Magnesium is needed for every cell, it translates throughout the health of your total mind and body. It comes up within my Kinesiology client sessions regularly, related to the effects of stress, adrenal function and nutrition assimilation. I believe everyone needs to know more about it and it’s benefits.
Below is an interview between Mercola and Dr Carolyn Dean MD ND and author of the Magnesium Miracle, about the varied effects of magnesium deficiency. I believe her interview is essential information that everyone should know about, and rather than summarise I would like to credit every word below to Mercola’s interview with Dr Carolyn Dean MD ND, (I have added headings to enable easier reading):
Magnesium is the most important mineral for the body
Dr Carolyn Dean MD ND:
It may not be the mineral that there’s the most of but it is the most important. It’s a mineral that activates the muscles and the nerves. It’s a mineral that attaches to adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to create the energy in the body. Without magnesium, you don’t have energy. It helps to digest proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. It actually is a building block for RNA and DNA. It’s a precursor for neurotransmitters like serotonin. It does so much in the body.
What I found out in the past five years about magnesium is that hardly anybody is really getting enough. What happens is we tend to get the laxative effect with magnesium before we get the therapeutic effect. Let me explain: when you take magnesium, say, a full-day’s dose, you can actually get the laxative effect if you take it all at once. That’s a fail-safe for magnesium. That’s a good thing.
Our Evolution by the Sea
The fail-safe is kind of evolutionary. Humans grew up around the oceans. In the ocean, there’s three times the amount of magnesium as there is calcium, its kind of sister mineral. When you’re eating seaweed, lots of fish, and whatever else is coming from the sea, you’re getting lots of magnesium. If you get too much, the fail-safe is you’ll get the laxative effect or diarrhea if there’s too much magnesium onboard.
But calcium, where are you getting your calcium? There’s no dairy cow. There’s no yogurt. There are no cheeses. You have to get your calcium from bones of fish. Calcium was required obviously for the bones. But because there was little in the food people were eating, there was this grabbing effect of vitamin D holding on to calcium in the body.
Now, moving to thousands and centuries later, we’ve had a turning of the tables, where we’re getting lots of calcium, too much calcium. People are being told to take lots of calcium supplements, and they’re not told anything about magnesium.
Magnesium for Heart Function
What’s been happening is, as I mentioned earlier, the muscle and nerve function that magnesium is responsible for is diminished. If you don’t have enough magnesium, your muscles go in to spasm. Calcium causes muscle to contract. If you had a balance, the muscles would do their thing. They’d relax, contract, and create their activity. With too much calcium, you get intense spasming and contraction of muscles, which can lead to a heart attack. Thus, we say magnesium is very important for the heart. The highest amount of magnesium in the whole body is in the heart, specifically in the left ventricle. People who have heart attacks and who die of a sudden heart attack after an athletic event, they can be expressing a severe magnesium deficiency. The calcium that remains causes the muscles to go into sustained contraction, and thus a heart attack. The heart pump just stops functioning.
Osteoporosis
We have this incredible importance of the balancing of calcium and magnesium. What’s happened over the past 30 years is we’ve been told to take 1,200 or 1,500 milligrams of calcium, mostly women, to avoid osteoporosis. Well, what’s happened in the past three decades is we’ve got more and more osteoporosis. I’ve heard statistics like a 700 percent rise in osteoporosis in a 10- year period even while taking all this calcium. What we seem to think, the myth that’s been created about calcium, is that we need twice as much calcium as we do magnesium.
Magnesium is farmed out of the soil
The way most magnesium experts think now is we probably need a 1:1 ratio. However, that doesn’t have to be entirely supplementation. Because if you look at today’s diet, you can be getting enough calcium, you can be getting your 700 milligrams, from dairy sources, nuts and seeds and deep green leafy vegetables.
Whereas with magnesium, magnesium is farmed out of the soil much more than calcium. A hundred years ago, we would get maybe 500 milligrams in an ordinary diet, 500 milligrams of magnesium. Now we’re lucky to get 200 milligrams. People do need to supplement with magnesium.
Some people feel that “Well, I eat organic. I should be getting enough magnesium.” However, if your organic farmer does not use rock salt, rock powder, or rock dust (I think it’s called rock dust), if they don’t use magnesium fertilizer, the soil is not going to have magnesium in it for the plants to take up and create the magnesium you need in your diet. This is the state we’re at right now– a person should try to get their calcium from the diet and take magnesium supplements.
You might assume a blood test would show a magnesium deficiency
The serum magnesium test, it’s not accurate enough. Only one percent of the total body magnesium is found in the bloodstream. If you put your dip stick into the bloodstream, you’re only measuring that one percent, which is guarded very carefully by feedback mechanisms in the body, because it’s the magnesium that’s used for the heart. If the blood magnesium goes low, if that one percent goes low, then the body immediately pulls magnesium out of the bones and muscles to keep the blood magnesium looking normal. Every time a doctor in a hospital setting does a serum magnesium test, they probably find a normal range because the body makes it so. But what is happening is the body is constantly losing storage form of magnesium. You don’t have anything to fall back on.
Stress, Prescription Drugs & reduced Magnesium Levels
One of the reasons why magnesium is becoming so important is we keep on draining our magnesium. One of the huge ways is our prescription drugs. The scenario that I like to talk about is very basic. You will recognize it immediately in either yourself or your family members. You go to your doctor. You’re under massive stress. Massive stress means you’re losing magnesium. You’re burning magnesium out of your body, because it helps support your adrenal glands. It helps keep you away from anxiety and depression. It helps relax your muscles. If you’re all tight and stressed, your magnesium is being lost.
What happens to the muscles of your blood vessels is they go tight. That tightness is going to cause increased blood pressure. Your doctor does your blood pressure or the nurse will do your blood pressure. It’s elevated because you’re under stress. The doctor is under stress, too. The doctor doesn’t have time to even ask you if you’re under stress but will say, “Oh, your blood pressure is elevated. We’ll give you a diuretic.” A diuretic is to drop the fluid level in your body to take the pressure off your blood vessels, so your blood pressure will drop. But what else a diuretic does is drain off your magnesium.
They know it’ll drain off your potassium, so your doctor may say, “Eat a banana or an orange every day when you’re on this.” But they don’t say anything about your magnesium and they don’t do your magnesium blood test. You go away. A month later you come back, and the doctor finds your blood pressure’s even more elevated. Yes, because you’ve just lost more magnesium.
Your doctor will put you on a calcium channel blocker. Now, they have that part right. They know that without magnesium, your calcium is going to become elevated and will tighten up your blood vessels, so they try to block calcium. But they don’t know that magnesium is a natural calcium channel blocker. They’ll also put you on an angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitor, another blood pressure drug. I’ve come to find out some research study just showed that people on ACE inhibitors have a higher risk of cancer. So, you go away with three drugs now. After two or three months, you come back and have blood taken to make sure that drugs aren’t hurting your liver or whatever. All of a sudden, your cholesterol is elevated. All of a sudden, your blood sugar is elevated. What does the doctor say? “Oh, we caught your cholesterol. We just caught your blood sugar. We can put you on medications.” They didn’t catch them; they caused them. Because the more you reduce your magnesium, the more your cholesterol will get out of control, because magnesium is important to balance out the enzyme that creates cholesterol in the body and helps to balance your cholesterol.
If you look up the signs and symptoms of diabetes in any allopathic medical book, you’ll find that one of the signs of diabetes is low magnesium. Here you are, after four months of magnesium deficiency-induced high blood pressure, still with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Now you’re on five or six medications, and all those medications will lower your magnesium levels.
Cholesterol
We’ve got an increasingly difficult problem in allopathic prescriptive medicine. When I went to medical school in the mid ‘70s, the average cholesterol was 250. Now doctors are trying to get you to hammer it down below 200. This is a ploy to get people on statin drugs. I believe it, because we need our cholesterol. Our body makes 80 percent of the cholesterol we use. Cholesterol is an antioxidant. If you’re toxic, your cholesterol will be elevated. Cholesterol is a precursor to all the hormones in your body. If you’re a man and you’re on a statin drug that kills your cholesterol, you’re going to need Viagra because your hormones are so beaten down.
Magnesium & Drug Interactions
What’s interesting is a doctor friend, Mildred Seelig, who was a magnesium expert, said her job straight out of medical school when she was hired by a pharmaceutical company was to measure the levels of vitamins and minerals in subjects when they took medication. What she found was that every drug that was prescribed would lower the levels of some nutrients but elevate magnesium. So, magnesium would come to the rescue. When you took a drug that the liver had to detoxify and that stimulated the body in certain ways, magnesium was shot out of the storage sites, as I said, to come to the rescue.
What was fascinating and what Dr. Seelig speculated at the time was that magnesium may be what’s causing the drugs to look good. The benefits of the drugs for the first six to eight weeks could be from magnesium elevation. She told her bosses; they weren’t really interested. She left the field to research magnesium for the rest of her life. What she said was maybe after those six to eight weeks, the magnesium stores are so low that the drug side effects start coming out. We know that most drug trials are six to eight weeks before the side effects really implode on a person. I mean, I thought that was incredible information, and it stayed with me. I’m always looking at drugs, their side effects, and their interaction with magnesium.
One of the most recent is in the past number of years the drug companies have been putting fluoride into drug formulas. Maybe up to 50 percent of drugs now have fluoride attached to the formula. What happens with fluoride when it’s around magnesium? They bind. There’s a molecule formed called magnesium fluoride, and that effectively eliminates magnesium from the body. You’ve got people taking cholesterol drugs, anti- anxiety drugs, and painkillers for arthritis. A dozen different types of drugs have fluoride molecules. When you take them, they bind your magnesium, making you deficient, and causing side effects that most doctors, they’ll just say, “Well, maybe you need more drugs.”
Inflammation
One amazing thing that happens with all this drug intake is a lot of inflammation. Inflammation is a big byword now. A lot of drug companies are looking more at inflammation as being the cause of heart disease. What we know about inflammation is that calcium is a huge precursor of inflammatory effects in the body, and magnesium is the best anti-inflammatory.
What happened with calcium supplementation in these past few decades–I alluded to it earlier, but coming back to it now– when women have been told to take 1,500 and even 2,000 milligrams of calcium a day, they are actually creating inflammation in the body. That has caused an increase in heart disease. In my most recent negative report about magnesium, one doctor actually said to a patient who had just had a heart attack, “Well, you have to take these five drugs.” They’re like the drugs I mentioned earlier: three for high blood pressure, one for cholesterol, and one for blood sugar. Even if you don’t have high blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar, you will be put on these drugs. They’re in a blister pack. The patient said, “Well, can I keep taking my magnesium?” The doctor said, “No, that’ll interfere with the drugs.”
We’ve got an uphill battle now, where doctors know less and less about less and less. What they’ll say about the drugs is yes, they’ll interfere. Yes, they’ll interfere with the blood pressure drug because they’ll help your blood pressure go down. So, you don’t need the drug. They’ll interfere with the cholesterol drug because they’ll lower your cholesterol–and with your blood sugar drugs.
Dr Carolyn Dean’s Message
So, keep taking magnesium. Take it in the various sources: the picometer-sized magnesium, Epsom salts and the magnesium citrates. Take an oxide if you’re constipated. Sixty percent of the population is constipated anyway. You may need the magnesium oxide, but take the other ones as well. My message is take magnesium. It is your new best friend.
Within Kinesiology, we look at the balance of minerals, and correct stress stored in the energy system which enables the body to restore its natural functioning. http://www.mindskinbody.com.au Northcote & Elwood 0468 968 195
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