Are sleep drinks safe and effective?

Sleep drinks contain natural ingredients that may promote sleep, but they aren't regulated, so quality and quantity of ingredients is sketchy. Sleep expert Michael Breus, PhD, shares his overall concerns about consuming sleep drinks.

Transcript

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So my concern is until I can have somebody list for me there's this many milligrams of this or this many milligrams of that, I

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would say that need you need to be cautious. Maybe bring it up with your doctor to make sure there aren't any interaction effects with medications that you might be taking.

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[LIGHT MUSIC] So one of the new crazes right now are sleep drinks.

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These are almost like little energy shots that you would see. They're sold everywhere-- at the grocery store,

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at the gas station, at the pharmacy. And they have all kinds of different natural supplements inside them. Here's the pros and the cons.

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I think that they may have, depending upon which one you're looking at, good ingredients, but the problem is, is because the FDA does not require

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that they put how much of these supplements are in each one, we have no idea. So my concern is until I can have somebody list for me

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there's this many milligrams of this or this many milligrams of that, I would say that you need to be cautious. Maybe bring it up with your doctor to make sure there aren't any interaction

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effects with medications that you might be taking. So some of the more common ingredients that we see in these sleep drinks can be melatonin, 5-HTP, GABA, kava kava, passionflower.

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There's a whole bunch of different ones that are out there, and they all do different things. Unfortunately, I don't like the way some of the sleep drinks

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just put everything in the mix and just have you drink it all. I think that they should be a little bit more targeted because, remember, there

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are two systems for sleep. There's the sleep circadian system, which melatonin would affect, and then there's sleep initiation process

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that could be affected by things like 5-HTP or GABA. [AUDIO LOGO]