Why does iodine reduce the urge for night-time urination?

Night 1: 1 t honey, slept deeply 4 hours, lightly for another 3 hours Night 2: 1 t honey, no change in sleep habits (both my wife and I were cold that night so perhaps we kept waking each other up) Night 3: 1.5 t honey, slept deeply for 5 hours, woke up strongly, stayed awake for half an hour, then slept another 2 hours

I found a quote attributed to Ray Peat here, that reads, “During the night all of the hormones of stress and inflammation rise, and the ice cream decreases them enough for you to stay asleep, but they still rise”

Lower will power in the evening might be a result of decision fatigue or ego depletion, which seem to have a direct correlation with blood glucose levels

I think I still have a little local raw honey left in my cupboard

That’s a good point. These willpower/ego-depletion/blood glucose studies support my views in several ways: that glucose is crucial for brain function, that low glucose leads to bad function, and that glucose levels depend greatly on both food and amount of mental activity. The alternative is that blood glucose regulation is so powerful and precise that blood glucose is not something we need to worry about. Like body temperature.

All I know is that at some point I added iodine based upon supplement recommendations by the Jaminets, then after noticing the good effects, it didn’t take long to narrow the cause to the iodine

In my case, I rarely eat manufactured food or at restaurants. This means I am also not ingesting the salt added during manufacturing. Most salt has iodine added to it (see Iodised Salt entry at Wikipedia). But I don’t like the taste of iodized salt, therefore, once I stopped eating potato chips and tortilla chips, I probably slowly got deficient in iodine. My hunch is that after a while my body was doing whatever it could to recycle the little iodine it had and not lose it via urination, and whatever process it used to recycle the iodine made the body want to urgently remove the waste. But that’s a layman’s viewpoint, probably wrong . It’s the only supplement I’ve taken where I have noticed a result.

i read another reason for the need to get up & pee during the night, could be due to a deficiency of sodium in your diet.

In the books “The Iodine Crisis” by Lynne Farrow and/or “Iodine: why you need it, why you can’t live without it” by David Brownstein it was mentioned that iodine supplementation can reduce the need to get up and pee during the night. I don’t recall if it was said why it works. If you buy Brownstein’s book do so from his website to make sure you get the current edition.

Hmm interesting. Who would have thought that honey before sleep would help! If only it didn’t need to be done on an empty stomach I’d give it a try. (I find eating before bed has me sleeping a lot better for some reason.)

Seth: I’m sure the “on an empty stomach” part is not exactly right – that some foods in some amounts are okay. I am tempted to try thin crackers – eating the honey on thin crackers.

The idea of dessert at the end comes from the French. Europeans had sugary meals, and drinks (everything served at once) like other cultures do but when kings got fat, lost their teeth etc. their doctors decided to BAN those who produce the desserts into a separate, smaller kitchen and only allow a little bit of sweet food at the very end of the meal.