I have started drinking tart cherry juice and eating a kiwi before bed. The theory being that kiwi’s have serotonin and tart cherry juice has melatonin that help you sleep. Seems to be working for me. It just seems weird to me that they have serotonin and melatonin. I’m also wondering what other hormones can you get from plants?
All multi-cellular organisms use hormones and other chemicals to send signals between cells. Plants and animals inherited the same system—and many of the same molecular signals—but we adapt the specific purpose of each signal to whatever messages our bodies need to send.
It’s similar to how related languages can derive words from a common ancestor, but the meaning of the word in each language changes differently over time.
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It’s all just chemistry. Many compounds/molecules/whatever basically self-assemble and then from there the kinds of reactions are limited by chemistry.
From there evolution took over and found ways of doing things. Once it found those ways, it got past to everything that came after. Melatonin originally evolved in bacteria as an antioxidant.
From there it became useful for other things like regulating growth and as stress response as well as managing circadian rhythms and such like.
Another fun thing about Melatonin is also that nocturnal animals produce it basically the same way - dim light makes them produce melatonin while bright light flushes the melatonin out of their system. The melatonin itself just affects their nervous system in the opposite way and acts like a stimulant, so they get less sleepy when they have a lot of it. I think that’s kinda neat and maybe a bit counterintuitive if you have never thought about it before. I sure know that I would have either expected nocturnal animals to have their own separate compound or to produce melatonin at daytime.
I’m not a scientist or qualified with any reliable technical knowledge about this, but I am aware that there’s a lot of plants that have chemicals in them that are identical to or closely related to the chemicals that are found in the human body.
I want to say that this is because we share some common chemistry with plants and that the mechanisms by which these hormones are created are some of the easier mechanisms for earth compatible biology to pull off.
After all, it does make sense that living creatures would adapt to eat foods that work with their bodies.
You’re talking about amino acids, which all life on earth possess compatible ones. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to eat anything. Plants do not produce mammalian compatible hormones or we would have been extracting that shit for millennia to increase breast size, etc. The modern “Soyboy” shit was always made up.
That is just factually incorrect. Many plants produce the exact molecules or proteins that are used as hormones in humans. Hormones do much much more than influence breast size. In fact most hormones are completely unrelated to gender and sex. Ever felt stressed? Hormones. Ever felt hungry? Hormones. Actually … ever felt anything at all? Hormones. And plants do the same. They also feel stressed and they use some of the same hormones in the process.
