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Writer's pictureDr.John Lieurance

HOW MELATONIN PROTECTS YOUR BODY & BRAIN. SHOULD YOU SUPPLEMENT WITH IT?

Updated: Oct 28, 2023



In this video, I discuss the benefits of Melatonin on your immune system, and how it protects your cells while under stress. Anyone under stress these days? LOL… well, you won’t believe the benefits Melatonin gives the body and brain. From Degenerative Neurologic Disease to Autoimmune disease…from heavy metal toxicity to infections and even Cancer.

Dr. Russel Reiter video about Melatonin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7YIRqTNmuY Make a consult with

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AskDoctorJL@Gmail.com (941) 330-8553

See Video Transcript below:

Dr. John Lieurance (00:00):

Hi. Boy, I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am today to present this material and I promise you that you pay attention to the next 20 minutes, this could change your life. This could be literally some of the most important material that you’ll ever hear. And you’re going to want to share this with your friends and family, because you’re going to see, this is one of the most groundbreaking discoveries that’s being made over the last few years.

Dr. John Lieurance (00:40):

Hi, I’m Dr. John Lieurance. I’m a naturopath and I’m a chiropractic neurologist and I practice natural medicine and my interest is drug free, surgery free alternatives to help people get healthy and stay healthy. And what I’m about to tell you is some information about a hormone that you’ve heard about before, a hormone called melatonin. Now we’ve all heard about melatonin as it relates to sleep, but what I’m going to be sharing with you in the next 20 minutes is literally going to blow your mind. We’re going to talk about melatonin. We’re going to take a deep dive into melatonin. There might be some aspects of this that are a bit deep and a bit technical. Don’t worry. You want to just kind of get the general idea. So we’re going to talk about the shocking story of how melatonin is much more than just for sleep.

Dr. John Lieurance (01:29):

Would you believe that this hormone also protects you from sickness and stress and inflammation? So literally melatonin is a protective molecule and we’re going to be taking a deep dive into that. One of my colleagues who I greatly admire is Dr. Russel Reiter And this is a screenshot of a video that he’s got on YouTube. You can Google this. I would encourage you to watch. It’s a 30 minute presentation that he makes. He’s probably the world’s expert on melatonin.

Dr. John Lieurance (02:00):

So this is an excerpt out of some of his literature. He says, “Right now melatonin in your body is preventing the oxidation of LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol that can clog your arteries. Melatonin in your brain is safeguarding and the irreplaceable neurons from free radical attack. Melatonin in the fluid of your eyes is helping prevent cataracts. Melatonin in the lining of your gut is reducing the risk of ulcers and it’s the most potent versatile anti-oxidants.” We’ve all heard about antioxidants, right? Well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to try to really get you to understand what that means to you and how that can possibly affect your life and maybe protect you in this very stressful situation that we have right now with this viral infection.

Dr. John Lieurance (02:47):

So melatonin is absolutely the body’s most potent antioxidant. There’s massive health benefits to melatonin. It is a free radical scavenger and it combats something, obviously inflammation and a lot of us have inflammation in our body. Some of us know it, some of us don’t. Obviously, for cardiovascular, we go and we take a test called C-reactive protein or high density C-reactive protein, which is a little bit more sensitive and these markers can actually become elevated in our blood and it could demonstrate that we have some sort of an imbalance with how we’re living and our environment, toxicity, infections, poor sleep, too much alcohol, too much physical, mental, emotional stress. All of those things can actually drive excess oxidation so what we need is we need antioxidants to buffer that stress, and we’re going to actually dig even deeper than that. It’s also very important for your immune system. We’re going to really dig into that immune system aspect and also cancer.

Dr. John Lieurance (03:54):

Okay, so this is what’s really going to blow your mind, all right. So this is the deal, melatonin is made in your brain and it’s made in relationship to the sunlight that hits your retina, okay. So one of the things that I do in my clinic is I’ll ask patients in the morning especially, don’t wear sunglasses and try to actually get light in your eyes and especially on your skin, and this will help build more melatonin so that when your body builds it in the brain, when you go to sleep, you’ll have a stronger dump of that melatonin so that you’ll have better sleep, really, really important. Now there’s something else about melatonin that a lot of people don’t know is that melatonin is also produced in every cell in your body. You heard that right. Melatonin is literally made in every cell in your body, okay. And particularly melatonin is made in an area called the mitochondria.

Dr. John Lieurance (04:49):

So for those of you that have heard of the mitochondria, it’s called, considered the powerhouse of the cell and almost all disease conditions have some sort of root in mitochondrial function, okay? So this is extremely important for people that want to stay young and live a long, healthy life, or maybe you’re dealing with a chronic disease. Maybe you just want to boost your immune system, okay. Auto-immune, you have a mystery diagnosis, whatever it is, you’re going to want to know how you can maximize and benefit a stronger mitochondria and so let me try to make this point here. So imagine that you’re on a small boat, okay, and you have to cook your food. You have a small amount of food. It’s a little rowboat or something, right. And you have a small amount of food and you have a little bit of wood, right.

Dr. John Lieurance (05:41):

And you have to light this wood on fire and cook this food because maybe it’s got bacteria in it so you have to kill the bacteria and you can’t eat it unless it’s cooked, right. And so you’re on this boat for a week or two weeks or something, and you only have so much food. And so could you imagine how you’re trying to be extremely careful with exactly putting just a little bit of wood there and when you burn it, you’re very careful and you’re trying to basically keep it from too much burning and then you want to prevent any type of fire to get in the boat. And so you’re extremely protective about this process, okay. Now I want you to take that concept into the cell and imagine that yourself, instead of wood, it’s taking glucose, okay. And it’s taking glucose into the cell and glucose has to also utilize oxygen.

Dr. John Lieurance (06:32):

And it’s in the mitochondria that that little fire to cook that food is happening, okay. So we go into that mitochondria and we take the oxygen, the glucose, and we’re going to actually create energy from that. And that energy is important to drive everything that you do. Every part of the cellular function has to come from that energy, which is called ATP. Now, this is where this really gets deep with melatonin, is that normally the mitochondria makes melatonin and that melatonin actually acts as a protector when that fire gets a little bit too large, okay, or it’s burning too hot, the melatonin actually comes and it controls it, okay. And this is a problem that happens with a lot of people where their mitochondria basically are over producing what’s called oxidation. So melatonin acts is a negative feedback loop to kind of control that, okay.

Dr. John Lieurance (07:29):

And this is something that actually happens with a lot of people with chronic infection, chronic autoimmune conditions are related to this. If you have chronic toxicity, I mean, literally cancer. There’s a lot of processes that have this as a root cause, okay. And then it expresses itself in people’s body in different ways. So let’s go back to this issue in the mitochondria. So you’re trying to make energy. You’re trying to be very conservative and you’re trying to make sure that you don’t overdo it and you want to control it, right. So we’re going to go into the cell and so let’s imagine that we have this process going and then all of a sudden we have an infection, okay, or we have, let’s say it’s COVID-19. We have an infection. What happens is that inflammatory response literally blocks your ability to convert energy the normal way.

Dr. John Lieurance (08:30):

The normal way is oxidative phosphorylation, okay. This is a technical term, something called Krebs cycle. It’s like Biology 101. It’s how you take that oxygen and glucose and how you make energy and how it drives through this process. It’s called Krebs cycle. And normally when you take oxygen and glucose and you go through Kreb cycle, you make ATP, you make 36 to 38 ATPs for each molecule of glucose, okay. What happens when you have a COVID infection or you have toxicity, or you have a chronic Lyme infection, whatever it might be, what happens is it stops that process, literally stops it and it shunts it into something called anaerobic glycolysis, okay. This process was pioneered by Otto Warburg. We’re going to get back to our presentation because I’m going to show you this. This is going to make cancer, make a lot of sense.

Dr. John Lieurance (09:29):

So anybody watching this who has cancer, this is literally groundbreaking. So let’s get back to this slide here. So what I want you to look at is on the right, I want you to see how glucose is going into the cell and you see that little X. So that little X is what happens when there’s inflammation and it prevents that normal energy to feed in to make that 36 to 38 ATPs. And what happens is you start to get this other aspect where the cytokine storm makes your body make energy in a very inefficient way where you only make four ATPs, okay? It’s a huge difference. It’s almost nine and a half times more when you don’t have that inflammatory response, very, very critical. And so here’s an image my friend, Dr. Been wrote in a presentation that he did, and you can look at this and see how this enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase is inhibited when you have the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Now these inflammatory cytokines, I’m getting a little technical here, but basically when you have inflammation in your body, you have this cascade of events that basically blocks you from making good energy.

Dr. John Lieurance (10:49):

And this diagram is basically outlining the very detail way that that happens and if you’re a healthcare provider, maybe you can come to this, you can pause the video, whatever it is, and take a look at this and you can see how the pyruvate then goes out into the cytosol and you’re getting a very inefficient anaerobic glycolysis, and let’s kind of move on. So now, is this stuff real? You’re hearing me talk, okay. If you don’t believe me or I ask you not to believe me, I want you to Google even just Google COVID-19 and melatonin.

Dr. John Lieurance (11:26):

I mean, now I was one of the first ones to start really preaching this, but now the hospitals are using it. There’s been a number of papers that are demonstrating that melatonin, this is a paper talking about melatonin as a potent adjunct to treatment, to COVID. Here’s another paper that was written melatonin inhibits COVID-19 and do cytokine storm by reversing aerobic glycolysis in the immune cells, okay. So for those health care providers, you want to maybe take a look at this paper and read it, but this is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s that anaerobic or I’m sorry, aerobic glycolysis. So there’s lots of oxygen there, but the body can’t utilize it the way it wants to because it’s blocked with that one enzyme. So this is called the math plus protocol. And you can find this online, and this is a common protocol that is now recommended for COVID-19 and you can see melatonin in a dosage of six to 12 milligrams is recommended.

Dr. John Lieurance (12:31):

I will absolutely say that’s way too little. We’re going to be talking about dosage towards the end of this. You’ll be very surprised. So hang on because you’re going to want to hear the real doses that you want to take. This is another paper, and it’s talking the body of knowledge on melatonin’s efficiency with respiratory. So basically protecting respiratory disease so maybe somebody, or you have COPD, or you’re having lung issues. This is basically a paper talking about how melatonin protects with the respiratory system with COVID. This is another diagram. This is from a paper that was written on melatonin for as an adjunct treatment for COVID-19 and so they’re recommending that healthcare providers take a fairly large dose of melatonin every day. Mild symptoms with patients that are admitted to the hospital. They recommend 50 milligrams of melatonin twice a day for seven days.

Dr. John Lieurance (13:42):

And then they recommend for people that are admitted to the ICU, literally 200 milligrams, twice a day for seven days. So these are some really high doses, right? So we’re used to hearing melatonin as it relates to maybe just three or five milligrams, but you can see people are doing much, much higher. Is that safe? Is that going to shut down my own production? Well, this is what’s really surprising. This is the deal. Melatonin doesn’t have a negative feedback loop, okay, like most hormones. You can take loads and loads of melatonin for a long period of time, stop taking it, and guess what your normal production keeps going. So there’s not the negative feedback loop like there are with a lot of hormones like testosterone and estrogen and progesterone and things like that. So you don’t need to worry about that with melatonin, you can take massive doses.

Dr. John Lieurance (14:37):

In fact, they even looked at dosing in animal models and stopped the studies when they got as high as what would be comparable to 115 pound person taking 150,000 milligrams. So you don’t need to worry about taking these huge doses either. So hospitals are using huge doses. Maybe you should think about it too. This is a paper that talked about how melatonin inhibits viral budding. So this is the way viruses reproduce and they kind of bud off and then they go around and affect more cells. So melatonin inhibits that.

Dr. John Lieurance (15:16):

And so melatonin inhibits something called an Inflammasome. This was out of a paper and so melatonin basically just shuts off that inflammatory cascade that we talked about. And so we talked about how that inflammation goes in and stops the production of energy with the mitochondria, right? Well, guess what melatonin goes in there and it actually stops that, that inhibition. So it allows your cells to kick back in and make energy the way they normally do. I mean, this is groundbreaking. Think about that. So this is what melatonin does. Melatonin will quench that issue.

Dr. John Lieurance (16:00):

So it’s going to basically get that guy in the boat that’s burning wood everywhere, and things are on fire, and maybe he’s wasted the wood that he needs for two weeks and he’s wasted it in two days, right? And then the boat sinks. So instead you’ve got melatonin that comes in and it’s the adult in the room that’s basically controlling and stopping all of this havoc. And it down-regulates this inflammation through this, Inflammasome. It basically re-establishes that enzyme so that you can go back into the normal Krebs cycle and efficiently make energy, unfricking believable. Again, you need to share this with your friends and family. I think people need to be aware of how important melatonin is now.

Dr. John Lieurance (16:42):

This is something to think about. Why are kids not getting sick with COVID and why don’t kids usually get really sick with a lot of infections? Well, there’s some scientists that think it’s because of melatonin’s really high with children and it’s lower as we get older. So is that making us more susceptible? Is it the melatonin story that I’m telling you here really the common denominator. I would tell you it is. This is the death rate with COVID-19 and you can see it’s much, much higher. The difference between almost 15% versus 0.2% with kids and that correlates with the amount of melatonin. Now, this was a study that they did with animal models, looking at endothelial destruction and the picture on the left is the animal that did not have melatonin on board. You can see that the endothelial lining are just obliterated. On the right side, you can see how preserved the blood vessels are so this is the protection that … and this is a similar thing that happens with COVID.

Dr. John Lieurance (17:45):

This was another study where they looked at encephalomyocarditis virus and basically the gist of this is they had two groups. Both groups, they injected this virus, right, a lethal dose of this virus, but one group, they gave high dose of melatonin. And so you’re looking at the dotted line here is the survival rate of the animals that didn’t have the melatonin so it literally was 6%. And if you look at the survival rate on the top, which is the solid line, that is the animals that had melatonin on board, because they had that protection. They had the adult in the room to calm down those fires in the boat and so 82% survival so, what group do you want to be in?

Dr. John Lieurance (18:38):

So these are the bullet points. Melatonin inhibits the runaway immune system, or the Cytotoxic T cell that’s attacking your cells. Sorry, I spelled that wrong. I’m not a good speller. I’ll be completely honest with you. It inhibits Interleukin-1, 6, 8, and TNF alpha, for those scientists or healthcare practitioners. It, up regulates your adaptive immune system and lymphocytes, which is what you want. So you want to suppress some aspects of your immune system, but you want to up regulate others. So it neutralizes that oxidation we talked about during infection or any type of chronic inflammation, and it reverses those turned off mitochondria so it kicks that energy back up. So, another thing to think about is deep sleep. So deep sleep is really, really important for clearing proteins that accumulate in the brain. So Alzheimer’s associated with amyloid beta plaques, you’re going to want to look at melatonin as something that, as we get older, we have less of and by supplementing melatonin, you might actually kick in something called the glymphatic system.

Dr. John Lieurance (19:55):

So this is the glymphatic, a lot of people haven’t heard of the glymphatic system. So now we’re kind of switching into how you can have a healthier brain, okay. So the glymphatic system, if you’ve heard of the lymphatic system, which is kind of the body’s gutter system, then the glymphatic system is the gutter system in the brain. And what happens is scientists are now looking at the accumulation a lot of these proteins in the brain that relate to different degenerative neurologic disease, and actually looking at maybe it’s our inability to clear these proteins and so they start accumulating versus that they’re an overproduction of proteins, okay? So clearing them is where you get deep … So, if you’re getting deep sleep and you’re kicking in that glymphatic system, so deep sleep is the primary activator of this pumping clearing glymphatic process in the brain.

Dr. John Lieurance (20:46):

So melatonin supplementation might actually help clear some of these plaques because the melatonin would be getting you deeper sleep, and it would be a stronger activation of the glymphatic system and you can see here these different plaques, amyloid, neurofibrillary tangles. These things just muck up the nerves in the brain and then we have problems with memory and all those other types of things. So melatonin has been studied as it relates to Alzheimer’s, the blood-brain barrier, breast cancer, heavy metals, mood disorders. So let’s talk about cancer a little bit. So Otto Warburg was this genius, German scientist. He won the Nobel Prize when he discovered that anaerobic glycolysis, and he discovered that that’s how cancer cells started to function. So we’re going to go back to that whole concept of in that mitochondria and instead of that mitochondria shunting that glucose and oxygen to that really efficient pathway, where they get 36 to 38 ATPs, it shunts it into this aerobic glycolysis, which is really inefficient.

Dr. John Lieurance (21:57):

And that’s the basic issue behind cancer is that it’s an inability to functionally make energy with glucose and oxygen. And so it shunts into this much less efficient form of energy and then that’s what cancer cells eventually develop into and so that’s what Otto Warburg discovered. And so we can see this pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme and you can see the line I’ve written here, and you can very clearly see, “Okay, you have the normal ATP that’s produced and then instead it’s going and shutting into this four ATPs.” This is what happens with cancer. If you or someone else that you know has cancer, this is something that you want to share with them, because this is at the root of cancer and this is at the root of many diseases. And it’s something that melatonin can actually re-establish that process and get you making energy properly and kind of quench inflammation. It’s pretty amazing.

Dr. John Lieurance (22:57):

Now, this is the literature. This is not me talking. This is basically the literature showing what melatonin does. Melatonin actually lowers blood pressure. So if you do start taking melatonin and you’re on blood pressure medication, you might want to talk to your doctor because … and that might be why your blood pressure goes up, but when you get older as well, because your melatonin levels start to decline thus higher blood pressure. So it’s a nice side effect.

Dr. John Lieurance (23:25):

So let’s talk about dosage. My opinion is, I personally take 100 to 200 milligrams every night and Dr. Russel Reiter also takes 200 milligrams each night himself so take a very much higher dose than what you would imagine. Now, one thing that you need to be aware of is that they’ve done studies and they’ve shown that the availability of oral melatonin is only 2.5%, so it’s not absorbed orally very well because your gut breaks it down. You have something called first pass that goes through your liver, that breaks it down and so there’s poor absorption orally. So when you do get into these really large oral dosages, you got to keep in mind that you’re really not absorbing much anyway.

Dr. John Lieurance (24:16):

One of the things that we like here at our clinic, Advanced Rejuvenation is we use suppositories so we recommend a lot of them to our patients and suppositories really offer a very unique way to bypass the gut and get straight into the bloodstream and they’re very easy to use. A lot of the patients will use a suppository before they go to bed at night. And by the way, the absorption is much, much higher up into the 80, 90 percentile. So I call it basically like an IV to go. And the other benefit of a suppository is there’s a slow release over about six to seven hours, which is more in line with the circadian release of melatonin so it actually works really, really well for taking right before bed. If you’re out there, you can email me at askdoctorjl@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining me. And if healing is possible, consider it to be within your reach.

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1 Comment


Jan Berg
Nov 17, 2023

I have neuropathy in both feet and a lot of burning pain. Also sleep problems and kidney cancer. What products do u recommend to start? also grandkids that have vaccine injuries with disautonomia and doctors put them on heart meds.

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