It's just another day when the ingredients on the label of a dietary supplement don't match the contents. But now, given the gummie craze children are more and more likely to mistake melatonin gummies for candy. A study by Harvard's Dr. Pieter Cohen examined the actual vs. claimed doses of melatonin found in 25 online products. The results are horrifying – but not surprising.
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It's irrelevant whether you like turkey or not because someone is going to be handing you a plate of it very soon. And after the meal, there's a good chance that you'll get sleepy. But will the cause of your drowsiness be the turkey, the booze, or your brother-in-law's tedious commentary about his golf game?
Melatonin is a neurohormone that the body uses to regulate sleep. It's sold as a dietary supplement without a prescription. As the CDC states, in "2020, melatonin became the most frequently ingested substance among children reported to national poison control centers.”
The agency's primary functions are ensuring food safety, regulating tobacco products rationally, and expeditiously approving new drugs and medical devices. It's failing. Instead, we're getting increasingly complex organizational structures and the commissioning of endless reports.
In general, the dietary supplement industry has the scruples of a three-card monte game. One of the most popular products is melatonin, which is used as a sleep aid because it's natural (wrong) and not a drug (also wrong). Let's take a look at some supplement sleight of hand.
Three daycare workers in Chicago were arrested and charged with child endangerment after it was learned they fed their charges gummies containing the sleep-inducing supplement melatonin. What's wrong with that? Plenty.
The American Medical Association is seeing the switch to brighter, longer-lasting LED street lamps as troubling, even raising some health concerns that it's calling potentially "harmful." But to us, those concerns seem baffling and overblown, because when its policy statement is examined it's hard to discern what the concern is all about.