Taken at bedtime

Thorne Melaton-3

A single-ingredient, 3 mg melatonin capsule from an NSF Certified for Sport brand, at the dose used in the reflux trials, where the evidence supports it as an addition to a PPI rather than a replacement for one.

Format

Capsule, once a day

Type

Melatonin (lower-esophageal-sphincter tone)

Cost

$16.00 for 60 capsules, about $0.27 a day

Customer rating

4.5 out of 5 from 1,105 ratings from Amazon

What customers consistently report

• Easy to swallow at a small capsule size
• Neutral taste and no fillers noted by repeat buyers
• More consistent praise for ingredient purity than for subjective drowsiness, with mixed reports on sleep onset

Those are the themes that recur across the reviews. Moderate review confidence — 1,105 Amazon ratings.

Why it might work

Melatonin’s proposed role in reflux is different from its familiar use as a sleep aid. In reflux specifically it is thought to raise lower esophageal sphincter tone and modestly reduce gastric acid secretion, a separate mechanism from alginate’s physical barrier or DGL’s mucosal coating. This product delivers exactly 3 mg per capsule with no other active ingredients, the same amount used in the reflux trials rather than a proprietary blend. Matching a trial dose is not the same as reproducing a trial result, and the sleep effect people usually buy melatonin for is not the mechanism described here.

What the research supports

The better piece of evidence here is a 2023 double-blind Iranian trial that added 3 mg of sublingual melatonin at night to omeprazole in mild-to-moderate reflux. Seventy-two of the seventy-eight patients randomized completed four weeks, and the melatonin group finished with a lower symptom score than the placebo group, 10.0 against 15.0, with fewer people still reporting heartburn. It received no funding. The trial melatonin is often sold on is weaker than its reputation: a 2010 study is widely cited as showing 3 mg of melatonin matched a standard PPI dose, but it enrolled only 27 reflux patients across three arms of nine, used no blinding and no placebo, dosed omeprazole at 20 mg twice daily rather than once, reported no symptom scores at all, and its authors concluded that omeprazole alone worked better than melatonin alone. We do not treat melatonin as a PPI substitute on that basis. There is no large replication of either result, and this capsule has not itself been tested in a reflux trial.

What the label discloses

The label discloses a single active ingredient, melatonin at 3 mg, with other ingredients listed as calcium laurate, hypromellose capsule, microcrystalline cellulose, and silicon dioxide. The product is NSF Certified for Sport, an independent third-party testing certification confirming the absence of banned substances. It is gluten-free, soy-free, and dairy-free.

Who this tends to suit

This fits someone already taking a PPI who wants to try an add-on with a different mechanism, which is the scenario the stronger trial tested. It also suits people whose reflux is worse at night or tied to sleep disruption and who want a low-cost, single-ingredient, independently tested capsule.

Where it may not fit

Melatonin should be used with caution or avoided by anyone on anticoagulant blood-thinning therapy, since it may potentiate those medications’ effects. It should not be used during pregnancy or nursing. Anyone whose reflux is tied to meals rather than to the night is unlikely to get much from a bedtime-only product, and anyone hoping to come off a PPI should not read this as a substitute for one.

Side effects and what to be aware of

Others we researched for the same job

These sit in the same role as Thorne Melaton-3 — reflux support — so they are the sensible things to weigh it against.

See all the products we have researched →

Related reading

Background on how this type of product works, read from the trial evidence.