The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #112 - Dr. John Lieurance

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Hi, friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. So, a little backstory on this conversation. I'm trying to remember over the order of events of how this happened, but all around the same time I heard an episode actually on Ben Greenfields Podcast with Dr. John Lieurance about all things melatonin, and not only was it fascinating, and did I get a ton of questions from listeners about it, and a ton of requests to bring Dr. John onto the show, but around the same time, our assistant for the Intermittent Fasting Podcast was actually working with Dr. Lieurance, and offered to introduce me and connect us. So, it was just absolutely beautiful and perfect timing. We did a call, we got to know each other, instantly connected on all the things. There's so many things to talk about.  

Dr. Lieurance sent me his new book, which is called Melatonin: The Miracle Molecule, and it was so funny because I got the book and I was like, “Okay, this is a long book. How was he going to talk about melatonin for this long?” Oh, my goodness, it honestly just blew my mind. I realized, I had such a finite view, and interpretation, and awareness of what melatonin does in our bodies. Friends, it's not just sleep. Sleep is just a small part of everything that's doing in us. So, there's so many things we could talk about. I'm sure we'll go on many tangents and rabbit holes. But Dr. Lieurance, thank you so much for being here. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Melanie, thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast, and I'm excited to be here. 

Melanie Avalon: I am as well. A lot of my listeners probably are familiar with you, because like I said, I've been getting so many requests to have you on the show. But for those who are not familiar, you have quite a resume. You have so many letters. You are an ND, DC, BS, DABCN, Chiropractic Neurologist and Naturopath. That is a lot of things, a lot of certifications and credibility, and that really shows through in your work the nuance and the intelligence was just absolutely incredible. But for listeners not familiar with you, could you tell them a little bit about your personal story? We have a lot of overlap in some of the chronic health conditions and non-chronic-- just things that we've experienced. But what led you to where you are today and especially what led you to your fascination with melatonin?  

Dr. John Lieurance: Oh, well, okay. My favorite subject. My dad was a marine, and so initially, I was a Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. My mom was in utero, and then my first two years of life was spent on that base, and it was the worst water contamination in US history. I had a lot of health issues as a child, asthma and a lot of chronic fatigue. I was eventually put into special education classes for ADD and hyperactivity. 

Growing up in Hawaii, they didn't really have the normal class. It was either you were really with some kids that had some serious problems or you were a normal. Unfortunately, for second grade through sixth grade, that's the class that I was in. It was really challenging. I look back and I do talk about this in my book a bit in the section when we get into melatonin for children and autism. It was healthy for me to write that chapter because I was able to air some of the challenges I had and how I could connect with if I had the ability to go back in time or my parents had some of the knowledge that we have today how much better my life could have been. I always look at things like my good friend, Dr. Dan Pompa, talks about pain to purpose. I don't regret anything, because everything that led me to this point was really a stressor, and we're going to talk a lot about stressors because that's really where melatonin shines, is it helps us to be more resilient and adaptable to stress at the mitochondrial level. 

Then, I had Lyme disease really severely searching and searching for many years for answers and was supposed to be the doctor that had all the answers. Even back then, I had a practice where people were traveling in, and I like kept losing weight, and just the amount of inflammation and pain I had in my body was just incredible. Eventually, I had to literally close my practice. It was right in the middle of 2008, where we had the economic collapse and so, everything crashed down on me. I lost everything and had to rebuild at that point, and again, another pain to purpose because I was able to figure out not just Lyme disease and mold illness, but really what led me to the path of what all diseases have in common, which is the fact that at the core, it's either infections or toxicity, but typically, it's both. 

This is where we can get into melatonin and talk about how melatonin plays a role in this but the problem with all diseases is that, it's rooted with inflammation. We know that inflammation shows up as cytokines. What the cytokines do is they create stress to the cell, and they make an energy shift in the cell, particularly it goes from-- and anybody that studied biology knows Krebs cycle. This is something that we all have to learn in biology, and it's in the mitochondria, where this is a small little vesicle. There's many, many hundreds of thousands of them in each cell, and they convert oxygen and glucose into something called ATP, which is the energy currency of the cell. When we look at that system, we want to think how efficient it is where we take one glucose molecule, and we make the maximum amount of ATP, which is 38. As we get older, things like NAD can be rate limiting. Things can clog that system so that we don't efficiently make energy, we don't make as many ATP, but also, we may start to produce pollution out of that mitochondria which is called oxidation.  

The way I think about it is like an older car, and the older the car is, the more it starts to be less efficient at burning gas. If you were to have the ability to clean up all the cars in this town, we'd have a lot less pollution. That's really the goal of a lot of the treatment plans that I have is, to basically clean up all those old cars so there's less pollution and there's more efficient energy production. The two organ systems in the body that are really most critical for this is the heart and the brain, because they're the most metabolically sensitive. What I mean by that is that, if there's a slight decrease in the amount of energy, then it's going to show up larger in the brain and in the heart versus other organ systems in the body, because they demand so much energy. So, stressors lead to cytokines and inflammation.  

Cytokines are inflammatory markers in the body and there's a variety of different types of them. But once they start to clog up the cell, the cell goes from this Krebs cycle and it switches to something called aerobic glycolysis. Aerobic glycolysis is a very inefficient way of making energy. Otto Warburg was the one that really discovered this, and he was a extremely brilliant German physician, who won the Nobel Prize. Listen to this. He won the Nobel Prize for discovering basically how cancer works, because that's what happens with cancer, is it switches to this aerobic glycolysis, also called fermentation. He was able to start to understand how using different oxygen therapies were helpful. Hitler did not let him accept the Nobel Prize though. Isn’t that crazy?  

Melanie Avalon: That's crazy. Oh, my goodness. I didn't know. Well, seriously, I didn't know Hitler had influence on that, but I guess so. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Yeah, well, he was a bad boy. Anyway, they call it the Warburg effect. It's referenced in the literature all the time as the Warburg effect. You know what? What strikes me though is there's such a massive aha moment back then, where people really fully understood the nature of cancer, and there's been no effort to really explore that outside of natural medicine. We do ozone therapy here, and we do intravenous ozone, something I call RejuvenOX, but there's also a 10-pass hyperbaric ozone. Have any of your speakers delved into this stuff at all?  

Melanie Avalon: I had on Dr. Jason Fung for The Cancer Code. That what blew my mind. He was talking about how one of the biggest epiphanies in the cancer literature was how they used to think that cancer was being forced to do aerobic glycolysis, like it was its only option, but really, it's choosing too, and that it could be doing other things. Basically, the implications are that for cancer like that's the way that it can just really quickly make energy and it's the most fast and efficient thing for it. So, I was wondering in general with aerobic glycolysis and inflammation, do the cells start doing that out of--? Is it because the system is breaking, and that's all they can do, or is it a conscious decision in the face of inflammation that that's just the easiest way to make energy? Why does the body switch to that under inflammation? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, the way I understand it is that if you look at disease, it starts out with a disruption in energy. You look at acupuncture, and you look at the meridians through the body, and the chi goes to the body. At the very beginning, there's an energy disruption, and then you'll start to have some chemistry that changes, and then over time, that chemistry is there long enough, you can have some cellular changes. Then from there, those cellular changes can lead to an organ situation and then could be systemic. But then at a cellular level, cancer is the last stage of this spectrum. So, if any system in our body is stressed for long enough, yes, I would definitely be on the bandwagon to say that the cytokines and the inflammation are the primary stressor, but underneath that, what's the cause of that, and toxins and infections are almost always the cause of that.  

Now, sometimes people have certain genetic situations going on, where they have poor detox pathways. Therefore, if you're not cleaning things out, you're either a swamp or a river, I always say, so things could be swampy because there's not a good drainage system, as well as if you're producing too many toxins or you're exposed to toxins, so it can be either way. 

Melanie Avalon: Are there genetic tests that people can take to know if they are good or bad detoxers? Are there a lot of potential genetic pathways? 

Dr. John Lieurance: I will admittedly say that I feel I've got some work to do in genetics. I haven't been so quick to jump on the bandwagon yet, because I don't know if that's how I want to practice medicine. There's still some questions I have about it, and its veracity and validity. Quite frankly, I feel the approach that we have here is really doing some pretty amazing things. But yeah, I couldn't really speak to that. I'm sure there's some other people that could really start rattling off a number of different genes. One of the big ones a lot of people look at is the methyltetrahydrofolate detox pathway. A lot of people can't convert folate to at active folate, mtrF gene, and that's a huge part of keeping a healthy brain, and that does play into some detox pathways. 

Melanie Avalon: I'll put a link in the show notes. I had Dr. Ben Lynch on who's like the gene guy. What I actually really liked about what he said it, and it really echoes what you just said, because when you read this book, Dirty Genes, he goes really deep into all the different genes. But basically, his conclusion is that, you don't even have to know what genes might be dirty for you because the solution is pretty much the same as far as all these mechanisms and things that support the body, things that you've mentioned, and I'm sure we'll go more into. I think that's really inspiring that maybe you don't have to know the actual genes that might be the actual cause if the pathway out might be really similar. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, it's such a new area, and there's so many clinicians that are so heavily jumping in feet first and that's their entire world and practices. It's all "Okay, we're going to run your 23andMe, and then I'm going to plug you into this thing, and basically, I'm going to manage your entire healthcare based on this chart." To me, that just doesn't make sense. 

Melanie Avalon: I feel very similar. I think people can get really in their heads, and even if we do have that information, do we really know that what we're doing is affecting it? But on the flip side, that's really granular. With your book coming back to melatonin, it does seem like something that can massively affect a lot of things. I love this conversation because I've been thinking about inflammation for years, and it haunts me, and I am convinced that-- because I see a therapist, then I'll go to the therapist, and she'll be like, “Melanie, not everything is inflammation. You need to lose this idea.” I'm like, “But it is everything.” [laughs] So, it's just really funny. As far as melatonin's role in inflammation, because in your book you talk about what you just discussed about how the energy potential for the mitochondria changes in the state of disease and inflammation, and how melatonin is involved in that, what role is it playing? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Ah, good question. Melatonin is the master stress resiliency substance. That's why I call it the miracle molecule because it's so integrally involved in so many different aspects of our health. If you look at the consequence of inflammation, and how it has such a dramatic shift, it's literally like the difference between if you had 100 logs of coal to burn to make energy, and then all of a sudden, now you only have 10. That's literally what happens. The current COVID virus, we know that the risk of this virus with regards to death is such that we have a runaway inflammation, we call the cytokine storm. What's really happening there is it's that switch from the Krebs cycle to aerobic glycolysis that really starves out the immune cells. Then, you lose your troops. You have all these troops that are stepping up to fight this infection, and then all of a sudden, they're just all wiped out, 90% of them are wiped out, and that's what gets people on the ventilators and on.  

Melatonin, by the way, is something that you can see a lot of different research has been done even with COVID, and it's very promising. Even, they recently announced a study that showed that taking 40 milligrams of melatonin could even decrease the potential of contracting the virus by 54%, which is really amazing. It helps to settle down the cytokine storm with any infection. In fact, if you look, there's some really cool studies that they did with deadly viral infections, and one in particular, they had these animal models, and they gave this encephalitis virus, it was just completely deadly. It would just literally obliterate the vascular structures. When you look at it under a microscope, it's like they're just completely obliterated. In the study, they actually show the image of this before with and without melatonin. But the survival literally went from 6% to 90 something percent with melatonin, with this animal model.  

Most of the research that they've done with protection from infections has been just as amazing. That's because it's buffering that stressor, which is that cytokine, so that It prevents that switch to aerobic glycolysis in the way that it does that is that in the mitochondria, the cytokine is basically this stressor that leads to higher oxidation. So, that oxidation needs to be buffered, and so every one of your mitochondria actually makes its own melatonin to basically buffer that ox-- It's the primary antioxidant in the body made in the mitochondria. What they found is that, you can give exoticness melatonin and it can turn that back on if it's been turned off from these heavy cytokine or inflammatory episodes. 

Melanie Avalon: With the melatonin in the cell, I want to get a broad picture because when people think of melatonin, the first thing they think is that it's regulating sleep. Is there different purposes and types of melatonin? Is there melatonin in the cell that's working with what you just mentioned with the metabolic system? Is that different from melatonin that regulates our sleep, is that different from melatonin in the bloodstream? When we take endogenous melatonin, does it literally enter the cells? Where is all the melatonin, and does it have different purposes based on where it is? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Melatonin is melatonin is melatonin. The molecule is the same whether it's found in nature or if it's made synthetically. Most of all the research that I reference in my book is all synthetic melatonin. There is a company trying to promote a natural melatonin, one that's a plant derived and they've got this narrative that it's better, it's healthier, and I was a little bit interested in that. I went to Russell Reiter who is the foremost authority on melatonin. Listen to this. This guy was the first scientist in the late 60s to actually discover that the pineal was more than just a worthless gland. He's a real pioneer, and he's really dedicated his life to studying melatonin. So, I went to him and I asked him this question, and he had a number of questions for this company, and the company never even answered the questions because they couldn't. Because there's no way to really test after they source it and his answer was just like, what I told you is like, melatonin is melatonin is melatonin. It's not going to matter where it comes from, because you have the same chemistry bonds, and hydrogens, and oxygens and so forth. 

Melanie Avalon: With melatonin, if melatonin is always the same and it doesn't matter, melatonin is melatonin is melatonin, like you said, but when we take in melatonin exogenously, for example, what determines where the melatonin goes? What determines if it goes to the cells, or if it affects our sleep cycle, or if it's in the bloodstream? Because people will take melatonin, what determines, what happens to that melatonin? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, okay, so let's start out with the basics on it. Most of what's available on the market is oral, like it's a pill. The research shows that it's only 2.5% absorbed because it has to be acted on by enzymes from all the way from the mouth into the stomach, and digestive acid, and then it has to go through the liver for what's called first pass, which breaks a lot of it down as well. What we have and I found successful in our practice is a suppository, one called SandMan, and also a liposomal version of sandman. The liposomal is using phosphatidylcholine which is very similar to your cell membrane, so it can cross into the bloodstream very readily, and then suppositories are really an interesting application. I find them to be incredibly helpful. The absorbability is really amazing, and it's slow. So, it's a slower release over a longer period of time.  

The best way to wrap your head around this is to realize that there's something called peak plasma, which means if I take, say, CoQ10 in a pill, then that CoQ10 is probably going to have like a one, maybe an hour and a half, where it's peeking in my blood, and that's the window that my cells can then go and say, “Hey, I'm going to pull that CoQ10 into the cell.” Once that peak plasma is done, then there's none left, so the cell can't bring any into the cell. It has this window of opportunity to pull whatever amount of CoQ10 can pull in during that period of time. The cells have a slow rate. It would be better if you had that same amount of CoQ10, but you had it released over say hours and hours, you're going to get a lot more cellular nutrient.  

With regard to melatonin, it crosses the blood-brain barrier. It'll go throughout all the cells in your body. With the suppository if you have a slow bleed, which is up to five to seven hours, first of all, it's great for sleep, because naturally we produce melatonin all night. But on top of that, the absorption at the cellular level is going to be fantastic. 

Melanie Avalon: What does the normal daily nightly rhythm look like for melatonin production? Do we produce any during the day, is it just at night, why do we stop producing it, what role does light and dark play?  

Dr. John Lieurance: Mm-hmm. Yeah, blue light in particular suppresses melatonin release. During the day, we build up our melatonin levels depending on light being shined in our eyes. So, that goes through something called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is through those nerves that go back towards your pineal gland from your eyes. The pineal builds up melatonin, it's stored, and then black basically triggers it to be released, so in darkness. This is where you start getting into the conversation of light pollution and how our cell phones, and TVs, and computers might actually be messing up our circadian rhythm. This is can be quite catastrophic, because sleep is more important than nutrition. When we start messing around with our sleep schedules, we can have some very catastrophic consequences to our health. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it was so funny when I was reading your book, you have pictures and you describe your house and your lighting situation. Literally, that's my apartment [laughs] at night. Occasionally, I see what my apartment looks from the outside and it's very shocking, it just looks like red light district. It's all red light only. I wear the glasses. I have an EMF-blocking canopy like you have. I stopped using it though, because I read that if it wasn't set up correctly that it could actually be making things worse. So, I've had it on the to-do list to make sure I set it up right. Are you on the ground floor, your bedroom?  

Dr. John Lieurance: No, I'm on the third floor.  

Melanie Avalon: Do you have the canopy grounded?  

Dr. John Lieurance: I have my bed grounded.  

Melanie Avalon: Because I was reading that it needed to be like you had to create a complete box with the floor. 

Dr. John Lieurance: You know who would totally know this answer is Luke Storey. Luke Storey, good friend of mine, he's also does a lot of podcasting. He actually did a whole program on this whole subject, and so, I will find out, I will get that information to you, and we can put that in the show notes. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, awesome. Yay. Yeah, it's funny. I was using it for quite a few months, and then I read that, I was like, “Oh, no. Okay, I've got to figure out the details here.” But going back to everything that you were saying, I'm trying to get clarity about all this in my head. When the light affecting our melatonin production and the melatonin being in our bodies, if we're not producing melatonin during the day, is it still active in our cells, the cellular melatonin that you were talking about? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Yes, it is. Now we're talking about melatonin being released in the brain is having a specific action on a neurological network of nuclei, and that is regulating our circadian rhythm. This rhythm is really hardwired to our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. You look at melatonin as the primary activator and supporter of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our resting and digesting. And then, you have cortisol and serotonin that are really more running the show to get us up in the morning, and they're also linked to our stress response, which is our sympathetic nervous system. Have you done much with heart rate variability, or have you talked about it much on your show? 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, yes. I've had Harpreet, CEO of Oura, on twice. I'm obsessed with my Oura Ring. I love talking heart rate variability. You have an Oura Ring, right? 

Dr. John Lieurance: I do. Yeah. This was something that was really fascinating to me. When I look at the graph on heart rate variability and how drastically it goes down as we age, I literally put the same graph of melatonin and they look identical. I really was wanting to understand heart rate variability more, because I knew about it, and I didn't really take a heavy dive into it. When I really delved into it, it was really interesting to see that-- This is what I found, is that your heart rate is being controlled by this fight or flight versus the resting and digesting side of your nervous system, the sympathetic versus the parasympathetic. What happens is each of them are going to jump in, and that's what creates the variability in the heart.  

We know that we have a healthy system when there's a balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. What happens to us as we get older, and I think just in general, there's enough stressors that are too much that the body can't adapt. What happens when we lose our ability to adapt? Then, we have a stress response that kicks in which is going to upregulate this sympathetic response. And if we don't have a strong enough parasympathetic nervous system to equal that, then we start to get into trouble where we start having high blood pressure, we start having degenerative neurologic disease, we start being more susceptible to infection, all the different things that you really don't want to happen to you. 

So, what melatonin does, it's the primary supporter to the parasympathetic nervous system. It makes sense when you think about it. When you go to sleep, that's when your body really goes into this restorative, regenerative, relaxing, and we lose that ability to have that deep, deep, deep stimuli to the parasympathetic nervous system, and that regenerative good night's sleep. When we start looking at melatonin, which we really start-- We're doing some much higher doses than what you would typically hear. So, we're dosing people up into the hundreds of milligrams. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, this is a huge, huge, huge paradigm shift. I feel a lot of people think melatonin is the hormone that makes you sleepy, it helps you sleep, so the benefits are coming from sleep, we get a ton of benefits from sleep. That's like the entirety of what people think of when they think melatonin. But it sounds like instead, melatonin, if it's our master stress hormone in a way like you just talked about, that is huge. So, it sounds like instead, melatonin is this master hormone affecting stress in all of our cells in all of our bodies, and one of its roles is that in concentrated form, the way that it affects our neurological system, it instigates sleep. So, that's one timeline of melatonin, one pathway. But really there's so much more.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, there's a couple points I want to just bring up. One is when you ponder just the fact that it's buffering inflammation and all stressors are going to lead to inflammation, it's basically buffering all stressors, but it also supports this parasympathetic nervous system, that's the opposite polar of the stress of-- whenever there's a stressor in the body, you have this activation of this sympathetics. Having it on both sides there, it just really starts to get a lot clearer for me at least when I think about it. 

Melanie Avalon: I'm just thinking more, and I know I keep asking you about this as far as the-- I was asking you about exogenous melatonin and where it goes. The reason I'm trying to get clarity is, it sounds like the melatonin in the cells is constantly doing all of this, having these effects, affecting our parasympathetic system, affecting our energy production, affecting all these things. But if we take it, is there a way to get it directly into the cells without it first going into the bloodstream, and telling our brain that it's nighttime, and messing with that aspect of things? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, it's a great question. There's not really a need to do that, because actually, we dose a lot of our patients during the day. One of the people that was instrumental in me really taking a really hard look at starting to use melatonin in high doses here in the clinic, which then led to formulating the SandMan was Frank Shallenberger. He was literally one of the first functional medicine doctors practicing way back in the 80s, and then he brought Ozone to the US from Germany. But I was able to do an internship with him, and he was dosing people with a couple hundred milligrams, and he would have some people he would dose during the day and the night, and most of those patients were neurological cases or cancer. So, I'd asked him that question, and what he said was that, if there's light, then there's no sleepiness with the melatonin. That's how we're wired. So, we can have melatonin and not get sleepy, and when you go into darkness, then the melatonin really kicks in. 

Melanie Avalon: Is it the SPN that's interpreting that? If the suprachiasmatic nucleus is seeing light at the same time that it's registering melatonin, then we don't get sleepy? 

Dr. John Lieurance: It turns off the melatonin. It doesn't act to send that cascade of events that leads to sleep. There's some very specific chemistry that happens with sleep. That whole cascade doesn't get triggered until you're in darkness, and then the Melatonin is released from the pineal. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, which on the flip side really speaks to how damaging light will be to our circadian rhythm, if it just stops talks that whole process. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, not only that, one of the things that I found fascinating is that Wi-Fi, or microcurrent from Wi-Fi, literally go right through the skull, and they trick the pineal into thinking that it's daytime. They have a number of studies where they've shown that these wavelengths cause cancer. I've got a whole chapter on cancer in the book. If you go to download the book right now, we have it in a PDF, and the cancer chapter is not in there yet. I'm finishing up cancer. I've got a really good chapter on cannabis and melatonin sleep, and a chapter on pineal and liver. So, those will be released in the final Amazon version, but there's still a ton of chapters and a ton of good stuff. You know what I'd be willing to do, Melanie is, I will be willing to do a free book giveaway to all of your listeners.  

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. That'd be amazing.  

Dr. John Lieurance: That's how much I want to get this out into the world. The way that the book is structured is the first chapters like an introductory, the second chapter, really talking about stress in general, and then each chapter like, I have a chapter of skin, I have a chapter on liver, and a chapter on cancer, and infection, and mitochondria, and gut, and hormones, and sex hormones we talk about, and mental emotional conditions. You can read the first couple chapters and then go to whatever chapter interests you as far as maybe a health issue that you're dealing with, and then you can better understand how melatonin could work for you, and also, it's highly referenced. So, all the chapters have a lot of references of from studies. What we're talking about in the book it's not like opinion. It's hard facts. 

Melanie Avalon: I honestly was shocked about the amount of literature that there is, and even since then, just perusing Google Scholar and looking up all the melatonin studies, I feel like melatonin really needs a rebranding because honestly, I'm shocked about how people aren't really talking about this at all. At least the general public, they really just think about it for sleep, and are not even aware of all of the stuff that's happening.  

Dr. John Lieurance: I don't know why that is, but one big reason is pharmaceutical companies have been trying to patent melatonin for many years. They change it a little bit, but it's not melatonin. Russell Reiter talks about this quite a bit. But God owns the patent to melatonin. But you change it just a slight bit, and it just doesn't do the same thing. It has to be that exact structure to do all the magic. If melatonin was patentable, or even if a supplement company, like this one that I was telling you about that has this narrative that they have some sort of sophisticated melatonin, and that all you need is just one or two milligrams of it, and it does all these magical things, blah, blah, blah. Well, it doesn't really match to the science at all. Even some of the studies that they did on it were flawed.  

You have to also take in the whole idea that if we're taking melatonin for something more than sleep, let's say we want a great gut. I'm sure you've talked at length in some of your podcasts about having a really healthy gut. If we just look at that, gut melatonin is 400 times higher than brain. So, literally, your gut lining releases melatonin, and it's released in a circadian rhythm just like it is in your brain, and it's the primary activator to something called microbiome swarming. If you could imagine all of these bacteria, these probiotics that we take in your gut, basically, if the stronger the signal for melatonin, the stronger that you're going to have a robust growth and proliferation of these amazing bacteria, and the melatonin also suppresses the bad bacteria. It's really amazing that way.  

That's one reason to start thinking about melatonin beyond just how's your sleep doing with a few milligrams, because some people might actually have an improvement of their sleep with a few milligrams. We have people that have tried melatonin and not been successful that when we had them take it with, say, a suppository or liposomal, and start going with higher doses. The reports I'm getting back, Melanie, are on believable. Especially for people that really do like two or three months in a row and just stay with it, it for me personally has been transformational. 

Melanie Avalon: We were talking about the melatonin the cells, the melatonin in the brain and sleep, so the rhythm of the melatonin in the gut, 400 times the receptors and the gut microbiome. Is that timeline aligning with our melatonin sleep-wake cycle or is it its own rhythm like ourselves?  

Dr. John Lieurance: It's on the exact same cycle. Yeah, when you're in sleep, that's when your gut's repairing itself along with all of those bacteria. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. This is something that, and I talked about this and talked about your book on the Intermittent Fasting Podcast, because we often get so many questions about early versus late eating, and something you talked about in the book-- Well, first of all, you talked about the role of the gut and how the melatonin actually reduces HCL, I believe. Sounds like you have high melatonin in your gut and HCL down, that wouldn't be the best time to be digesting. On top of that, this blew my mind that the pancreas has melatonin receptors, and that there is potentially an inverse relationship between insulin and melatonin. Could you elaborate on that?  

Reason I was so excited to read that was because I am haunted, I’ll tell you haunted, by late versus early eating, because I personally do really well eating at night or I perceive that I do. But all the studies that I see tend to say hormonally that it's better to eat earlier, but then I wonder if a lot of the in-practice studies, are they accounting for people who are just eating later versus not earlier? But it's very hard to argue against the pancreas having melatonin receptors and the implications of that with insulin regulation and eating. I said a lot there. 

Dr. John Lieurance: No, it's a great conversation. Melatonin, so the receptors in the pancreas are called the MT1 and MT2. Basically, what happens is it shuts down your production of insulin. When you go to sleep and you have all this melatonin come in, then if you were to, say, eat a bunch of carbs before you go to bed-- because sugar's actually really dangerous. Sugar is corrosive. We don't want a lot of sugar floating around our bloodstream. It's bad, bad news. You start to get these glycated end products. This is what causes cataracts. You get these in your tissues, and it makes your tissues not as elastic. It's a big negative part of aging, and basically, those sugars basically get highly oxidized in your tissues, and it just gets really mucky. We don't want a lot of extra sugar, and that's why a good insulin response to put to store it is really healthy. We don't want to eat carbohydrates late because of that. That's why people might actually wake up not feeling as good. You may have more inflammation if you have too many carbs late at night.  

Melanie Avalon: I'm so happy that you said that, because I don't know if you specifically because you've talked about the pancreas and just eating in general at night, but then I was thinking, “Hmm, maybe if you are eating at night, lower carb would require less insulin.” It's not competing. The insulin is not being “turned off” by high melatonin. So, maybe, it sounds like if you are eating later, maybe lower carb is a better route to go. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, overall, it seems that you want to have about three hours before you go to sleep ideally. Before you eat anything, you want to be fasting a bit so that there's none of the digestion pressures on your system, so that your body can basically focus on healing, and repairing in that all the different magical things that happen while you're sleeping. 

Melanie Avalon: Do you know if there are different melatonin circadian rhythms based on your chronotype, like if you're in a late-night person or an early bird? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Oh, yeah. No, I can speak to this. This is what I understand is that, people talking, “Oh, I'm a night owl. I'm a wolf or whatever.” What I understand is that, it's very rare. It's only 10% of the population. But these people have a tendency to caffeinate themselves. They stay busy. They create a lifestyle that puts them in, it alters their circadian rhythms so that they're just in that situation, and that it's not really truly best for their archetype.  

Melanie Avalon: Interesting. I'm always curious to hear because I always self-identified as an insomniac my whole life. Although, I will say, I'm really good now with my sleep because I've gone to such great lengths to combat that the opposite of what you were just saying like, instead of doing all the caffeine and all this stuff, I just I do all the things to support the sleep. I feel okay about where I am right now, but I definitely feel like I'm that type that is like the Insomniac type.  

Dr. John Lieurance: What time do you go to bed?  

Melanie Avalon: Like 2:30. The latest. That'd be the latest. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Wow. What time you wake up?  

Melanie Avalon: 11:00? 11:00.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Okay, all right. Well. 

Melanie Avalon: Every time I try to try to go to bed earlier, I still want to sleep later. Even if I get up early, I will still get that second when late at night, I'm just a night person. What are you? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Yeah, I go to bed at 8:30 or 9:00. I feel like I'm old, and oh, my gosh, whatever. But I wake up at 3:00, sometimes 4:00 in the morning.  

Melanie Avalon: Oh, you actually wake up when I go to bed. [laughs]  

Dr. John Lieurance: I know. But that time is so peaceful, and I'll usually meditate for an hour or two, and then I get so much done.  

Melanie Avalon: Me too, which is at the end of my day instead of the-- [laughs]  

Dr. John Lieurance: But what you what? You could try, Melanie is, you could try taking the high dose of melatonin at, say, 9 o'clock, and you will definitely be able to go to bed at 10:00, like if you did say SandMan, and it'll totally reset everything for you. When you take that melatonin and that's why I came up with this travel hacker kit. It's becoming hugely popular for a lot of businesspeople or even people just traveling for vacation. One of the things that I do before COVID is, I grew up in Hawaii. My dad and sister still live out there. So, I would travel from Florida to Hawaii like two to three times a year. When I would go out there, I would just be trashed, and it was so hard to get adapted to that five-hour change. So, I decided to really hack travel. What I did was, I took a 300-milligram CBD suppository before I got on the plane, and then I redosed that halfway through, and what I found is that, all the stressors that really seem to really create a lot of inflammation in my body from the plane which I think is the radiation but also the air quality, which is a bit better now, and just the overall stress of going in and out of the airport and so forth. But I would arrive feeling so much fresher, and I also will use NAD during the trip as well.  

Then, when I got to Hawaii, I would do even much higher than 200 milligrams. I would even do 400 or 500 milligrams at the bedtime that it would be in Hawaii, and literally I wake up at what's normally time to wake up, and I go surfing, and I am right in the mix of things. So, I put together this travel hacker kit and the reports I'm getting back from everybody are unbelievable. I was telling you my buddy, Luke Storey, he went and did a trip to visit some family up in Indiana and he just couldn't believe how fresh he was when he got to his destination. 

Melanie Avalon: That is incredible. Well, listeners definitely check out the show notes. Again, they will be at melanieavalon.com/melatonin. I'll put links to everything because I know listeners are definitely going to want to jump on that. That's really amazing. What is the half-life of melatonin when you are taking it that way. So, when you're taking it to fall asleep in these higher doses, how long does it last in the body? Are there side effects? 

Dr. John Lieurance: The half-life is an hour, hour and a half.  

Melanie Avalon: For which form?  

Dr. John Lieurance: Any form. If you were to take a pill, it's all going to go into your bloodstream pretty quickly, and then you've got that half-life. If you do a suppository or liposomal but more so the suppository is going to be a slower release, then it's a trickle. So, it's releasing into your bloodstream, and then once it's released, then it has its own half-life. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. So, there's the initial, how long does it take to show up in the bloodstream than there's the half-life from there. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Right. Think about it the absorption and then the utilization. 

Melanie Avalon: When people see melatonin supplements at the store that are advertised for sleep, what's the typical dosage on those so listeners get an idea of just what you're talking about with these larger dose things?  

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, typically, sometimes you'll see 1 milligram, 5 milligrams, 10, you might be able to find a 20. But I don't know that there's really anything at health food stores above that. What we're talking about is superphysiological dosing. Some of the questions that I normally get asked about that are, isn't that dangerous, and could it possibly shut down your own production? The fear that people might have is, “Okay, I'm going to take all this melatonin for a certain amount of time, and then if I stopped taking it, I'm going to be left with no melatonin at all, because it's going to cause a disruption in my brain's production.” What's really interesting about melatonin, Melanie, is that there's no negative feedback loop on melatonin.  

For instance, estrogen or testosterone, if you take it exogenously, if you take it with cream or an injection, your body's going to say, “Oh, I have that. I can stop producing.” So, you have this what's called receptor site downregulation. That doesn't happen with melatonin at all. I know this firsthand, because I've gone months and months taking very high doses of melatonin, and if I stopped taking it, I'm fine. It's not like I can't sleep. I actually get a pretty decent night's sleep.  

The other thing is, there's no toxicity level of melatonin. When you look through the book, Melatonin: Miracle Molecule, what you're going to really find throughout the entire book and all the studies is that the scientists concluded that there's no negative effects to the melatonin. It's totally safe, and they've done studies to see if there is a toxic level, which would be equivalent to giving an average-size adult 150,000 milligrams of melatonin, and they basically stopped the study, because they just basically concluded that there's probably no toxic level to it. 

Melanie Avalon: That is so crazy, and I will say, honestly, I was reading your book, and you kept saying that, and I was like, “Really?” Because everybody has this idea in their head that-- I think most people think that there is some sort of side effects or a tolerance. I was like, “I'm going to find the study that show--" and I was googling and I couldn't find any. I couldn't. It was everything that you just said. That was really shocking to me because there's definitely this pervasive vibe out there about it.  

Dr. John Lieurance: I almost think there's an effort to keep melatonin suppressed. I really do. I'll tell you one thing that really shocks me is when you look melatonin up, and you look at it on, say, a WebMD, which is really just the pharmaceutical companies, they're feeding you exactly what they want you to see. There's massive censorship. But if you look up melatonin, you look at the side effects of melatonin, you'll see headache, and malaise, and blah, blah, blah. So, you look at this list of side effects, and if you really dig down and look at the study that was based on, it's the exact same side effects that the placebo arm had. So, how misleading is that?  

Melanie Avalon: That's really, really misleading. That's really frustrating too. Then on the flip side, you noted some studies that honestly are very shocking, things like comparing them to anxiety, meds pre-surgery, or comparing them to benzodiazepines or just-- The effectiveness is crazy. Melatonin and vitamin D, aren't those the only hormones that aren't regulated? We can buy them over the counter? I wonder why? 

Dr. John Lieurance: I know I've seen progesterone. There's probably a few sets, but yeah. One fact that really is amazing to me, we're talking about prescriptions and such, is blood pressure medication. If you read that chapter on cardiovascular and how melatonin can drastically improve the lipids, but also it lowers your blood pressure naturally. If you look at the graph of melatonin and as you age, it drops off, naturally, you're losing that parasympathetic aspect to keep the blood pressure down, and then you get that back on board, it will actually lower the blood pressure. But what really gets me is that all blood pressure medications, every one of them has been shown in research to suppress melatonin production.  

Here, we have all these, I don't know, probably millions of people on blood pressure medications, but how many of those people do you think their doctors actually said, “Well, you ought to also take melatonin, because this drug is going to suppress your melatonin.” I've never heard it. But that's really how it should be prescribed. Actually, I think what should happen is that melatonin should be prescribed first, because that may actually fix the problem, and then if that doesn't work-- again, melatonin doesn't-- If you could patent melatonin as a blood pressure medication, it would be all over the TV. 

Melanie Avalon: I wonder if there were pharmaceutical companies-- in the future, if it might become a thing where they're going to actually take melatonin off the shelves and turn it into a drug? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, they did that in Europe. You have to get a prescription for melatonin. 

Melanie Avalon: They prescribe it for all these different things or really just for sleep still? Do you know?  

Dr. John Lieurance: I have not seen anybody in-- In fact, we have so much interest with MitoZen and a number of the products that we're producing there. We've got some partners we're talking to start launching in Europe because they're really hungry for this technology of superphysiological melatonin dosing. Again, it's really restricted there because they can even buy it at a drugstore like we can't here. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it's so interesting how different things in different countries. I know St. John's wort is a drug there. But there's something like metformin you can get, but you can't get metformin here. It's really interesting. Going back, though, to the suppository, so, I don't know if this will be surprising to listeners. I'm all about the colonics and the enemas and like, I can do all that fine. Actually, I really enjoy it, but I've actually never done a suppository. So, for people who feel like there's a barrier there. Have you found with your patients that most patients can adapt to doing suppositories? 

Melanie Avalon: Well, I think at first blush people find it like, “Oh, either I wouldn't do that,” or “Oh, that's interesting.” But it's really such an no big deal. The suppository is made of an organic palm oil. It's like self-lubricated and it's shaped in a way that you don't really have to put your finger anywhere. It just slips up there, and then it turns into an oil pretty quickly. So, you don't even feel that it's there. It literally takes like two seconds, but I bet you a lot of your listeners are familiar with NAD. Would that be correct?  

Melanie Avalon: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, obsession.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Imagine you could go to a clinic, and you could pay $1,000 or more for NAD infusion, an IV. 

Melanie Avalon: It is so expensive. I've been looking at getting it here. It is so expensive. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Exactly. But you also have to sit there for five hours, and then, it's uncomfortable.  

Melanie Avalon: It'd be nauseous, apparently.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Yeah. We have NAD+Max, and it's literally as much as what would be in an IV, and it might even be better, because there's so much controversy and what's better the NM[?], nicotinamide mononucleotide or the nicotinamide riboside as a precursor, just taking straight NAD really work to get the mitochondria back up and running. What I did is, I put together a suppose-- It's the only suppository that I know of that's an NAD suppository. It's got 500 milligrams of NAD, it's got 250 milligrams of NMN, and 250 milligrams of nicotinamide riboside. But there's one other really interesting thing nobody's talking about, which is that when you give NAD, you're also supporting the senescent cells, which are these zombie cells that are producing all this inflammation, and all this oxidation, and as we get older or disease states, they accumulate. So, doing things to clear out senescent cells such as a fast triggering autophagy is clearly extending life from all the research, is clearly reversing a lot of diseases, is clearly giving people more vital, healthy, robust life. So, it's something we should pay attention to. We don't want to support these senescent cells with taking NAD every single day, which a lot of people that I know, they'll get one of the precursors to NAD and that's part of their daily vitamin. When I first learned about it, I did as well. Especially when you're fasting or on fasting days, it's better not to take NAD. What we do is we actually have a program we call Fast Track Fast, and NAD+Max actually has a polyphenol called fisetin. Have you ever heard of this one, fisetin? 

Melanie Avalon: Yes. Strawberries.  

Dr. John Lieurance: It is amazing. Have you seen the research on this?  

Melanie Avalon: I've seen some of it. Yeah.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Yeah. It's such a powerful senolytic. We actually put that in the suppository, so when you take it, you're suppressing the senescent cells a bit while you're providing NAD. But so, the Fast Track Fast is a really interesting protocol that I've formulated, and what we do is we have people load with NAD for two or three days, and what I think about there is you're increasing the cellular energy leading into a fast which is really a stressor. If you can support your energy reserves going into a stressor, you can get more out of that stressor because you're leaning more into the hormetic zone. 

Then when we have people fast, which we can have people do two days where they do a 24-hour fast basically just going lunch to lunch, and there's a product called Lucitol which is a lot of fisetin, something called steryl stilbene, green tea extract, curcumin, lutein. It's basically loaded with all of the polyphenols, resveratrol. All the polyphenols that are really shown to be senolytics. We're getting like a double whammy on the signaling for autophagy, clearing out senescent cells but also mitophagy. Have you guys talked about mitophagy on the show much?  

Melanie Avalon: I have. That's with the mitochondria? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Yes. You’re right. That's basically where your body clears out all the old, weak, and dysfunctional mitochondria. Yeah, there's some really interesting things that you can do to even have a stronger influence on that which is to do ozone. Let's say you're fasting, whether it's a 20:4 hour fast or a three day fast, that's a great time to actually go in and get an ozone IV, or if you have ozone at home, you can do rectal insufflations, because ozone is the most powerful activator to mitophagy, and what's on the other side of that is mitochondrial biogenesis. 

Melanie Avalon: With activating mitophagy, is the ozone activating something that activates mitophagy or is ozone just wiping out the mitochondria? 

Dr. John Lieurance: It works on something called PGC-1 alpha. I think I'm getting that right. PGC-1 alpha, it's a gene pathway that basically is an energy-regulating pathway. The way I wrap my head around it is like this. Imagine that you have a bunch of mitochondria that are misbehaving, and they're taking oxygen and glucose, and they're very inefficiently producing a bunch of oxidation. High oxidation is a trigger for the body to recognize that maybe that we need to clean up some mitochondria and build new fresh ones. So, what ozone is, is it's like this pulse of this massive amount of oxidation, and it wakes the system up, and so it wakes up your antioxidant buffer pathways. One of those is this mitophagy and mitochondrial biogenesis.  

Melanie Avalon: Okay, okay, gotcha. Sort of how hormetic stressors work?  

Dr. John Lieurance: It's totally hormetic. Absolutely. 

Melanie Avalon: It seems like really extreme hormeses. Like you just mentioned, it's the toxic level of it. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Sounds like the name of my next book, Extreme Hormesis. 

Melanie Avalon: Extreme Hormesis, I love it. I love it.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, listen, some people might listen to some of the strategies that we do. I know you're in the same boat. You've changed some things that your house for your sleep, yada, yada, yada. Point being is that we were not designed to handle all of the stressors being thrown at us right now. So, you have to do things to counter that. That's where the conversation of melatonin is just so amazing, because in today's age, if you really want to be your more robust, you have to be able to resist all of these stressors. One of the things that was really the most amazing thing that I really realized with melatonin is, and if you read my skin chapter, you'll actually see they've done studies where taking melatonin prevents skin burns, but I don't burn anymore. I go out into the sun, I can literally do no sunscreen, and I can be out in the sun on a hot day all day long, and I will just brown.  

Not too long ago, we had a patient from Boston come down, redhead, very fair. He came down, we did bone marrow stem cells for arthritis he was having in his hip. I put him on high-dose melatonin just to support them through the therapy, and the treatment, and to assist him to get the best results without treatment. He went fishing the day before and spent the day out in the boat and he didn't bring a sunscreen and nobody had any. He came in, and he's brown, and he was so shocked because he said he's never experienced anything like that before. If you think about UV rays coming in and hitting the skin, that's oxidation, that's stress, and the skin being able to buffer that stress and not burn is what melatonin is providing to it. So, it's an outward, something that you can physically see, and it's very tangible of how melatonin is helping protect my cells on my skin, but I know that's happening in my brain, and in my heart, my pancreas, my gut. Every organ and tissue in my body is getting that same type of support. 

Melanie Avalon: That is incredible. Two thoughts about it. One is with the sun, because I've been curious for a while about the role of polyunsaturated fat levels and omega-3, omega-6 levels and its role in sunburn. Basically, what fats our cellular membranes of our skin are made of and when they're more inflammatory, I feel like that is more conducive to sunburn. But either way, melatonin, if it's serving as the anti-inflammatory, it would be addressing that. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, it is, though, because it's inflammation is triggering the cytokines, and so when you look at-- Remember, in the beginning of the podcast, I had mentioned that I was able to figure out what was at the core of all diseases through my process, and what I discovered is that these toxins, they settle in the cell membranes, and this is where all of your hormones have to interact and message the cell in that-- Basically, life begins and ends at the cell membrane. This is where all the environmental influences are being interpreted, all of our hormones are being interpreted. All the heavy metals wind up in the cell membrane, all of the fat-soluble toxins, which are the ones that get in trouble, not necessarily the water-soluble ones, but the fat-soluble ones, they get caught up in both your cell membranes, but they also get caught up in the gut. So, they recycle over and over again through your bile.  

Often, when we first start working with patients here at Advanced Rejuvenation, what we'll do is we'll do binders and we've got very specific ways that we have people mop up a lot of these fat-soluble toxins in the gut. But then, we also have a protocol that I call cell membrane rejuvenation. It's like a refresh situation. Basically, we want to flush out all of the fats and the long chain fatty acids, very long chain fatty acids, all of the bad stuff. So, you really have to really be careful about all of these cooked vegetable oils, because that's where they go. They go in the cell membrane. The heavy metals, that's where they go in the cell membranes. Pesticides, all these chemicals, and then biotoxins. If we have infections, the toxins from the infections, if we have chronic Epstein-Barr, CMV, HHV-6, Lyme disease, you name it, these infections produce mold, and this is the reason that mold gets us in trouble so much, is it's biotoxin illness, because the cell membranes get so toxic, that the patients become hyperinflammatory and it shuts down mitochondrial function. 

Melanie Avalon: I'm on the exact same page about the cell membranes. I just think they're one of the most important aspects and everything. So, it really sounds like with melatonin-- because it seems like most things that we would take to support our health “supplement wise,” there's a point of diminishing returns, or toxicity, or even with NR and NMN you were talking about the role of it supporting senescent cells. But it sounds like melatonin, I don't know, it's like the way to go. It sounds like the worst thing that might happen is you might be a little bit groggy the next day.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Well, some pointers is that, some people are slow metabolizers. If someone's a little bit too groggy in the morning, first of all, I would say, it's possible you might be detoxing. We didn't really get into it, but melatonin actually can clear out heavy metals and detox them out of the brain. Sometimes, people have a few days where they just will feel groggy because their body's detoxing. Other times, it might be better to dose right around dinnertime, two or three hours before bedtime, because then by the time you wake up, it's had enough time to clear out of the system. We've had some success doing that. So, I would say if people are having a challenge with it, it's likely that they just need to keep taking it for a few days until they get over that hump and/or try dosing it a little earlier in the day or in the evening. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, gotcha. Well, for listeners, definitely, definitely get Melatonin: The Miracle Molecule. Although Dr. Lieurance said, we will be-- I guess we'll have the information in the show notes for how listeners can download that book, which, thank you, that is so incredible. I can't wait for them to read. 

Dr. John Lieurance: Why don't we make up a coupon code right now? How about you just use AVALON and you'll get a free PDF. Now, keep in mind, we're going to be releasing the hard copy on Amazon probably in a couple of months. So, you can get the PDF version, and there's a lot of great stuff there. But there will be a few extra chapters that will be in the final book. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. I will put links to all of that in the show notes, also links to all the products that we discussed. There will also be a full transcript in the show notes. But this has been absolutely amazing. I just can't thank you enough for all that you're doing and all of your work, and it's perfect because the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is surrounding everything. So, what is something that you're grateful for? 

Dr. John Lieurance: Oh, I tell you, one of the meditations that I do in the morning. I actually was at Rhonda Byrne’s house just like last week she wrote the book, The Secret, and they came out with the movie, The Secret. She's a very close friend of mine. 

Melanie Avalon: Can I just say really quick, that book is the reason I have this show now. I read that book, and I was like, “I'm going to start a podcast.” [laughs] And here we are. So, that's incredible. She must be amazing. 

Dr. John Lieurance: We went to dinner. She lives up in Monticello in California, like Santa Barbara area. She's down the road from Oprah. It was unbelievable. Yeah, so, it was just her, her and I for dinner, and then her family was at the house, who I got to meet quite a few of them, and then we spent the next day at this other hotel/restaurant on the beach, and the conversations were off the chart. I wish I had a recorder going because I have a YouTube channel, Cellular Reset. So, I had her as an interview there, but I feel even in the last year, I've become so much more conscious, because I've been really working on-- I attended a Joe Dispenza seminar, and I've just been really working on understanding consciousness. We work with some psychedelic medicines here at the clinic, specifically ketamine. Some different psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy I think is the next big thing. I think it is really going to be transformational and disruptive to not just psychology and people dealing with depression, and PTSD, and anxiety, but I think even people that are fairly healthy, they have a great life, but the betterment of people. 

So, I pray and I go into this just deep state of gratitude for my life, and this deep gratitude for everything that I have, and then from there, I'm grateful for what I want, and even saying that, because the way to pray, is really not to petition. You're not petitioning, “God, I want, I want, I want." In fact, when Yeshua wrote the original Aramaic Scripture, that wasn't the way he described it is. It's basically a deep state of gratitude for what you've already received. This is really the message Rhonda has brought to the world in a big way. But originally, it was Jesus that brought that, but it was just misinterpreted through the Bible. 

Melanie Avalon: That is so beautiful. I think that might have been my-- I've asked this over a hundred times, and I don't want to play favorites, but I was absolutely amazing. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Lieurance. This has been amazing. The work that you're doing is having profound effects on so many people. I can't wait for listeners to read the book. You were so kind. You sent me some of your supplements. So, now I am going to go try them. I'm really, really excited. So, I'll share with listeners how that goes. But thank you and hopefully, we can connect more in the future because this was absolutely incredible.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Oh, my pleasure, Melanie. Thank you for having me.  

Melanie Avalon: All right. Have a good rest of your day.  

Dr. John Lieurance: Okay, you too.  

Melanie Avalon: Bye.