Melatonin is classified as a food supplement by the US Food and Drugs administration (FDA) but in other countries, it is classified differently. Regardless of the specific group classification, we can agree that a lot has changed since melatonin was initially discovered in animals. We now understand almost all the details related to melatonin synthesis, we also have a better understanding of the relationship between light exposure and melatonin production, and we are even discovering new functions that were unknown a few decades ago.
Despite all the advances in knowledge about this important agent of the circadian system, questions about dosage and timing remain unanswered. A more relaxed classification has generated significant variety of presentation forms and dosages. Since we are interested in circadian topics, we decided to compile a review of the most common melatonin preparations that are available in a popular search engine (Google).
This is a topic that we would like to investigate further and cover in more details in the future but, it is no secret that melatonin searches are increasing. According to Google, West Virginia has the highest relevance score for the term “melatonin”. Since we plan to cover this topic in the future, let’s move to subtopics that are more relevant to this particular post.
We completed a dedicated shopping search using Google for the term melatonin. We completed this search from our main office in Washington DC, this is relevant because Google may use location as one of the variables involved in determining the relevance of certain pages (it is possible that a person completing the same search from a different location could obtain different results. We tried to minimize the information provided to our search engine to avoid getting results that were too personalized to us. For the sake of simplicity, we analyzed the first 40 preparations that we found. This involved reviewing the first 2 pages of a Google search and can be considered the limit of what most individuals would consider when searching the Google engine (who reviews more than 2 pages of search results?).
We found a broad variety of available melatonin strengths yet some strengths were common to most of the suppliers. Preparations ranged from 0.3 mg per capsule/tablet up to raw melatonin powder that could be bought by the lbs. Table 1 Covers the most common strengths that were available online and the number of suppliers that were providing that particular melatonin strength.
Table #1.
|
Strength |
Number of suppliers. |
|
1 mg |
5 |
|
3 mg |
11 |
|
5 mg |
5 |
|
10 mg |
12 |
Probably our biggest surprise was to find providers or raw melatonin powder among the options that were available online. The amount of melatonin that is available as a raw powder was extremely high with one preparation offering 500 grams of the product or what it is the same: 500 000 mg. It is possible that these larger amounts could be intended for supplement producers rather than final users but we can’t say for sure.
Melatonin certainly comes in all shapes and forms. The most common forms of presentation were capsules and gummies but we also found companies that provide tablets, liquid preparations, raw powder, and even a company that offers an inhaled form of melatonin that is intended for vaping. For preparations that involved pills, capsules, and/or gummies, most bottles had 30 to 180 units per bottle. The most common amount was 120 units per bottle, this was observed in 25% of the products that we reviewed.
For each product we completed a price analysis and we paid special attention to the lowest and highest prices that were offered online. It is important to note that online prices don’t tell you the entire story because we found many companies that offered relatively low prices for the product yet, the final price changed significantly after shipping costs and other fees were added. Despite the variety of prices, we feel that melatonin prices were not very high. Without taking into consideration shipping costs, melatonin prices ranged from 2 to 20 cents per capsule/tablet. The average tablet cost was 8 cents. When we factored in shipping costs, the average cost per pill increased to 11 cents.
Melatonin is widely available online as a supplement and it comes in a variety of forms, strengths, quantities, and prices. Formulations ranged in strength from 0.3 mg per capsule/tablet up to pure melatonin powder but the most common strengths were 3 mg and 10 mg. Overall, we learned that melatonin is relatively cheap. In this post, we just wanted to provide a descriptive overview of the different strengths and quantities of melatonin that are available online.
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