Supplementing with maizinol, an extract from the leaves of young maize plants, not only improves sleep but also lowers cortisol levels. American researchers affiliated with the company that markets maizinol reported this in the Journal of Medicinal Food in 2023.

Study
Researchers from the supplement company GLH Nutrition LLC and Unigen, the company behind maizinol, divided 45 healthy subjects into three groups. For four weeks, the subjects in one group received a placebo daily, while the subjects in a second and third group received a capsule containing 250 or 500 milligrams of the extract UP165 daily, respectively.

Unigen has since renamed this extract maizinol. That is the name we use in this post. And for the record, yes, this study was sponsored.

For a period of two weeks before the supplementation began, the researchers monitored the subjects' sleep. They used a questionnaire to determine their well-being and recorded the cortisol levels in their saliva. The researchers repeated the procedure during and after the supplementation period.

Results
The most striking effect of supplementation was a 36.3 percent decrease in salivary cortisol concentration. That's quite substantial. The researchers didn't analyze blood samples, but the decrease in blood levels would have been similar.

The PSQI, a score on a standardized questionnaire that measures sleep quality, improved by 30 percent with supplementation. This is clinically relevant. The effect is comparable to that of mild sleep interventions.

Sleep duration increased by about half an hour per day with supplementation, similar to the maizinol study we discussed earlier this week.

In addition, the sleep architecture changed. Deep sleep - the sleep phase in which the body produces anabolic hormones like testosterone and growth hormone, but also the phase in which the immune system activates new cells - increased by almost fifty percent.

The table above summarizes the measured effects of supplementation. Click on it for a larger version.

For clarity, we limit the table to the effects of the 500-milligram dose. This will likely become the recommended daily intake of maizinol.

Conclusion
"UP165 could be used as a safe nutritional supplement for a 24-hour support for a better quality and efficiency of sleep at night and for improved mood state and overall well-being by day", the researchers summarize.

"These data suggest the possibility of the standardized, natural, hormone-free, corn leaf extract, UP165, to be considered a natural alternative to a synthetic melatonin."

More coming soon.