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. Actually, Nancy, we can tell our listeners to go to a website: www.NutritionalMagnesium.org. There is a wonderful two-minute video that shows how magnesium is responsible for opening and closing the little doors that allow calcium and magnesium inside the cell.

http://nutritionalmagnesium.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=290%3Aa-look-inside-the-cell-by-andrea-rosanoff&catid=91%3A

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.