Night Milk Crystals
Night Milk Crystals is a dryed milk product sold by a Munich based company. This product falls into the classification of food products. It is made by milking cows at nighttime. According to the assertions of the manufacturer night milk crystals have a high concentration of the hormone melatonin, and therefore, should have sleep-inducing effects. One portion of these crystals contains 9 grams of milk powder and retails for 1,55 Euros. The manufacturer is the Milchkristalle GmbH in Munich owned and operated by Tony Gnann - a German businessman - who holds a patent on the production process.
Preparation
The cows are kept under artificial light conditions during daytime and under a soft red and yellow light during nighttime. They are milked between 2 and 4 am when the melatonin content ist supposedly highest. In a process called freeze drying, the drawn milk is then turned into a crystalline powder under vacuum conditions.
Assertions and Studies
In order to back the claims made regarding this product, the manufacturer points to a small sized study of the Bavarian "Innovationsförderung Weihenstefan". In this study, the authors indicate a melatonin concentration of 110 pg/g for this product. In comparison, ordinary milk powder contains 15 pg/g. Over a period of ten days, test subjects (humans) ingested 10 grams of the product on each day (thus 1.1 ng melatonin per day) which was mixed into an unknown quantity of ordinary milk.
The content of melatonin contained in night milk crystals is extremely low. In order to obtain the same effect of an approved medication containing 2 milligrams (mg) of melatonin, the consumer has to ingest around 2 million portions of the crystal powder at a total cost of approx. 3.1 million Euros while melatonin itself is not considered a sleep inducing medication and cannot be obtained as a such in a German pharmacy.
In 2004, the veterinary institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich examined "night milk" in another study. The munich researcher detected that milk drawn from cows at night contained 18.7 pg/ml melatonin. During daytime milking only 1.9 pg/ml melatonin were detected. High variation within the population was noticed. In a feeding experiment with night milk and ordinary milk given to calves, no effect on their circadian rhythm nor on the plasma concentration became evident. Therefore, the authors concluded, night milk has no effect as a pacemaker (melatonin acts as s pacemaker and has a so called Zeitgeber function). The melatonin signal forms part of the system that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. It is the central nervous system (more specifically, the SCN, supra chiasmatic nuclei) that controls the daily cycle in most components of the paracrine and endocrine systems rather than the melatonin signal (as was once postulated).
No food has been found so far to elevate plasma melatonin levels in humans.
Night Milk
Beside processing, marketing and retailing night milk crystals, night milk itself was and is offered as a food product on the market. In Switzerland, the provider "Harvestmoon" was prohibited by the Zurich Kanton health officials to claim that their product „Nachtmilch“ (night milk) would contain five times as much melatonin as ordinary milk. Harvestmoon accepted the interdiction and stopped retail and production. In Finland and Great Britain night milk seems to be available.