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Can Low Melatonin Raise Your Risk of Cancer?
Reading, watching TV or sending e-mails late at night, may be greatly reducing your melatonin production.
In humans as with all mammals, your biological clock resides in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of your brain (SCN), which is part of your hypothalamus. Based on signals of light and darkness, your SCN tells your pineal gland when it’s time to secrete melatonin. Light comes in through your eyes and travels up your optic nerves to the SCN, which is very sensitive to cycles of light and darkness.
Melatonin is important for the proper functioning of your body. Melatonin helps you to be healthy by; scavenging free radicals, reducing inflammation and by stimulating your immune system, to help your body to rid itself of cancer cells. Multiple studies point to the role of melatonin in protecting you from multiple types of cancer, including breast cancer . Melatonin may even have a role in slowing the aging of your brain.
Reading, watching TV or sending e-mails late at night, may be greatly reducing your melatonin production and depriving you of this hormone’s many health benefits.
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Even the slightest amount of light in the white or blue bandwidths, may be enough to seriously depress your pineal gland’s production of melatonin for the night, which is why sleeping in total darkness is preferable.
“Light pollution” is a growing problem that has adverse biological consequences on plants as well as on animals. Whether you have the light on for an hour or for just a second, the effect is the same. Your melatonin pump doesn’t turn back on when you flip the light back off.
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It is interesting to note that the frequencies of light that don’t negatively impact melatonin production are the colors given off by fire, which were common at night for primitive man. Yellow, orange and red wavelengths don’t suppress melatonin production the way white and blue wavelengths do.
Current scientific research suggests that melatonin deficiency may come with some profound biological disadvantages, such as higher levels of inflammation, a weakened immune system and an increased risk of cancer.