Mark Hyman, MD, Putting Magnesium Back in Your Life

How Do You Know if You’re Low?

Dr. Hyman states that most of us are defi­cient in mag­ne­sium, but how can we know if we have this defi­ciency? One might think it can be tested in the blood by a doctor—but unfor­tu­nately that’s not the case. “When we test for mag­ne­sium, the tests for most peo­ple come out ‘nor­mal,’ so we think it’s nor­mal,” Dr. Hyman says. “But that’s a very mis­lead­ing assumption—that test­ing for mag­ne­sium with con­ven­tional blood tests shows an accu­rate level. We use serum mag­ne­sium, which tells us only about what’s in the blood­stream, not about what’s inside the cells. Testing for red-blood-cell mag­ne­sium is a lit­tle more use­ful but it’s still dif­fi­cult to measure.”

So what is the best test? “The best diag­no­sis for a mag­ne­sium defi­ciency is sim­ply a good med­ical his­tory,” says Dr. Hyman. “So any­thing that twitches or cramps or spasms or is tight in any way is a sign of mag­ne­sium deficiency.”

Such signs include a long list of symp­toms: mus­cle cramps or twitches, insom­nia, irri­tabil­ity, sen­si­tiv­ity to loud noises, anx­i­ety, autism, ADHD, heart pal­pi­ta­tions, angina (a spasm of the arter­ies), con­sti­pa­tion, spasms in the mus­cles, headaches, migraines, fibromyal­gia, chronic fatigue, asthma and kid­ney stones (which are caused by a calcium-magnesium imbal­ance); even dia­betes and obe­sity are related to mag­ne­sium defi­ciency. Other symp­toms con­nected to mag­ne­sium defi­ciency include high blood pres­sure, men­strual cramps, irri­ta­ble blad­der, irri­ta­ble bowel, acid reflux and pre­men­strual syndrome.

Magnesium affects sev­eral cru­cial areas of health, and Dr. Hyman elab­o­rates more specif­i­cally on each:

Heart health: “Magnesium is very impor­tant for car­diac func­tion and is essen­tial in sta­bi­liz­ing car­diac mem­branes and pre­vent­ing arrhyth­mias. I also think that it helps with things like angina as well.”

Bone health: “I think cal­cium and mag­ne­sium are both nec­es­sary; your bones cer­tainly have a lot of mag­ne­sium and peo­ple tend to ignore that. I always rec­om­mend cal­cium and mag­ne­sium for osteoporosis.”

Nerves, anx­i­ety and stress: “Magnesium relaxes the ner­vous sys­tem in a num­ber of ways. Besides just relax­ing the mus­cles, it actu­ally is a nat­ural blocker of a recep­tor in the brain called MMDA. This recep­tor is stim­u­lated with cal­cium, actu­ally, and it’s some­thing that leads to over-excitation and stim­u­la­tion of the brain and irri­tabil­ity, depres­sion and many other things. Magnesium is a nat­ural MMDA recep­tor antag­o­nist, which helps to really calm the ner­vous sys­tem overall.”

Depression: “Depression and anx­i­ety are very related and I think mag­ne­sium helps reduce the same phe­nom­ena in the brain. I would always rec­om­mend that peo­ple use a nutri­tional approach to depres­sion before actu­ally using anti­de­pres­sants because mostly they don’t work well.”

ADHD: “ADHD is a hyper-irritability of the ner­vous sys­tem. Many of these chil­dren are very depleted in mag­ne­sium because their diets are poor—they eat high amounts of sugar. I think mag­ne­sium is a crit­i­cal defi­ciency in kids with both ADHD and autism and it has a very calm­ing, relax­ing effect on them.”

The basic rea­sons go all the way down to a cel­lu­lar level. “Magnesium is nec­es­sary for your cells to make energy, to sta­bi­lize cell mem­branes and to help your mus­cles relax,” Dr. Hyman says.

Magnesium and the Medical Community

When you go to your doc­tor with the types of symp­toms enu­mer­ated above, he or she is not likely to pre­scribe mag­ne­sium. But inter­est­ingly, mag­ne­sium has been uti­lized by the med­ical com­mu­nity for many years—almost always as a last resort.

Earlier in his life Dr. Hyman worked in an emer­gency room and wit­nessed this first­hand. “When I was in the emer­gency room, mag­ne­sium was used fairly rou­tinely in crit­i­cal care sit­u­a­tions intra­venously to pre­vent or to try to reverse car­diac arrest or if there was abnor­mal rhythm in the heart,” he says. “When all the drugs had failed we pulled out magnesium.

Magnesium was also used to treat preeclamp­sia (high blood pres­sure in preg­nancy) and pre­ma­ture labor. It was also admin­is­tered to alco­holics when they turned up in the emer­gency room, as they tend to be defi­cient in mag­ne­sium. “We use it all the time as well when peo­ple are con­sti­pated,” Dr. Hyman points out. “We give them milk of magnesia.”

Why Are We Deficient?

“The rea­son many peo­ple are so magnesium-deficient is very sim­ple,” says Dr. Hyman. “They do a lot of things to cause their bod­ies to lose mag­ne­sium and eat almost no foods that con­tain magnesium.”

Of course today’s com­mon diet is a major prob­lem, con­sist­ing of processed and refined foods. Average diets con­sist mostly of white flour, meat and dairy—none of which con­tain mag­ne­sium. “We don’t eat magnesium-rich foods,” Dr. Hyman con­tin­ues. “When was the last time the aver­age per­son had a high dose of sea veg­eta­bles like sea­weed, or dark green leafy veg­eta­bles, or beans or nuts? Mostly if you’re an American your nut con­sump­tion comes from chocolate-covered peanut but­ter cups or high-sugar-content trans-fat-laden peanut but­ter. This is obvi­ously not high-magnesium food.”

In addi­tion to the aver­age person’s lack of mag­ne­sium intake, many aspects of people’s lives actu­ally rob their sys­tems of the lit­tle mag­ne­sium they con­tain. Drinking cof­fee and alco­hol, eat­ing sugar and being under chronic stress all cause their bod­ies to become depleted.

Restoring Magnesium

How does Dr. Hyman rec­om­mend that mag­ne­sium intake be restored to a person’s diet? He con­sid­ers it a three-stage process. “First of all, I sug­gest that peo­ple iden­tify how to stop drain­ing their bod­ies of mag­ne­sium,” he says. “Two, eat foods that are high in mag­ne­sium, and three, take supplements.

In terms of cut­ting out ele­ments that drain the body of mag­ne­sium, Dr. Hyman rec­om­mends lim­it­ing cof­fee, colas, high salt, sugar and alco­hol. He points out that med­ica­tions, such as diuret­ics, water pills and antibi­otics, and many drugs actu­ally cause a per­son to lose mag­ne­sium as well; so if these med­ica­tions are nec­es­sary, a higher intake of mag­ne­sium could also be warranted.

There is a long list of magnesium-rich foods that can be added to a diet. These include kelp, wheat bran, wheat germ, almonds, cashews, buck­wheat, brazil nuts, fil­berts, mil­let, pecans, wal­nuts, rye, tofu, soy­beans, brown rice, figs, dates, col­lard greens, avo­ca­dos, pars­ley, beans, bar­ley, dan­de­lion greens and garlic.

Dr. Hyman also rec­om­mends mag­ne­sium sup­ple­ments, avoid­ing the most com­monly avail­able forms—magnesium car­bon­ate, mag­ne­sium sul­fate, mag­ne­sium glu­conate and mag­ne­sium oxide.

“I think it’s great to get people’s aware­ness up about mag­ne­sium, because it’s such a crit­i­cal fac­tor in terms of the gen­eral well-being peo­ple can achieve through its use. I find that in my prac­tice it’s prob­a­bly one of the most pow­er­ful, ben­e­fi­cial and ther­a­peu­tic tools that I have for a whole host of chronic illnesses.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Dr. Hyman, to access his video blog or to view his list of books, visit www.drhyman.com.

You can also order Dr. Hymann’s book, Ultraprevention, from our book­store.