I don’t know how Dr. Oz hasn’t featured this study on his show yet. Unlike most of the junk he peddles, this supplement actually has a fair amount of research supporting it. And better yet, the research I’m about to cite was done on HUMANS, not rats.
What is this marvelous wonder drug you ask?
Melatonin. Yes, the sleep supplement.
What is melatonin? Melatonin is a hormone made by the pineal gland in the brain that helps control your sleep and wake cycles. It’s often promoted as a supplement to help with jet lag.
According to Dr. Anne Amstrup and her team, melatonin just might be a potent fat loss agent. She recruited 81 post-menopausal, Caucasian women who also had osteopenia for her 12 month long study that was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology. She randomized the 81 women to one of three groups: 1) Placebo nightly. 2) 1mg of melatonin nightly. 3) 3mg of melatonin nightly. That was it. No dietary interventions. No exercise interventions. Fat mass and lean mass was tested via DXA, the gold standard, before the study started and at the end of the 12 months.
The results…. The melatonin group on average lost an astonishingly 6.9% more body fat compared to the placebo group. In fact, the placebo group actually gained fat mass over the 12 months. Impressive, don’t you think?
Don’t go running to the pharmacy just yet though. A few caveats…..
Notice that the participants were all post-menopausal women with osteopenia. We know that as we age, we produce less melatonin. Would we see the same results in a young female or male participants already producing sufficient amounts of melatonin? We don’t know.
We also know a lack of sleep leads to weight gain. Were these women sleep deprived? Would someone who is not sleep deprived experience the same results? We don’t know.
In fact, we really don’t even know how melatonin caused the women to lose fat. The authors hypothesized it may shift the body’s energy resources to bone formation instead of fat formation. It may have also produced better sleep. Or, it may have had a completely different mechanism of action that we don’t know yet. Right now, it’s still a mystery.
With all of that said, this study does provide pretty strong evidence that melatonin may be beneficial for post-menopausal women with osteopenia trying to lose weight. Unlike most supplement studies that are subpar in design, this study:
- was done on humans
- it was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (gold standard)
- was 12 months in duration
- used DXA to analyze body fat and lean mass.
Some may argue it was a small sample size of only 81 women, but that’s to be expected. Studies are ridiculously expensive to operate. Thus, there isn’t much incentive to study melatonin because it can’t be patented and is relatively inexpensive.
As always, before you take a new supplement, talk with your physician about it.
