Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, The Magnesium Miracle

OC: What would you con­sider are the most impor­tant magnesium-related health issues that peo­ple should be edu­cated about today?

CD: I guess one would have to be heart dis­ease. People don’t seem to have any idea that the heart is one big mus­cle and that mag­ne­sium is the most impor­tant min­eral for cre­at­ing mus­cle relax­ation. When you have mag­ne­sium in bal­ance with cal­cium, you have prop­erly func­tion­ing mus­cles: the heart, the mus­cles in the blood ves­sels, and the mus­cles in the skele­tal struc­ture. So with the defi­ciency in mag­ne­sium that up to 80 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is suf­fer­ing, you do have an excess of cal­cium, you have mus­cle con­trac­tion symp­toms and peo­ple are suf­fer­ing with heart symp­toms: pal­pi­ta­tions, angina and up to and includ­ing heart attack just from sim­ple mag­ne­sium deficiency.

Another issue, and one which I expanded on in my book, is the fact that mag­ne­sium defi­ciency is one of the indi­ca­tors of dia­betes. Magnesium seems to func­tion in about half-a-dozen meta­bolic diabetes-related func­tions in the body. These include keep­ing blood sugar in bal­ance, help­ing pro­mote the pro­duc­tion of insulin, help­ing open up the cells to insulin, and allow­ing glu­cose into the cells. It’s very impor­tant for blood sugar bal­ance. I have found peo­ple who sim­ply add mag­ne­sium to their sup­ple­ments and find that their blood sugar can nor­mal­ize. Diabetes is very diet depen­dent, so I find it very sur­pris­ing that a lot of doc­tors con­sider that when some­body starts exhibit­ing symp­toms of dia­betes, then the patient should just take dia­betic med­ica­tion or insulin. No one really has come out and told peo­ple that mag­ne­sium defi­ciency can be a cause. We know chromium and vana­dium are impor­tant in blood sugar con­trol, but it’s very new research that is show­ing the impor­tance of magnesium.

OC: What type of diabetes?

Type 2 adult onset dia­betes. What seems to be hap­pen­ing is peo­ple who are over­weight or obese for 10 to 15 years and peo­ple who are eat­ing a high-sugar diet for 10 to 15 years have a very high inci­dence of devel­op­ing diabetes.

OC: What kinds of expe­ri­ences have you had in your own prac­tice in rela­tion to magnesium?

CD: I do a tele­phone con­sult­ing prac­tice and I put pretty much all my patients on mag­ne­sium. I get a lot of reports from peo­ple that they start sleep­ing bet­ter right away, they feel calmer, they feel less irri­ta­ble, they feel more in con­trol; so it begins to affect the day-to-day feel­ing of well-being. It stops mus­cle cramp­ing: peo­ple who get charley horses when they stretch their legs at night—those symp­toms go away. Again, it really helps with heart symp­toms; peo­ple have con­trol over their heart pal­pi­ta­tions and angina. Women with PMS find that mag­ne­sium really helps con­trol their pre­men­strual symptoms—they don’t have as much fluid reten­tion. I have peo­ple who tell me that tak­ing mag­ne­sium makes them com­pletely stop hav­ing kid­ney stones because the mag­ne­sium helps dis­solve the cal­cium that is mostly respon­si­ble for the buildup of kid­ney stones. There are many, many more.

OC: I’m going to men­tion some spe­cific areas. Can you address mag­ne­sium as it relates to each one? First, bone health.

CD: Without mag­ne­sium, the bone isn’t formed prop­erly in a sound struc­tural state that can with­stand falls and bumps. The bone is brit­tle and suf­fers more fractures.

OC: Stress.
CD: Stress is inter­est­ing. People with mag­ne­sium defi­ciency do tend to have more anx­i­ety, more irri­tabil­ity. If your mus­cles are on the edge of being in spasm, then you’re hold­ing your body tense. It’s almost like the mag­ne­sium defi­ciency starts first, your mus­cles are tense, then you think you’re tense. When you feel tense, you start excret­ing more adren­a­lin and the adren­a­lin starts speed­ing up the heart.

Magnesium is actu­ally required to man­u­fac­ture adren­a­lin. With the overuse of adren­a­lin due to ten­sion, a vicious cycle occurs where low mag­ne­sium starts cre­at­ing the surges of adren­a­lin that can come if you have a minor stress or a minor scare. You secrete the adren­a­lin, your heart races and then you feel you’re hav­ing an anx­i­ety attack. Unfortunately when peo­ple are in the mid­dle of that, they can go to their doc­tor and say, “I’m hav­ing an anx­i­ety attack,” and instead of being diag­nosed with a mag­ne­sium defi­ciency, the doc­tor pre­scribes val­ium or, worse, an anti-anxiety med­ica­tion. So it’s really impor­tant to look at low blood sugar and low mag­ne­sium as a cause of anx­i­ety symptoms.

OC: Women’s health.

CD: One of the main med­ical treat­ments using mag­ne­sium is for eclamp­sia and preeclamp­sia. Eclampsia is a con­di­tion in preg­nant women when they’re about to deliver, bring­ing high blood pres­sure, fluid reten­tion and even seizures. And it’s mostly due to mag­ne­sium defi­ciency. The treat­ment is with intra­venous mag­ne­sium and the fluid drains off, the seizures stop and the blood pres­sure comes down. So the ques­tion has always been, for peo­ple who look at nutri­tion, why aren’t preg­nant women told to take increased lev­els of mag­ne­sium dur­ing their preg­nancy to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing? Because, unfor­tu­nately, women who have eclamp­sia have a higher inci­dence of chil­dren with cere­bral palsy and chil­dren who have sud­den infant death syn­drome. In pop­u­la­tions where moms take enough mag­ne­sium, there’s much less cere­bral palsy and sud­den infant death. So it’s extremely important.

OC: Children’s health.

CD: Kids drink­ing a lot of soda, or even drink­ing fruit juices, are get­ting high amounts of sugar but not mag­ne­sium. If you think of kids who do ath­let­ics, they’re sweat­ing a lot. We know you lose sodium from the skin—if you lick your sweat, it tastes salty—so a lot of the sports drinks tend to replace sodium and sugar. But you lose equal amounts of mag­ne­sium and sodium and you also lose potas­sium. So it’s really unfor­tu­nate that kids—and adults—in ath­let­ics, when using the sports drinks, are not replac­ing magnesium.

Kids with­out mag­ne­sium also suf­fer irri­tabil­ity, insom­nia and con­sti­pa­tion. So when I have a par­ent telling me about their child who can’t sleep at night, has trou­ble with con­sti­pa­tion, and gets really moody or edgy or angry or irri­ta­ble, I just put them on mag­ne­sium imme­di­ately. Those symp­toms, usu­ally diag­nosed as ADHD, clear up very quickly. You can’t con­cen­trate in school when you’ve got a mag­ne­sium defi­ciency. Your brain is irri­tated. So with mag­ne­sium, every­thing calms down.

I also treat a lot of autis­tic chil­dren, and they too have con­sti­pa­tion. The added ben­e­fit with mag­ne­sium in the autis­tic pop­u­la­tion is that it actu­ally helps detox­ify heavy met­als, which a lot of these kids are suf­fer­ing with—mercury toxicity.

OC: What would be your form of choice for the tak­ing of magnesium?

CD:  The pow­dered form is prob­a­bly the best because you start absorb­ing it straight away, even in the mouth. So, pow­dered first, and then cap­sules, and then tablets. The tablets usu­ally have a lot of binders and fillers and are harder to dis­solve than capsules.