The Surprising Benefits of Melatonin That Have Nothing to Do With Sleep | Dr. John Lieurance

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Dr. John Lieurance** (0:02)
If you were to ask me, what's the single most powerful thing you could do to reverse aging, mitigate disease, I would say melatonin. 400 times more melatonin is secreted from the gut than the pineal. Melatonin is not just for sleep. Every cell in your body is basically being protected by melatonin. It's the ultimate resilience molecule. When things get stressful, when things get inflamed, melatonin comes to the rescue, but it's declined so quickly as we get older. And so we don't have enough melatonin to really help keep our body robust and buffer a lot of these oxidative activities. We think about battery power in our cells. As we have more inflammation, the battery power goes down because the cell danger response. We have to start deriving energy from fermentation, which is 10% as effective as through the electron transport chain. When we can supplement with melatonin, it repairs this whole process so that we start making energy normally again. When an organ or a cell starts to get more energy, it's going to start doing some things that it's been putting off. I'm 56 years old. What I've gone through in my life, like I shouldn't look like this. It's melatonin.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:20)
John, your health journey begins all the way back before you're even born. Camp Lejeune.
Talk about what went on there, and then we'll build on that.

**Dr. John Lieurance** (1:32)
Yeah. Well, preparing for this podcast, I went in and looked at some of the videos on your YouTube channel, and there was an interview with a neurologist about the root of Parkinson's disease. And I felt like I wanted to just listen to you and your channel and just get a flavor, just kind of get ready for, because I wanted to really just do the best I could for this recording and just give my all. And lo and behold, he starts to talk about Camp Lejeune, and that really got my attention because that's part of my journey. My father was a Marine, and he was stationed in Camp Lejeune when my mother was in utero. And the first two years of my life, my dad now has leukemia. It's a very slow growing. It's a B-cell lymphocytic leukemia, which is one of the better ones to have. My mother has crippling arthritis. My sister has a lot of health issues as well. And I've had health issues since a young age. I was always very sensitive. A lot of allergies, severe asthma, hospitalized more times than I can remember. A very dysfunctional immune system. And then had a lot of... This is what I think what happened was that because I had such a fragile immune system from the toxins in Camp Lejeune, which by the way were basically the groundwater was contaminated with some of the most destructive chemicals from the dry cleaning.
And so these leached into the water, and so it was in the water supply.
And so I think what happened with me was it caused a dysfunctional immune system that led to a lot of inflammation, that then created some neurological things that set up for dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, hyperactivity. I was kicked out of three different schools living in Hawaii until I finally ended up into the absolute class that you didn't want to be in, which I was surrounded by what I felt was people I didn't really belong in that environment. But in Hawaii, they had such a disparity between the extreme challenged people and the normal classes. So I was basically taking the short bus to school, and that was a very big part of my early education was in these classes.
And so it was a very challenging childhood, and I really had no idea about this Camp Lejeune until much later in life. And the more I learn about it, the more I reflect on me and my family, I can see how destructive these chemicals can be to your health.

**Jesse Chappus** (4:35)
For somebody in your boat or otherwise exposed to these chemicals, well, one, do we know specifically what they are? You mentioned dry cleaning. And then two, how does somebody get those out of the body, or can they?

**Dr. John Lieurance** (4:49)
A lot of these chemicals, they get in your fat, and the fat toxic load is much more significant than the water-soluble. And particularly these toxins like to find themselves in the cell membranes in the body.
And so these cell membranes are basically like a lipid bilayer that surrounds every cell, and it really protects the outside world to the inside world of these cells. And it also acts as a signaling sensory kind of dome. And so when we have hormones, they act like lock and keys, and they actually attach themselves to the cell membrane and trigger certain biological effects at a cellular level. And oftentimes, these toxins find themselves. I think about it like all these satellites that we're putting into orbit, right? I think about how cluttered space is getting. And I think about this kind of cluttered space, and I think about that like our cell membrane, where we get all these toxins starting to clutter around our planet, our cell, right? Because you could almost think about the Earth as being like a cell, right?