Rhonda Patrick· PhD
As you know, melatonin rises in the middle of our sleep and there's a kinetic to it. It's not easy to detect melatonin. It's not like a continuous glucose monitor that you can stick to your arm and it will collect melatonin data because melatonin is present in such a low concentration that it needs more fancy method to detect it. So that means we have to sample blood in every 30 minutes or an hour when we're sleeping, and then use that inexpensive method to measure melatonin. And that might be one reason why not much studies have been done to differentiate between exogenous application or taking a melatonin pill versus pineal melatonin.