Magnesium Deficiency – Diet and Lifestyle

How Diets and Lifestyle Can Create a Dangerous Magnesium Deficiency

Excerpted from Nancy Desjardins’ (www.HealthLady.com) Interview with Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD., ND.

Dr. Carolyn Dean:

…it’s about lifestyle and diet. I went to med school in the mid-70s, so I’ve been at this a while. I was reading before med school. I was very interested in reading all the health books there were before I even went to university. In Honors Biology, I was interested in ecology. It wasn’t until several of my classmates got accepted into med school—and they thought I was in pre-med—that I thought, “Of course! I can go to med school, be a doctor, and people will listen to me about nutrition.”

Up until that point, they just thought I was bugging them. In my 40 years of study, writing and doing medicine and naturopathic medicine, I haven’t found a magic bullet pill, either a supplement or a drug. I haven’t found the one surgical procedure, operation or affirmation you can do to live to be 120. It’s a combination of factors, so that’s what I’m presenting to people.

Some people are still after the magic pill, and that’s just fine, but what we do as practitioners is to help support people throughout the long haul, not just have one doctor to visit, who says, “Take this pill and you’ll be fine.” Things are much different now. People are realizing that there is no quick fix, and they have to take responsibility for their own health.

Nancy Desjardins: The magic bullet is non-existent at this point. Do you feel now, today, that people are more open to listen? People like yourself and many other practitioners out there are delivering the message in a totally different way. Going back to an article you posted on May 23rd on your blog, you said that for most medical doctors nutrition was a three-hour class. They had one afternoon during their seven years of medical training.

Who knows? Many of them played hooky that day, so they actually missed their three hour class. You said when your doctor starts giving you advice about magnesium,  calcium, vitamin-D or other nutritional supplements, you may want to seek out a second opinion. Let’s talk about that.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: I know some doctors are talking about vitamin-D now, and a lot of doctors prescribe calcium. That’s because the evidence is seemingly overwhelming. I find that the vitamin-D that’s being prescribed is synthetic. It’s a vitamin-D2, and you want to be taking the natural vitamin-D3. The advice to any woman past 40 is to take calcium, but they don’t also advise magnesium, which is absolutely necessary in the balance of how calcium is absorbed and how it’s utilized at the cell level.

You need magnesium. If you’re deficient in magnesium, too much calcium flies into the cell and puts the cells—the nerve cells, muscle cells, brain cells—into spasms that they sometimes don’t recover from.

If you’re deficient in magnesium, the door stays wide open and allows too much calcium to enter. Some of this I learned in biochemistry. In my school, we all took 200 hours of biochemistry, and we saw that every vitamin and mineral was used in biochemical reactions in the body. In other words, to proceed from one biochemical reaction in the body to the next, it required a co-factor of a vitamin or mineral. However, that was never translated by the clinicians to say, “If you have fatigue, maybe you should try magnesium and B-Complex before you get so tired that you need a sleeping pill,” or “If your body is irritable and on-edge, maybe you need some balanced calcium, magnesium, potassium and B vitamins, instead of an anti-anxiety drug or an antidepressant.”

It was very unfortunate that what doctors seemed to learn about vitamins was only the deficiency diseases, like scurvy is a deficiency of vitamin-C complex; not just ascorbic acid, but the whole C-complex is important. Beriberi is a deficiency disease from vitamin-B1, and it goes on. In medical school, because we didn’t learn about vitamins and minerals as promoters of health or good function in our bodies, doctors really feel they can ignore it.

This is because we were also told that you learn everything you need to know in medicine, and anything else is quackery, nonexistent or not useful. That’s why a patient can go into a doctor’s office and talk until they’re blue in the face about vitamins and how much they’re helping them, but most doctors who haven’t done personal reading on the subject will just say, “You’re wasting your money on vitamins.”

Nancy Desjardins: Your background is quite interesting. You were a medical doctor before you became a naturopathic doctor.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: I know! I kind of sandwiched it, Nancy. I had done all the health-book reading before medicine, and during medicine I still read Prevention magazine when I could get a minute. I tried not to get brainwashed by the fear that our lecturers put into us about the dangers of vitamins or the dangers of herbs. When I got out, I did my naturopathic training.

I found if I could approach someone with diet, exercise, lifestyle or getting them shifted in their mood or attitude, having them accept their life more than fighting it, then I would move into supplements.In the next couple of decades, we’re going to start finding the problems with all this calcium people are building up in their tissues. Most calcium supplements are only about 4% to 6% absorbed. Where does the rest of it go? I feel that it’s causing gallstones, kidney stones, heel spurs, as well as perpetuating fibromyalgia and calcium deposits in people’s muscles, causing them pain. I’m not as worried about magnesium.

If it builds up in the intestines, it causes a laxative effect. When you hear that 60% of the population is constipated, maybe you need that effect. Magnesium tends to flush out, and it doesn’t stay in the body.

You’ll probably ask me, “Do we really need supplements? Where is it in our food?” A few hundred years ago, we might have been getting 500 milligrams of magnesium in our diet. Unfortunately, now we might get 150 milligrams of magnesium in our diet. It’s being farmed out of the soil, and if it’s not replaced with real mineralization, real mineral fertilizers, it can’t come from thin air. Going back to our lifestyle, we’re so deficient in minerals. Look at our food. During the refining and processing of food, a significant amount of magnesium can be lost. You talk about supplements, but what would be a general or simple solution here?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: I do start with food, even though I know it’s probably depleted. Organic may be better because they probably grow crops and then plow them under to re-mineralize. Some farmers are using re-mineralization, pulverized rock, because in the soil you have to have the worms and different bacteria to work on the minerals to break them down to that angstrom size.

That’s the size the plants like, as well as the size we like. The foods that contain a lot of magnesium are things like seaweeds. Chocolate is some people’s favorite source, but I’m talking about the 100% raw cacao. The deep green leafy vegetables are good sources. Nuts and seeds have a lot of magnesium and other minerals, as well. I tell people you can get some collard greens and kale and blend them up with some sunflower seeds and sea salt.

You can either make it as a drink or as a pulpy pudding to eat. It’s really quite tasty. You can take frozen bananas, which are pretty high in magnesium, and coconut milk, which also has magnesium. Put in your raw cacao, and you have an incredible chocolate dessert. I think I figured out a serving would be about 300 milligrams of magnesium.

Nancy Desjardins: Really? You take a frozen banana, and you’re obviously referring to fresh coconut.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: No, I can get them here in Maui, but I made the recipe. It’s on my blog. Actually, that might be the nut pâté. However, it’s a very simple recipe with canned whole coconut milk. The recipe on my website is a nut pâté. This is wonderful. You can blend any sort of nosh, and add lemon juice, some sea salt and lots of garlic, and get a nut pâté that you can put in a collard or a kale wrap. I thin it out a bit with some more lemon juice and water, and use it as a mayonnaise.

Nancy Desjardins: Yes, that’s a good idea. Our mayonnaise today is not the most nutritious mayonnaise on the planet, so that would be a good substitute. I’ll make sure to link the dessert with the frozen banana, coconut milk and raw cacao, and also the nut pâté. I’m sure it’s really good. I’ll try it myself. Our soil is deplete, and magnesium is a very important mineral to add into our diet. We mentioned about food, but there are many types of magnesium supplements. Which one would be more absorbable for our bodies? Do you have a preference?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: One of the  best absorbed, is a magnesium citrate powder.  You mix it with warm water, which helps the absorption. For some people it can cause a laxative effect. The way you get around that, if you’re just using the citrate, is to break it up at several times a day. Take it with a meal, and try to make it so that you’re not taking a full dose on an empty stomach.

Nancy Desjardins: You mention in your book that stomach acid is essential for the magnesium absorption. What happens if someone is not producing enough stomach acid? This is a big challenge for a lot of people, because that would explain the heartburn and indigestion.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: A lot of people are low in stomach acid. You do need a certain acid pH to change what they call the valance of a mineral to change its confirmation to make it more absorbed. That’s something else I learned in chemistry. What I’ve been finding in my telephone consulting clients is that so many people with heartburn and indigestion are told they have too much acid. They’re given antacids which kill their stomach acid production.

That’s leading to a lot more problems where food is pushing through the stomach incompletely digested. It can’t be absorbed if it’s not broken down to the right size for the body to absorb. Actually, intestinal organisms—what we call the bad bacteria and yeast—will start feeding off this undigested food and causing gas, bloating, and even symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.

Our latest book, which I’ve written with my sister, is IBS Cookbook for Dummies. I’ve been doing a lot of work on diet and digestion. Heartburn and indigestion are rampant. People who are taking pills to kill their stomach acid are rampant. We’re creating new diseases. There’s a disease of insufficient stomach emptying, gastroparesis they call it. If you ask people, “Are you taking antacids?” I haven’t seen any studies, but I’m assuming a lot of people with this new condition are taking antacids.

Your stomach will stop processing, it will fill up with food and it will go paralyzed if you don’t have enough stomach acid. The way the stomach works is that food will stay in the stomach until it’s liquefied. Then it will squirt out into the small intestine. If you’re not breaking down your food, if you don’t have enough stomach acid, then the food’s just going to sit there. Then you’re told to take a drug to push the food out of your stomach.

Nancy Desjardins: Exactly, that’s right. This is precious. We need to be aware of that kind of information. Many people are talking about that, but it’s our responsibility to speak for that kind of information.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: To further that discussion a little, in Europe they have instruments that measure the pH of the stomach. You can swallow a little pH meter—a tiny, tiny pH meter—into your stomach. The majority of people who have indigestion, heartburn and stomach problems actually have an alkaline pH. They have little stomach acid. The treatment for them is to take hydrochloric acid supplements. There is one called that is called betaine hydrochloric acid. That would go against everything that all the commercials on TV are saying about people who have heartburn and stomach acid. We’ve got a very big educational problem on our hands with people who think their heartburn is too much acid. It’s actually not enough acid. What I do for that is very simple.

I get people to try one to three teaspoons of apple cider vinegar in about four ounces of water, and either drink that before a meal or sip it during your meal to see if that doesn’t settle down the stomach and help the digestion of food. Instead of these very strong, powerful antacids that have a lot of side-effects, I ask people to try deglycyrrhizinated licorice, the DGL licorice. That is very good for coating the lower esophagus and stomach, helping to heal it and breaking the cycle of heartburn.

Nancy Desjardins: That’s amazing. Going back to the betaine hydrochloric acid, would you say it’s different from a plant enzyme or any other digestive enzyme?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: It’s strictly a hydrochloric acid supplement to mimic the gastric acid that we produce in certain cells called parietal cells in the gastric mucosa.

Nancy Desjardins: Let’s talk about soy. This is a question that has been asked many times. What would you say to people who consume lots of soy products? Would you say that this can cause mineral deficiency?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Apparently, one aspect of unfermented soy is that it contains phytates, which bind minerals. In general, the whole soy story began when some of the big soy growers decided they’d try to get a health claim label on their soy, so they could promote it as a health product. They didn’t stop to realize that in Asian countries, soy is mostly used as a fermented product and in small amounts.

The soy that most people are eating now is a soy drink, milks, and all kinds of textured protein products made of soy that aren’t fermented. They still have their phytates, and they have thyroid-blocking aspects to them, as well. They also have huge amounts of phytoestrogens, which are causing feminization in animal studies. I’m not very good about promoting soy, other than fermented soy or soy sauce or tempai. These are two of the fermented sources.

Nancy Desjardins: As long as it’s coming from a fermented source, like you mentioned, it’s great. That wouldn’t be the solution, if it’s not fermented, for someone who’s going through menopause. People are promoting soya for the treatment of hot flashes. What would you say about that?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: If it’s fermented, yes. Some of the soy products, where they isolate the different phytoestrogens, that’s different. That’s not eating the soy that has the phytates. In order to remove the phytates and the thyroid blockers you have to soak it, process it, and that’s why the fermentation process can remove a lot of these negative chemicals.

Nancy Desjardins: You mention in your book that coffee acts as a diuretic, which can drain the body of magnesium. This is not very healthy. What would you say for coffee lovers? Do you have any substitutes? What can they do? A lot of my clients find it really hard to give up coffee.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: In my telephone consultation practice, I look at why people are using coffee. Is it for their energy? If that’s the case, we look at their adrenals and thyroid. If it’s for their bowels—sometimes people use it as a laxative—then I definitely look at their magnesium needs. In terms of weaning it, it is an addictive substance. It can cause heart palpations when you drink too much, and it can over-stimulate your adrenal glands. It is wise for most people to get off it.

People don’t like to get off it because they get the withdrawal headaches. I have people wean onto black tea first, and then decaf tea—not the chemical decaf, but the more natural decaffeination processes—and then go to the herbal teas. Usually that helps. There are homeopathic remedies like chamomile that you can use to help with the withdrawal headaches, as well. Finding the reason why people need their coffee is the most important thing.

Nancy Desjardins: There are so many substitutes out there, as well. What do we need to know about magnesium, anxiety and depression?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: If you watch the cell and how it functions, you see how magnesium opens up the channels, allows a little bit of calcium in, and then closes the channel really quickly. Then the cell does its work firing its neurons, and then the calcium is pushed out. They’ll see when we demonstrate that too much calcium in the cell makes the cell very irritable.

That’s how a lot of people with anxiety feel; they just feel irritated. Their skin is crawling, or their muscles are so tense that they’re hard. What happens with that whole picture is that if it’s primarily a magnesium deficiency that’s causing the anxiety, then you’ll be tense. Your muscles are tense. It’s very difficult for you to fall asleep because you’re too tense and your mind is always racing. With anxiety and depression, people are often blaming themselves, “I’m so anxious. I feel depressed. What’s wrong?” and they start looking for reasons to blame themselves. However, it could be just their body chemistry is out of balance. One of the first things I tell people to do is to start taking some magnesium in one of the forms we talked about.

The B-vitamins can also be very helpful. The reason why magnesium can become deficient in someone who’s anxious is because of the adrenal glands. If you’re always overworking them and pushing out a lot of adrenalin, that means you’re overusing magnesium. Magnesium is a building block for adrenalin. It’s also used in the production of serotonin, the feel-good chemical in the brain and in the gut. If you don’t have enough magnesium, you don’t have enough serotonin. Rather than going to the Prozac drugs, you could start with magnesium.

Nancy Desjardins: I’m sure you have a test that people can take, as you mentioned, if your life is very stressful, if you experience lack of sleep, if you drink coffee. For the majority of the population, what would be, in your opinion, the percentage of people who are deficient in magnesium? It would probably be over 75%?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, there are government and university statistics about the RDA for magnesium. I think in the book I mention something like 70% to 80% of men and women are not getting even the low RDA that they talk about. I think the RDA is like 350 to 400 milligrams. One hundred to 200 years ago we were getting 500 milligrams, that’s what we need—500 to 600 milligrams.

Why? With the extra stresses; with athletes and all their sweating, they lose magnesium; if someone takes any sort of diuretic and, as you  mentioned, a lot of people are drinking coffee; they’re on hypertension diuretics that pull out your magnesium. We’re just talking averages here, but so many people with their special circumstances have real magnesium deficiency.

Nancy Desjardins: This is a good point. You mentioned athletes. Obviously, if we do lots of exercise, then we do need extra magnesium due to the sweating.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, and the stress on the adrenal glands and the stress on the tissues. Absolutely. I got a report a while back from people over in Iraq. The military go out for the day with their 120-pound pack and all their gear, and they come back and they’ve sweated through all their clothes. They have to hang up their clothes to dry them of the sweat, and then beat the salt and minerals out of their clothes before they wash them. They’re absolutely depleted of their minerals. Unfortunately, the substitutes, the so-called electrolyte substitutes, are mostly salt and sugar.

Nancy Desjardins: I didn’t know that. This is great. We talk about chronic fatigue, so obviously fibromyalgia would be in the same category. Would you say that magnesium deficiency is common in most chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia suffers?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, very much so. I came across that early on in the whole chronic fatigue picture, because I was interested in magnesium. A long time ago I found that if people with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia could take magnesium and also treat their yeast, there was a high percentage of recovery. It was a combination of those two things.

Nancy Desjardins: Yeast infection and taking magnesium would take care of the chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, in a lot of people. I know in recent years there’s been so much heavy metal buildup in people, as well as viral and Lyme disease, low thyroid and the adrenals weakening. I’m having to address all these things in younger and younger people. Unfortunately, things aren’t really improving because our environment is so polluted, and we really don’t have the support from the general medical community or dental community about mercury amalgams to educate people about them and have them safely removed.

That’s one of the underlying things that builds up in a person’s body; the dental amalgams do gas off a certain tiny amount of mercury every time you chew. If a person’s immune system is already weakened, if their thyroid is low, or if they have yeast overgrowth, that’s another added insult.

Nancy Desjardins: Dr. Dean, you mentioned some specific foods that are rich in magnesium, which would be the green leafy vegetables, some nuts and seeds, and then the cacao, which would be the unprocessed chocolate. It’s not cooked; it would actually be raw. Can we eat too much cacao? Would eating cacao chocolate every single day be okay?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: According to the raw community, they say it’s okay. I eat my banana, coconut milk and cacao every two or three days and  thoroughly enjoy it. Chocolate has a bad reputation with some of us because of the company it keeps, which is a lot of sugar and milk, and that takes away the benefits. Aside from the calories in cacao, coconut milk and frozen bananas, it’s a pretty healthy treat.

Nancy Desjardins: I have to add this, especially for us women, because cacao is so high in magnesium. We talked about the fact that this is a mineral that is so deficient in our body. When I introduced raw cacao into my diet, it totally changed the concept. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my food, but I thought, “Thank goodness! I was not crazy for craving chocolate.” If we crave chocolate, we’re deficient in magnesium somehow. It’s okay to have chocolate as long as it’s coming from the natural source.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Exactly. So many of our products have become adulterated. When we hear that something is bad for us, we have to recognize that it may be bad in the refined form, or bad if you’re not a vegetarian and not a raw person and you eat beef. You have to make sure its grass-fed beef. If you are avoiding nuts and seeds because they’re too fat, then get organic raw and soak them for six to eight hours to help their digestibility; not so much their fat digestibility, but know that you’re getting natural fats that the body would rather have then a processed sunflower seed oil.

Nancy Desjardins: The options are available. We just need to know which option to go for. Let me ask something else here. What other nutrient, including calcium, needs magnesium to become potent? We talked a little bit about that, but let’s clarify.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: When I mentioned about the cell properties of magnesium, where it opens up the channels to minerals, then magnesium really is important for any mineral absorption at the cellular level. When you look at the interactions of a lot of the chemical processes in the body, it’ll require magnesium and maybe a B-vitamin. It’s so interactive—all of the minerals and all of the vitamins together—that I don’t think you can just highlight any one above the other.

In medicine they really haven’t even recognized that magnesium is necessary for the proper calcium balance. We should just know that in the human body, nature and God created a certain complexity and orchestration that we keep trying to mess around with. I don’t know how many times I’ve answered the question, “Are we allowed to take calcium with magnesium?

“I’ve heard that you should take them separately. The body doesn’t want them at the same time.” I say, “Why on earth does a collard green have magnesium and calcium together if God and nature didn’t plan it that way and didn’t think it was just fine?”

Nancy Desjardins: There’s no mistake in nature.

Dr. Carolyn Dean:  I think we should work on the level that all these good foods in as much of a raw state as possible
are beneficial to us.

Nancy Desjardins: How about birth control pills? Why can prescription medicines, such as birth control pills, deplete magnesium in our bodies?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: The way drugs are created, they’re created in a lab usually from coal tar products. They’re synthetic, and immediately that identifies them by the body—by the immune system and the liver—as being a foreign substance. The body has to break down that foreign substance for the best way to eliminate it either through the urine or through the kidneys.

Any drug that you take puts a strain on the liver. With the birth control pills you get an imbalance of zinc and copper, magnesium and the B-vitamins. It’s most likely because of the metabolic processes that have to occur in order to break down the birth control pill that causes the over-utilization of these supplements or these nutrients.

Nancy Desjardins: Someone who’s been on birth control for many years obviously would be depleted in magnesium.

Dr. Carolyn Dean: I don’t know that I could point to a study that says that, but in the book, The Magnesium Miracle, I talk about the hormones requiring magnesium for their processing. The same occurs when you take the birth control pill; magnesium is required to process them out of the body.

Nancy Desjardins: As far as testing magnesium levels, what would be the different methods?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: That’s probably one of the reasons why magnesium is so ignored by medicine. There’s no really accurate, cheaply available test. The blood test that’s done for magnesium on the serum, when they withdraw the blood from your arm, is only measuring 1% of the total body magnesium. If you’re taking blood out and looking for magnesium, it’s always going to try to be in a normal kind of perfect range to keep the heart happy and to keep the muscles from twitching too much.

That 1% is always going to try to stay in range. Somebody could have serious magnesium deficiency and be twitching and having chest pain; they could just have had a heart attack, and that serum level isn’t going to show you anything. The red blood cell level measures about 40% of the body’s magnesium, so that’s more accurate. The studies that I often quote in The Magnesium Miracle book are done with an ionic magnesium test.

That is highly accurate, but it’s not available to the public; it’s just a research tool. It is difficult, what you were alluding to earlier with the different symptoms: if you’re drinking coffee and alcohol, if you’re stressed, if your eye is twitching, if you get charley horses, if you get migraine headaches, if you have any sort of cramping. That will lead you to identify a possible magnesium deficiency. In the book I go over about 100 different factors that equate with low magnesium, so that could be helpful for people to look through those and see themselves in those factors.

Nancy Desjardins: Is there anything else we forgot to mention and that you would like to add to this interview, Dr. Dean?

Dr. Carolyn Dean: Perhaps just that we have focused on magnesium here. I do feel it’s the most important mineral, but it isn’t the only mineral or vitamin. I didn’t want to give people the impression that I thought everything had to do with magnesium. It just seems to be so helpful for people, especially if you’re trying to decide, “Should I take supplements? What should I do?”

If that’s the case, I tell people to start with magnesium. It’s very basic, it’s very simple, it works on 325 different enzyme systems in the body, and it’s not like one of what I call celebrity vitamins, like Resveratrol. If you eat your nuts, especially good organic peanuts, you get Resveratrol and you don’t have to spend all your money on very high-priced supplements. These are the types of things I like to pass on to people, simple ways they can introduce inexpensive supplements and foods to help their health.

Nancy Desjardins: Thank you again.