![]() I kept searching for solutions… That’s when I discovered tart cherry juice ![]() He was crabby at the end of the day, and would frustrate easily. He would often fall asleep in the car or when I would take him for a walk in the stroller. It’s just sleep, right?īut I knew that he needed more. Yes, I know there are much, much worse things out there. In Griffin’s first three years, I can count how many times he slept past 6:30am on one hand. We tried everything to help our son sleep past 5:30am But there aren't.which leads us back to uric acid being the only current working logical explanation for why tart cherry is producing sleep benefits.Get free updates based on your toddler’s birth date! – Free Updates on Toddler Sign me up! It would seem to me then, that if it really did have an impact on sleep, there would be lots of studies on procyanidin B2 and sleep. This is surprising because procyanidin B2 is in a lot of different plants and is a very well known compound. Even looking up if procyanidin B2 has any effect on melatonin doesn't really return anything nor did I find any studies looking at procyanidin B2 being beneficial for sleep. Clearly there is an effect on sleep, and there seems to be more evidence against melatonin producing this effect than for. The Howatson study, is also the exact same study that kept tripping me up. The Howatson et al.24 study does, however, give support to the beneficial effects of tart cherry juice on sleep quality in a younger group of volunteers than those tested in the present study." Thus, the increase in melatonin may not be the major mechanism responsible for the improving sleep quality. Cherry juice increased melatonin intake by 85μg/d while the melatonin dose shown to treat insomnia ranges between 0.5 and 5 mg/d, a dose that is 6- to 60-fold higher. Melatonin is postulated to treat insomnia, by restoring disturbed circadian rhythms. "The urinary degradation product of melatonin increased statistically (~17%) in the cherry juice condition, but there was no change in the circadian rhythm of melatonin. In fact, they are even saying melatonin is unlikely to be the main player here: However, this seems like a huge stretch and their reasoning for it doesn't sound very solid. That being said, the following study is suggesting that perhaps Procyanidin B2 in tart cherry may make more tryptophan available for melatonin production: Now in terms of melatonin production, this is not really a subject I touched on in the podcast because I wanted to keep the focus centered on tart cherry and its effects on uric acid. I've also been taking tart cherry since the day we brought it out and I have to say, my sleep has never been better and we tested our tart cherry for melatonin and found it contains no melatonin at all. Once I scrapped the melatonin pathway, the uric acid pathway became quite clear. At first I was going to brush it off entirely, but there were so many studies and anecdotal reports on the sleep benefits of tart cherry that I figured there must be some truth to it. I do think it is still an under researched phenomenon, but there appears to be a definite causal link between serum uric acid levels and sleep quality, and since we know that tart cherry has a significant effect on uric acid but not on melatonin, the uric acid theory seems the most likely. I basically had to piece together 10+ studies to get to a working theory and all of a sudden all the pieces started to fit together quite nicely. ![]() Like I said in the podcast too, this is an incredibly novel pathway for sleep enhancement and I've heard no one else talk about this ever before. This is what led me down the path of tracking down a link between uric acid and sleep. As far as I can tell from digging into this topic, there is no link between melatonin and tart cherries besides the fact that they contain a miniscule amount of melatonin, but so do a few other fruits like bananas and those certainly aren't being touted as sleep aides in the same way tart cherry is.
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