of the best ways to get rid of that grogginess is to engage the eyes with blue light. And you can do that with screens, you can do that with blue light producing devices like seasonal effective disorder boxes, or you could do it with wearing glasses that concentrate blue light. But that's a little bit of an aside. What they actually did in this study was they looked at melatonin supplements. This is just synthetic melatonin. It's chemically identical to the hormone that's produced in your body. It's commonly used as a sleep aid for insomnia. I used melatonin in pretty high doses for jet lag, which is a reason why I looked at this study because I am concerned about my heart and my mortality. So the researchers divided participants according to their documented melatonin use, right? This wasn't some kind of a study where they put one group of people in one room and one group of people in another and did some controlled sleep board study where they gave one group melatonin and one group didn't get it. They instead looked at recorded melatonin use long term via electronic medical records and then a non-melatonin group. What they found was that among adults with insomnia, people with documented long term melatonin use, 12 months or more, had about a 90% higher chance of developing heart failure during the following five years compared with non-melatonin users.

That 90% of course does not mean that in the whatever, non-melatonin group, one out of 10 people died and the melatonin group, nine out of 10 people died. That is a relative risk score, not an absolute risk score. So, it was still significant, however. Heart failure occurred in 4.6% of the melatonin use group compared with 2.7% of the non-melatonin group. People in the melatonin group were almost three and a half times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure compared to the non-melatonin group. And that when we engage it with absolute risk, again, is pretty big. But even relative risk is sizable. That means hospitalization rates in the melatonin group were 19%, and then they were 6.6% in the non-melatonin group. So what do I think about this? Well, in my opinion, there are a few things to consider here. First of all, this is a conference abstract. This is not a paper. It hasn't gone through peer review yet. And I think the biggest thing that you need to know about is the exposure and the way that they tracked it is a huge issue. The melatonin cohort required at least one melatonin prescription, yes, I said prescription, plus 365 exposure days. And control groups had no melatonin exposure. Now, when I say prescription, that's important. If you live in the US or you're listening and you're an American or you live in America, then you can go buy melatonin at CVS or Walgreens or Amazon. However, in countries like the UK, melatonin is prescription only. That means that a clinician has decided that your insomnia is so bad that you need a prescription for melatonin. Now, if your insomnia severity is so high that the doctor is writing you a prescription for medication for it, might that not indicate that that level of insomnia could be predisposing you to cardiac events or increase risk of mortality, melatonin use aside. Let me think of an example. So this would be like me saying, well, statin use increases your risk of dying, right? And then we were to say, well, it appears that people who are put on statins have increased risk of dying from a heart attack. Well, maybe the very fact of the first place that your doctor thought your heart condition was severe enough or your lipid abnormality was severe enough to put you on a statin already puts you into a higher mortality risk group, right? They also did not look at dose.