 Unfortunately, there is no guarantee of the strength or purity of over-the-counter melatonin supplements, which have been found to contain impurities that raise serious safety question. For these reasons, melatonin supplements cannot be recommended. Too bad there's no way you could get the benefits without the risks, unless melatonin was somehow found naturally in certain foods you could eat. Melatonin was first discovered in plants in 1995 and has since been found throughout the plant kingdom. But enough that eating them actually affects your levels? Yes, you randomize people to eat more or less vegetables and you can see the effect. I had to get people to eat vegetables, though. How about beer? The melatonin present in beer contributes to increases in the level of melatonin in the human bloodstream, though alcohol consumption may actually mess with your own endogenous melatonin secretion, so beer probably isn't the best choice. Eat two bananas or drink the juice of about 2 pounds of oranges or pineapple and you can get significant bumps in melatonin concentrations in your blood. And the melatonin levels found in those fruits are actually pretty modest compared to some other foods. Here's the breakdown. The single food within each category, with the highest recorded melatonin level and how much you'd have to eat at one time to reach a physiological dose in your bloodstream. We make melatonin, so it should come to no surprise that other animals do too. The most melatonin-rich meat tested was salmon, but because there's only billions of a gram per serving, you'd have to sit down and eat about 200 pounds to get the effect. OK, so forget meat. What about whole grains? The highest recorded was a strain of corn, so rich in melatonin you'd only have to eat 16 years of corn. Alright, scratch that. What about other vegetables? Plain white button mushrooms top the list, only 2 pounds. A hundred times more melatonin than meat, but still, they're so light. I mean, 2 pounds is like eating 10 cups of mushrooms. That's a lot in one sitting. Thankfully, cranberries to the rescue, the most melatonin-rich fruit, just a single ounce. And it's like you just took a melatonin supplement. With only good side effects, other than, of course, the extreme sourness. That's about a third of a cup of cranberries. They're pretty sturdy, so you could travel with them without them getting smushed. But what do you do with them once you get there? Easy to blend into a smoothie, but what if you're stuck in a hotel? Can you eat dried cranberries, like what do they call, craisins? A study of various tart cherry products suggests that the drying process wipes out the melatonin, so no melatonin in dried cherries and presumably dried cranberries either, nor in juice. The level of melatonin in cherry juice concentrate was almost non-detectable, so drinking cranberry juice would also presumably be a wash, which brings us to nuts. Pistachios are not just the most melatonin-rich nut. They're simply off the charts, as the most melatonin-rich food ever recorded. To get a physiological dose of melatonin, all you have to do is eat two. What? Two what? No, just two pistachios. Check it out. Here's the data. More than 200 micrograms of melatonin per gram, 0.2 milligrams per gram. And you can get the normal daily spike your brain gives you, taking just 0.3 micrograms, so just two nuts. So taking a whole handful of pistachio nuts is like taking one of those high-dose melatonin supplements. So the best food for jet lag appears to be appropriately timed pistachios.