The Dr. Hyman Show - How Common Mineral Deficiencies Impact Our Health with Dr. James DiNicolantonio

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Even if you go and eat, quote unquote, real food, if it's not from a regenerative farm, there are four main minerals that are now depleted in both animal foods and plant foods across the board, and that's magnesium, calcium, copper, and iron. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Whole body wellness is obviously a huge part of my life, and I'm always looking for new ways to make feeling great easier. One of my non-negotiables is getting a daily dose of healthy light. For years now, I've been using Juve light therapy devices to easily do that all year long,

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Starting point is 00:02:09 and some exclusions do apply. Now, supplements are one of those things that I'm always being asked about. Is it worth spending money on them? Do we need them if we really eat well? Can your body even absorb them? The answer to most of these questions is, it depends. There are definitely certain supplements I'd never recommend taking because they aren't made in a way that your body can take advantage of and you just pee them out.

Starting point is 00:02:31 And there are definitely some supplements we can benefit from because our food supply, even if we're eating whole organic foods, because that doesn't just provide enough of the nutrients that we need for optimal health. A major one of those nutrients that I suggest people supplement is magnesium. Most soils have become depleted magnesium or there's not organic matter enough to draw the magnesium out of the mineral rich soil into the plants. So it's a tough mineral to get enough of through the diet. 80% of Americans are actually deficient or insufficient in it. As it's as crucial for hundreds of reactions and enzymes in the body and impacts everything from metabolism to sleep to neurological health, energy, pain, muscle function, and more, it's really important we strive to get enough of it.

Starting point is 00:03:10 Magnesium also plays a role in our stress response, and everyone I know could use a hand in better managing stress to promote better overall health. I like to call magnesium the relaxation mineral. My favorite new magnesium is from a company called BioOptimizers. Their magnesium breakthrough formula contains seven different forms, which all have different functions in the body. There's really nothing like it on the market. I really noticed the difference when I started taking it. I've tried a lot of different magnesium products out there. I also love all their products and how they're gluten-free, soy-free, lactose-free, non-GMO-free, a chemical fillers, and made with

Starting point is 00:03:41 all whole real natural ingredients. Plus, they give back to their community. For every 10 bottles sold, they donate one to someone in need. Now, that's pretty awesome. Right now, BioOptimizers is offering my listeners 10% off your order. Just go to magbreakthrough.com forward slash Hyman. That's M-A-G breakthrough, B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H.com slash Hyman and use the code HYMAN10 to receive this amazing offer. I think you'll love it as much as I do. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you ever thought about the fact that you might be deficient in certain nutrients. Well, this is a podcast you

Starting point is 00:04:25 want to listen to because we're going to talk about minerals today. And we're going to talk about it with James Nicolantonio, who's an incredible researcher, scientist, who's just prolific and is constantly helping me understand the world of nutrition, minerals, and all kinds of stuff related to nutrition and health. So welcome, James. Thanks, Mark. Great to be back. Yeah. James is a doctor of pharmacy. He's a cardiovascular research scientist. He's known internationally for his work on health and nutrition and has actually testified in front of the Canadian Senate on the harm of added sugar. No surprise that's harmful. He's an associate editor of the British medical journals, Open Heart and on the advisory board of many other medical journals. He's

Starting point is 00:05:05 authored over 250 publications in scientific literature and the author of five bestselling books includes a salt fix, which challenges our ideas about salt, a super fuel, which I think he wrote with Joe Mercola about fat and the diet and longevity solution, the immunity fix and the mineral fix, which is what we're going to talk about today, which is minerals. So thanks, James, for being on the doctor's pharmacy. Thanks for having me, Mark. It's great to be with you. Okay. So we know when we think about food, we think about protein, fat, carbs, maybe fiber. We talk about vitamins and minerals, but most of us don't recognize how deficient we

Starting point is 00:05:43 are. And you wrote that it's estimated that one in three Americans are deficient in at least 10 minerals. I mean, insufficient deficient. How does this happen? Why are we so deficient? And tell us more about this rampant pandemic we're having, it seems, of nutritional deficiencies, even in a world of abundant calories and food. Well, that's a great way to put it, it really is a pandemic. And it really almost started in 1940. And there's three primary reasons why most of us are actually deficient in about 10 minerals. And the number one reason is the foods that we eat are now just simply more nutrient depleted compared to 50 to

Starting point is 00:06:26 80 years ago, because how we grow our food. The second reason is 60% of our calories come from processed foods, which flour, sugar, seed oils, which essentially that eliminates 80 to 100% of the minerals in those products. And then the third factor is that at least for the majority of adults in the United States, most of them have at least one chronic health condition, which either that condition depletes us of minerals or the medications used to treat those disease states deplete us of minerals. And so we can sort of take a deep dive into each one of those to sort of explain to people what's happening. Yeah. And then, and then what else we'll get into not only, you know, why we're so deficient, but what does that mean for biology and how does that show up clinically or symptom wise? Cause it's, it's not just an idea that, oh, I'm deficient in certain minerals.

Starting point is 00:07:13 These minerals are key for our biological functioning when they're not inadequate amounts in our body, we get problems, we get symptoms and conditions, diseases. And so it's, it's important to sort of think about, you know, why we're so deficient, but also how do we diagnose it and what do we do about it? Because it can make a huge difference in people's health. I've seen using minerals in my practice over the last 30 years in functional medicine be one of the most powerful things to help improve people's overall wellbeing and health. So let's drop down and just go through each one of those four points. I think it's important. So why is the food less or the plant simply does not have the time to actually take up all the nutrients. So it's literally more diluted in nutrition. Whereas if we were to, you know, an animal that had lived for years, it would have had much longer to actually extract nutrients from the diet. So that's number one.

Starting point is 00:08:28 The other is the phosphorus fertilizers that are being used that inhibits the uptake of numerous minerals. So clinical studies have shown if you take, let's say, for example, raspberries and you use those phosphorus fertilizers, that decreases the calcium and magnesium by 30%, the boron by 30%, and same thing with zinc. So it's, it's kind of shifting away from regenerative farming and more to these monocropping increasing yield. And it's leading to these nutritional dilutions compared to just 60 years ago. Yeah. And, you know, also, uh also aside from the fact that we breed for yield and not flavor or nutritional density, which is one problem. And aside from the fact that because of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,

Starting point is 00:09:14 the plants are eating that and they grow more carbohydrates become more starchy and less nutritious and less protein and minerals. And then the soil has been damaged so much by all these compounds. You're talking about even things like glyphosate that kills the microbiome of the soil. And there's a symbiotic relation between the soil microbes and the plant because the microbes and the organic matter in the soil are required to extract the nutrients from the soil to put in the plant. So even if the soil is full of nutrients, if there's, if the soil is dead and it's no organic matter no microbes the plant can't get access to those nutrients exactly so that's that's 100 correct so for example there are some studies

Starting point is 00:09:51 suggesting that glyphosate will inhibit the uptake of minerals into the plants the acidity of the soil also reduces the uptake of those minerals so you may not necessarily see a reduction in the mineral content of the actual soil, although we know the top soil is obviously much more nutrient depleted. But even in those instances, if the if the soil is more acidic, or you have glyphosate, and the plant, there's a reduction in its uptake of nutrients. Yeah. And then the second point you made was, you know, we're eating processed food, and a 60% of our calories basically is, is deliberately stripped of all of its nutrients. And then it's fortified with stuff because they've taken it all out. And, and then, you know, we, we actually first saw signs of vitamin deficiency when we

Starting point is 00:10:36 started to polish rice. And, and it was, you know, it was, it was interesting. It was given to the, the chickens in prisons in Europe and then to the prisoners and they all got really sick. And it was because of the vitamin deficiencies and the same thing is happening now. Then we decided we have to enrich the flour, enrich the rice, but that's silly. Why don't eat the whole food, which has all the nutrients, but we now are seeing a massive depletion of our diet in these minerals. So what are the top minerals that we're, we're depleting in our, in our food because we're eating processed food?

Starting point is 00:11:08 Yeah. So there's, well, there, even if you go and eat, um, it's quote unquote real food. If it's not from a regenerative farm, there are four main minerals that are now depleted in both animal foods and plant foods across the board. And that's magnesium, calcium, copper, and iron. So copper has been the worst. So vegetables have lost about 75% of their copper. Animal foods like meat have lost 50% of their copper. And then you have 80 to 90% of copper lost in cheese. And then we've lost almost all of it in milk. And so really trying to source regenerative agriculture crops and foods and animals from regenerative farms is going to be much more nutrient dense. So really finding those local farmers that are using like real natural manure that are not using these phosphorus, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:57 artificial NPK fertilizers and glyphosate is really going to make a tremendous difference just from the real foods that you're eating, not even talking about the processed foods. So that's, that's a good way to help with that. And the other thing you mentioned was chronic disease and also medication caused, you know, depletion. And we are now, what are the data that six out of 10 of us have a one chronic disease and four out of 10 have more than one. And I think what was it? 81% of Americans over, I think 50 or something are on one or more medications. I mean, 80% of Americans. So what is all that disease and drugs doing to our mineral status? Well, exactly right. That most of us are sick. And what ends up happening is you basically, you know, don't, you're not able to absorb nutrients

Starting point is 00:12:47 well if you have a damaged gastrointestinal tract for one. And so, so many people are suffering from gluten intolerance, celiac disease, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis. And if you have damage to the gastrointestinal tract, which many of us do from eating these processed foods, you can't even absorb the minerals. And then even if you are able to absorb them, we require insulin to drive numerous minerals into the cell, including magnesium and potassium. And we know 75% of the US population is insulin resistant and has high levels. So you can't even get it the minerals into the cell as well when you're insulin resistant. And if you have elevations in your insulin levels that kicks out magnesium and calcium in the urine as well. And so wait, wait, wait, just so we unpack this,

Starting point is 00:13:35 you basically eat a lot of sugar and starch or insulin goes up and you start to pee out minerals like magnesium. Yeah. And you can drive them into the cell to utilize them. So you could be taking, you know, all the magnesium or calcium or potassium that you would like to take in a day but if you don't fix the insulin resistance you're never going to get the full driving of those nutrients into the cell where it actually is needed to work amazing so and then the other thing you know so you have chronic diseases which then cause your minerals to become depleted you have um you know soils which are not good which allows us to sort of not get the minerals. We have processed food, which just by nature has no minerals.

Starting point is 00:14:12 And then we take medications, which often are mineral depleting. And in medical school, we all learn, oh, yeah, if you give someone a diuretic for high blood pressure or for heart failure, you have to give them potassium because the medication causes potassium to leach out in the urine, but also causes other minerals like magnesium. So talk about this general idea. We talk about, oh, be careful taking those supplements going to interfere with your medications. But the opposite is also true, that whatever medications you're taking may be causing massive nutritional deficiencies, whether it's an acid blocker causing B12 deficiency or certain antidepressants things causing B6 deficiency or, or, you know, the diuretics causing magnesium deficiency. So

Starting point is 00:14:53 talk about the minerals and the depletion of our, of our nutritional status by the medications. What are the top medications that cause the problems and what do they do? Well, one of the first medications a doctor will throw someone on if they have high blood pressure is something called a thiazide diuretic. So something like hydrochlorothiazide or chlorthalidone, indapamide are some of the names that some people may be familiar with. And you're right that the medical community thought for a long time, and they still think this, that the potassium depletion, you just give these people more potassium, but it's really the magnesium depletion that these thiazide diuretics

Starting point is 00:15:30 are causing that is causing the body to not be able to hold onto potassium. So 80% of people who are on a thiazide diuretic for six months or longer are deficient in magnesium, 80%. And it's one of the most prescribed medications in the United States. What's so fascinating about that is that magnesium lowers blood pressure. So you're kind of getting rid of the very mineral that you need to keep your blood vessels relaxed and not have high blood pressure. In fact, that's what we give women when they come in with high blood pressure from pregnancy. We call it preeclampsia. The treatment is intravenous magnesium. Right, exactly. We used to, before we had all these

Starting point is 00:16:09 types of medications, we used to treat many health conditions with magnesium, including preeclampsia. There have been many clinical studies that show that live birth rates are much better, especially if you start earlier on in your labor or preterm with magnesium supplementation. And so it really is the missing, one of the missing minerals in the diet. And it said that 50% of people with high blood pressure or heart disease have magnesium deficiency and half the population isn't even getting the RDA for magnesium. And what's interesting, what we talk about in the mineral fix. So before you go into that, so the RDA for listening is minimum amount you need, or they call them RDIs, the minimum amount you need to prevent deficiency diseases. It's not how much you need for optimal health. It's like

Starting point is 00:16:52 how much you need to get scurvy for vitamin C or rickets, you know, vitamin D. It's not really the amount your body needs for optimal functioning. And so it's so important to rethink our approach to nutrition based on optimal performance and function rather than simply prevention of deficiency diseases, which is what our whole medical training has been around vitamins. And the interaction between the drugs and the nutrients is a really big deal. And like you're saying with thiazide diuretics, but there's other examples of other nutrients that get depleted. What are a few other examples of common medications and the nutrients that they deplete? Well, another common medication is proton pump inhibitors, which are prescription, quote unquote, acid suppressing therapies, as well as antacids over the counter. There's actually a

Starting point is 00:17:34 third leading class of drugs, by the way, after statins and antidepressants, it's a third leading class of drugs. Exactly. And if you have heartburn or reflux, most doctors will just throw these at you and you're not really supposed to be on them for longer than two to three months at the most. Doctors used to just kind of put people on these for years. And they started noticing that people were becoming deficient in numerous minerals, particularly magnesium. And now there's an actual black box warning that these medications can lead to magnesium deficiency. An actual black box warning. A black box warning is on the label. The pharmacist has to put this black box that says,

Starting point is 00:18:10 if you take this medication, this is going to happen to you, or this may happen to you, you might get magnesium deficiency. So this is kind of a big deal for that to happen. Right, exactly. And well, that's the crux of the book, The mineral fix is that the RDA does not match the optimal intake for nutrients. And most people understand that things like refined sugars and carbohydrate and refined carbs and seed oils are bad for their health. But what a lot of people do not realize is that if you do not hit optimal intakes for nutrients, that is just as damaging to your body. Well, that's a, that's a big sentence. So, you know, if you are avoiding all the crap and you still don't have optimal levels of nutrients in your body, it's still harmful to you. It's extremely, I mean, they, what was really interesting was one study. They put women on a diet that contained 100 milligrams of magnesium, within just a few weeks, a third of those women developed atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. So you can induce arrhythmia simply by lowering the magnesium content of the diet. And you can see these types of harms with

Starting point is 00:19:18 numerous nutrients. They've done this with copper as well. If you go on, this is actually what's really scary. We have the RDA completely wrong for copper. So it was set based on essentially just one or two balance studies. And they forgot to actually test mineral losses through sweat. They didn't think copper was lost through sweat. So they just looked at urine and stool copper loss for the RDA for copper. Well, it turns out that we lose about 0.3 milligrams of copper through sweat per day. And so the RDA doesn't even actually maintain balance for likely half of the population. And there are studies that show that if you even go slightly above the RDA,

Starting point is 00:19:57 if you put someone on, let's say one milligram of copper per day, you can induce insulin resistance, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, all these problems that you would induce with a high sugar diet simply by eating a low amount of copper. Wow. That's incredible. So we've got copper, magnesium. What are the other common minerals that we're low in and what are the impacts of those? The top 10 minerals are really boron, manganese, potassium, magnesium, calcium, zinc, selenium, even molybdenum. And when it comes to immune health, we all know that zinc and selenium are extremely important. And simply being deficient in selenium can essentially turn non-virulent viruses into something that could potentially kill you. Well, you know, there's a fascinating study on COVID in China, where they look at areas where there was high selenium in

Starting point is 00:20:48 the soil versus low selenium, where people were tending to be deficient in selenium. I think they had five times higher risk of getting it from the hospital or dying or three times higher risk. It was a dramatic difference between the adequate and the deficient selenium groups. And so that's just one mineral. But we have many, many minerals that are all dynamically interacting together that regulate thousands of different biological functions. And these people think, oh, well, vitamins and minerals are just, you know, not really that important, or you can get it all from your food or, you know, we're not really that deficient. How can we be deficient? We're such a well-nourished country. There's so much obesity,

Starting point is 00:21:20 but there's actually a phenomenon of the more obese you are, the more mineral, nutrient, vitamin deficient you typically are. Even like vitamin D, it's sort of striking to see this paradox of sort of obesity and malnutrition going together. And we really have this moment to sort of look at our biology, go, wait a minute, how do we optimize it? Because it's not simply about getting adequate levels, it's about simply about, you know, getting adequate levels. It's about getting optimal levels. And that has a profound effect on our overall biology. So tell us a little bit more about, you know, why these deficiencies drive disease. You mentioned a little bit about it, but I think give us some practical examples of if I'm deficient X or Y, what will I see as a doctor in my practice? Well, if you think about, let's say,

Starting point is 00:22:05 just let's talk about brain health, for example. If you want to actually create the three feel good neurotransmitters, serotonin, noradrenaline, norepinephrine in the brain and dopamine, there's enzymes in the brain that require minerals to actually create serotonin and then also form melatonin from serotonin. They depend on like magnesium, zinc, calcium, iron, copper. If you are deficient in those minerals, most doctors don't even look or test for that. They simply just give you an antidepressant or if you can't sleep, they will simply give you a pill to help you sleep. But if you're deficient in any of those minerals, the enzymes can't even convert tryptophan eventually to serotonin and melatonin. So a lot of these issues with sleep, anxiety, mood disorders, depression are literally being driven

Starting point is 00:22:56 by these mineral deficiencies. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, I've seen so much from my practice. I just read this one patient, I might've talked to her before, but she had, you know, classic signs of magnesium deficiency. She was a doctor, radiation oncology resident, actually, worked at Mayo Clinic and seen the top headache specialist, had intractable migraines, was on narcotics and Zofran, which is like a chemo anti-nausea drug. She, and so I talked to her and I said, well, tell me about your other symptoms besides the migraines.

Starting point is 00:23:24 I said, how's your digestion? So, you know, I'm pretty regular. I'm like, oh, well, well, how often do you go to the bathroom? She's like, I'll go once a week. I'm like, that's not regular. She goes regularly for me. I go every week. I'm like, no, you got to go every day. I said, well, tell me other symptoms you have. Well, I have anxiety. I have insomnia. I have palpitations. I have muscle cramps. I have bad menstrual cramps. These are all signs of magnesium deficiency. And if you're alert to it, and it may be other things like sensitive to loud noises or irritability or, and anything that sort of spasms twitchy or irritable is typically a sign of

Starting point is 00:23:56 magnesium deficiency. And that's because magnesium is a relaxation mineral. And when I gave her magnesium, I literally had to give her 2,000 or more milligrams a day in order to get her start going to the bathroom and relieve her headaches and it was amazing once we gave her the magnesium all of her symptoms went away and and you know what causes magnesium deficiency besides not getting your diet is things like caffeine and stress you know I remember one study in Kosovo where they looked at magnesium levels in the urine and they found high levels in people who are really stressed and you can't really test for it in a way that most doctors test for. It's not really adequate. So maybe, would you mind just sharing a little bit about the challenge we have

Starting point is 00:24:33 with testing and how we can diagnose these mineral deficiencies? Because people are like, I'm listening to this and I'm like, do I have mineral deficiencies? Is it causing my health issues? How do you diagnose it? Because typically traditional medicine is pretty crappy at diagnosing nutritional deficiencies and particularly around minerals. Right. That's a good question. And part of the problem is, is some of these minerals are what are called acute phase reactants. Meaning if you have inflammation in the body, the levels of those minerals will either go up or down depending on inflammation. So for example, if you are inflamed, zinc will go down, selenium will go down, and iron will go down. And you may not be deficient, but the inflammation is driving it down. On the flip side, inflammation will actually increase copper levels. So you could be deficient in copper, but the inflammation is

Starting point is 00:25:20 driving your levels up because it's an acute phase reactant. The other problem is most minerals do not sit in the blood. They're mostly in the tissue or the bone. So take magnesium, for example, 1% of your entire body's magnesium is actually in blood. 99% is in things like muscle and bone. And of course we're not going in and, you know, taking a sample of someone's bone or tissue to test for magnesium deficiency. So what are some of the best ways to actually look for mineral deficiencies that people can actually do? And it's really actually looking to see if you're at the lower end of normal on a blood test. So what happens with mineral deficiencies, you don't typically fall below the actual normal threshold unless

Starting point is 00:26:03 you are significantly deficient. But what will happen is you will go from a middle point of normal, just to the lower end of normal. And if you're sitting on that lower end of normal, especially if you have a low amount coming out in the urine, that is highly indicative of mineral deficiency. Yeah, that's a great point. I think, you know, we, we in medicine, we're learning lab tests and we see, OK, this is the normal range, you know, but when you understand what normal means, it's a statistical number based on the population. So if I were to land in America from Mars and I go, what's the normal weight of Americans? Well, given that 75 percent are overweight, it's normal to be overweight. It doesn't mean it's optimal.

Starting point is 00:26:50 And in addition, we use this sort of two standard deviations, meaning we use a wide bell curve for figuring out what's normal. So you can be two or 92 and it's still the same reference range, right? And maybe it should be like one standard deviation should be where we're thinking is optimal and anything outside above or below is a problem. And I think we're learning this in medicine, that disease is not just an on or off phenomenon, it's a continuum. So you might, for example, see a blood sugar being normal up to a hundred, but in fact, we know that if your blood sugar is over 87, according to Israeli studies, that your risk goes up of heart disease and death in a linear way. So 88 is worse than 87 and 90 is worse than 88. And the same thing with nutrition. I mean, we don't want too much, but we don't want

Starting point is 00:27:32 to make sure we have optimal levels. And magnesium is an interesting phenomenon. When I started practicing magnesium, it was one of those miracle drugs that I started using in functional medicine. It's like incredible. I help people sleep with all sorts of issues. And it's hard to test because the typical thing I learned in medical school was just check the serum magnesium level. So you're saying if it's a low end of normal, which is like two, then you're worried, you're worried. But by the time he gets there, you're already pretty depleted. And then you can look at red cell levels, which is a little bit better, which is what's in the cells, because typically magnesium is more in the cells. But that also isn't perfect, although it can be a little bit better. And then there's the real test, which is a magnesium loading test, where you basically

Starting point is 00:28:14 deplete the body of magnesium. You don't get to take it for a while. You give a big magnesium load, and then you collect the urine for 24 hours, because that'll tell you how much spills out. If you hold all the urine, if you hold all the magnesium in your body, it means you're pretty deficient if you don't pee it out. And yet nobody does that test. There are other indirect tests we use like organic acid testing and so forth. Amino acids, we can sort of indirectly tell whether there's some nutritional deficiencies, but it's really tough. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. We're living in a time unlike anything before, and that comes with both pros and cons.

Starting point is 00:28:49 We're able to video chat with people we love all across the globe, and many of us can work from home thanks to computers and the internet. We can walk into a superstore and buy everything we need anytime, day or night. But all that technology and convenience means we're constantly exposed to artificial light from sources like LEDs, fluorescents, and digital devices. A certain amount of light exposure is good, and it's good for us, especially when it's from the sun. But overexposure from these man-made sources disrupts our body's highly intelligent systems. And that's because the body is biologically programmed to follow distinct light-dark cycles, which help regulate vital hormones, energy, and sleep.

Starting point is 00:29:25 But all this exposure to artificial light, what my friend Dave Asprey calls junk light, can throw those programs out of balance and completely disrupt your sleep. That might not sound like a big deal, but it can lead to headaches, weight gain, depression, insulin resistance, and many other health problems. But there is a solution, and it doesn't mean throwing out all your screens and putting them in the trash. The blue light blocking glasses from TrueDark are designed to help you get just the right amount of light at the right times. TrueDark has a daytime line with clear yellow lenses called Daylights that allows some blue light to filter through so you can stay awake and focused when you need to. Their Twilights have red lenses to more thoroughly block out blue,

Starting point is 00:30:02 green, and violet light at night to optimize melatonin production and promote deep, restful sleep. TrueDark can also work with your prescription to make you a custom pair. Right now, you can get 15% off at TrueDark.com forward slash Hyman with the code DrHyman15. That's TrueDark.com forward slash Hyman with the code DrHyman15. I found using the right glasses at the right times has really improved how my eyes feel during the day and how well I sleep at night. And I hope you check them out too. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So besides magnesium, what are the other tests? If you're wanting to know what your nutritional status is, do you just go to a regular doctor and get regular tests? Or what are the best tests for the top things like selenium, zinc, magnesium, we talked about copper? Yeah, so the best test that

Starting point is 00:30:52 has actually been matched against the gold standard IV magnesium load is actually mononuclear blood cell magnesium levels. So white cell level. Yeah, it's called mononuclear blood cell. And it's the only blood test that I've ever seen that actually correlates well with the IV magnesium load, which is the gold standard for testing for magnesium deficiency. So that typically, though, is not ordered by your doctor. And that's the problem, right? Is that you would think the first thing you would that all of us would know is we would have a list of 20, 30, 40 vitamins and minerals, and we would understand if we're deficient or not. And our doctor would first instantly say, okay, you're deficient in 10 minerals. Here's the foods you

Starting point is 00:31:36 need to start eating to replace those. They don't do that. They just say high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure. Here's this pill, this pill, and this pill, and they send you on your way. And that's the problem. We need to get health insurance companies to pay for and reimburse for vitamin mineral tests because you can do hair analysis. It's not perfect, but that is a three-month reflection of blood. So that's a potentially better way for numerous minerals. You always want to have serum as well. And you want the serum to be not on the lower end of normal. And then you can also do many other tests. But typically, it's white blood cells that you look at for minerals, whether it be

Starting point is 00:32:16 neutrophils or leukocytes. Leukocyte copper, neutrophil zinc are some of the best tests to actually get for those minerals. And people can do that through the regular lab test? Typically, I mean, typically doctors don't do that. There's certain companies that specialize in those types of tests. And some have their own unique methods for doing this. But that's the problem. We don't have insurance companies demanding or paying for these better tests or minerals. So most people are stuck with serum and they just, you just want to make sure that you're

Starting point is 00:32:51 definitely not at the lower end of normal on serum. Yeah. Great. Okay. So we were seeing that there's massive deficiencies. We probably need to take something. How, how do these nutritional deficiencies of micronutrients, on our health span and lifespan in terms of longevity and premature aging? And how do we, you know, how do we get to avoid premature aging and

Starting point is 00:33:12 increase our longevity? So what we sort of need to understand is everybody focuses on macronutrients, right? How much carbohydrates versus how much fats, you know, people that are high carb, people that are low carb, they forget that it's the minerals that determine how well you actually convert those macronutrients into energy how well you your muscle can grow how much atp you can produce everything is dependent on so i i kind of laugh when people say it's all about calories with weight loss when literally your fat burning machinery depends on minerals. So some people can be eating a low calorie diet, but a nutrient micronutrient deficient diet, you're going to gain much more weight than someone who is eating more calories, but are getting more minerals because your fat burning machinery will actually work better. So take magnesium, for example.

Starting point is 00:34:07 You cannot activate ATP without magnesium. It binds to ATP, it cleaves the terminal phosphate, and it releases energy. Everything depends on ATP. Magnesium is required to produce protein, DNA, RNA. I don't know a single function in the body that does not work without ATP and protein and DNA. So literally everything depends on minerals. And so like you had said, I mean, magnesium is the relax mineral. It prevents calcium from actually accumulating in the arteries. So one sign of mineral deficiency is coronary artery calcification, which a lot of docs are starting to use versus just cholesterol tests. Yeah. So how does mineral deficiency cause the calcium deposit? So essentially magnesium is a, is nature's calcium channel blocker and it prevents the cells,

Starting point is 00:34:55 the endothelial cells that are lining the arteries from accumulating calcium. And so there is this balance we talk about in the book that it's not also just about the, the overall amount of minerals you're getting. It's the balance between them. You have to, you don't want to have really more than a two to three to one ratio of calcium to magnesium. Otherwise you're going to start getting issues because the balance is off. Yeah. Interesting. So the thing we often hear about, let's just sort of talk about some of these chronic age-related diseases is, you know, high blood pressure is an issue and we're, we're taught that we should not be eating salt or

Starting point is 00:35:28 having too much salt because it can cause high blood pressure. And yet, you challenged that whole hypothesis. We've had you talking about this before, I think on an Instagram Live or a podcast. And you wrote this book called Salt Fix, which challenges our notion of salt being the enemy and the evil that we thought it is. Although it is for some people, can you kind of break down in just sort of a short nugget, you know, what is the right thinking about salt and where have we gone wrong and how do we fix it? If you eliminate refined carbs and sugar, you make sure you're getting enough magnesium,

Starting point is 00:36:01 you make sure you're getting enough potassium, only 1% of the population would probably actually have a significant rise in blood pressure with a normal salt intake. In other words, it's not the salt. The problem is the sugar and the refined carbs that are causing you to over-retain salt. It's really not a problem for most people if they fix those three underlying causes. And that's sort of what I discussed in the mineral fix and the salt fixes. The three causes of being again. Of over-retaining salt would be insulin resistance, low potassium, low magnesium intake. Okay. So this seems so easy to fix. You get magnesium, you get potassium, which we get from vegetables and plant foods, right? And you cut out the starch and sugar. And as a doctor, as a doctor, it was interesting when I tell people to cut out starch and sugar, what happens is the body starts to dump huge amounts of salt and you get all kinds of quote side effects from going on a low carbohydrate diet,

Starting point is 00:36:56 including, you know, feeling achy, tired, wiped out. And it's like essentially having electrolyte depletion. And the reason that you're doing that is not because your body's doing something wrong. It's because before you were having so much sugar and starch, your body was holding onto all this salt. And so then it dumped fluid and salt, which is a good thing, but you have to make sure you get adequate salt while you're doing that. Because if you don't, you're going to feel like crap. And so it's really important for people who do switch their diets to understand that you can, and the same thing happens with the keto flu, you know, it was this whole idea that the keto flu, and you go keto, you cut out carbohydrates, you get sick like the flu, but that's because of the mineral depletion from the dumping of the salt from the lower levels of insulin in the blood,

Starting point is 00:37:37 which is after you cut out the starch or sugar. So it's really, it's a really important idea. But there are, but there are people who are salt sensitive and have salt sensitive hypertension, right? The African-American community has more of that. Is that, is that fair to say? It's fair. Yeah, they do have more, but typically it's because their dietary potassium magnesium is very low and they eat high amounts of carbs and sugars.

Starting point is 00:37:57 And what's interesting, you give those people metformin and you help fix their insulin resistance and you actually fix most of their salt sensitivity. So in, in the mineral fix and the salt fix, especially we, we cover a couple of those clinical studies. You give salt sensitive people metformin, or you put them on a lifestyle, better diet, and you fix their insulin resistance. They're no longer salt sensitive. So really one of the best measures of insulin resistance is if you're salt sensitive. Interesting. Interesting. So yeah, I see, you know, a lot of my patients, as soon as they change their diet, boom, their blood pressure comes down and it's, they have to start peeling off the medications because their blood pressure drops too low. So it's sort of paradoxical to think that actually maybe it's not the salt, it's the lack of

Starting point is 00:38:40 potassium and magnesium, which are rampant deficiencies in potassium, you know, comes from mostly plant foods. So you say, Oh, eat a banana for potassium, but it's, if you just make a big vegetable broth or, you know, make a good soup, even like seaweed, I like to put seaweed in the soup that helps you get a lot of potassium and extra minerals. So that's really important. Seaweed is a great source of minerals, isn't it? Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And that's a good point that just being a little bit low in potassium can cause you to over retain salt. And so again, it's this balance, you need to make sure typically what I do, I probably get four grams of potassium per day and four grams of sodium, and I don't have high blood pressure, and it dramatically improves my performance. Most people don't really utilize salt correctly. Before you go on, just the average recommendation is like two grams or less for salt, right? It's two and a half. So you're saying you eat twice the amount of salt that our current experts are recommending, but you also eat a lot of potassium

Starting point is 00:39:35 and it seems to balance out. Exactly. So the typical American is only consuming maybe two and a half grams of potassium. And that's the problem. If they bump that up to about four grams, then most of those individuals wouldn't have an issue with a normal salt intake. And I mean, I've published numerous papers on why we recommend such a low intake of salt, and it's strictly based on blood pressure. But they never look at the other surrogate markers that are actually worsened on a low salt diet. So for example, you may have a slightly lower blood pressure, but that's not necessarily good. I can dehydrate you and tell you to only drink two ounces of water per day and lower your blood pressure. So to think that that one surrogate marker is the most important is, is, you know, really just narrow focused. But if you look at

Starting point is 00:40:20 the harms like stress hormones, aldosterone, renin, angiotensin 2, those artery stiffening hormones, they all increase with a low salt diet. If you go below three grams of sodium per day, all those stress hormones increase. Yeah, I mean, that's great. It's really helpful. I mean, historically, you know, as hunter-gatherers, we probably had 10 to 1, I mean, sorry, you know, 1 to 1 sodium potassium. Now we often have 10 to 1 sodium to potassium, and that's coming primarily from processed food. I always say it's not the salt or sugar you add to your food. It's the sugar or salt that's added by corporations that's hidden in your food. That's the problem. I mean, you probably wouldn't be able to tolerate that much

Starting point is 00:41:00 salt if you just put it on your food, But when it's sort of buried in tasteless, you know, refined ingredients, it kind of makes it all taste good, but it's actually killing you. Well, I mean, getting a normal salt intake is actually one of the best ways to reduce sugar cravings, because one of the mechanisms, the survival mechanisms that we had, that you can see this in animals, when they're depleted, how do they know to go to a salt that can actually eat salts? Like how do they actually do that? Right. Because their reward center in the brain is actually hyperactivated. So that's what happens in humans as well. If you don't get enough salt, your reward center is hyperactivated and you get, you get more of a dopamine response to things like sugar, Adderall, or, or any type of addictive substance. And so low salt can literally drive sugar addiction. That's incredible. All right, let's talk about COVID-19 because we're

Starting point is 00:41:54 in the middle of this pandemic and it's clear that minerals play a role in the prevention and potentially even treatment of COVID. And we did see with, you know, our government recommendations, they're not including all these guidelines about how to upgrade your nutrition or improve the quality of the food you're eating or take these supplements. Although I was sort of surprised when President Trump had COVID, they put him in the hospital. In the New York Times, they report, oh, he's taking zinc and he's taking vitamin D. You know, so they actually were like, wow, you know, they're practically applying it in the New York times, they report, Oh, he's taking zinc and he's taking vitamin D. You know, so they actually were like, wow, you know, they're, they're practically applying it

Starting point is 00:42:28 in the hospital, but they're not telling America to do this. So talk about what are the key nutrients that can worsen COVID outcomes if you're deficient and what we should do about it. Yeah. I put together a pretty good chart in some of the books on the top nutrients deficiencies and how much they actually increase the risk of having a poor outcome or dying from COVID. The top nutrient deficiency would be vitamin D. Essentially, if you are significantly vitamin D deficient, you're at up to 15-fold higher risk of dying from COVID and times higher risk of having a poor COVID outcome. Selenium and zinc sit, as you said, somewhere between a three to five-fold higher risk of having a poor COVID outcome or dying from COVID if you're deficient in those minerals.

Starting point is 00:43:09 And I mean, I love this example that there was a non-virulent RNA virus called Coxsaxi virus. It causes hand, foot, and mouth in some kids, but in adults, it doesn't do much unless you're selenium deficient. If you're selenium deficient and get Cox's virus, you end up with Keyshawn disease, cardiomyopathy, and you potentially die from the virus because you're selenium deficient. And we treat these people by just giving them selenium. So this would obviously translate to other RNA viruses as well. So we have a clear past example that mineral deficiencies can lead to fatal outcomes from an RNA virus. So why this isn't being talked about with COVID is beyond me. It is. It's incredible. And the selenium study from China was so fascinating about COVID-19 and the dramatic changes in outcomes just based on one

Starting point is 00:44:01 mineral. And zinc also, how does zinc play a role in immunity and what is it, what is it what is the role of zinc in the body? So there's two different sort of mechanisms. So zinc lozenges have a direct antiviral effect, right. You know, reducing viral replication and penetration into the cell. That's why there's these, you know, so quote unquote zinc ionophores that are trying to get more zinc into the cell as well. And then you have zinc that just controls numerous immune cell health and they utilize zinc for, you know, helping to kill viruses. And actually magnesium is probably one of the most important because the ionic magnesium in immune cells actually controls their receptors to be able to attack viruses. So zinc, magnesium, selenium is

Starting point is 00:44:47 important for the antioxidant functions. Most, we don't, we kind of think of vitamins as being the antioxidants in the body, but it's actually the minerals because they actually control our antioxidant enzymes. So there's like coppers, zinc, superoxide dismutase, which it's the superoxide anion that depletes us of our nitrogen oxide. And so not getting enough minerals can actually reduce nitric oxide and increase blood pressure. Let me unpack that for a minute. Cause I think you just not people and people are going to necessarily get that. So basically your body has its own antioxidant system and there's some very powerful antioxidants like superoxide dismutase, you know, catalase and so forth. And these, in order for

Starting point is 00:45:33 these things to function, they need the right amounts and the right types of nutrients. So you're saying copper and zinc are important for, or selenium and copper are important for superoxide dismutase and selenium is important for glutathione peroxidase. So there's a lot of these important antioxidants that our bodies make that are way more powerful than any antioxidants you can take by taking a supplement. And then they need the right levels of these minerals to function. And what you're seeing is that 80% of us are deficient in these nutrients. And yet we're not taking advantage of this

Starting point is 00:46:05 knowledge from science to actually upgrade our own immune and antioxidant systems. Exactly. What's actually really interesting is 3 billion years ago when algae was producing oxygen, and this is where oxidative stress even comes from, right? Is the actual change in the atmospheric oxygen by these things like blue-green algae. The first antioxidants that they used against their, the defense of their own production of oxidative stress was iodine and selenium in the algae. They were, minerals were actually the first antioxidants in the first life forms on earth. And what's really interesting, even protection of the mitochondria depends on minerals.

Starting point is 00:46:45 So superoxide dismutase is not just in the blood and in helping the cytosol in the actual mitochondria. There's something called manganese superoxide dismutase protects the mitochondria. And we know that's the powerhouse of the cell and produces ATP. So if you can't protect your own mitochondria because you're nutrient depleted, you cannot protect yourself from oxidative stress. Yeah. Which is a big deal. And, and now with COVID, we're really seeing the need for increased levels of some of these nutrients, like selenium and zinc. Talk about iodine because you know, we, we all were eating iodized salt. There was a big problem with goiters

Starting point is 00:47:22 and thyroid issues because of massive iodine deficiency in history. And so we decided to supplement salt with iodine, but now people are eating iodine-free salt and sea salt. And what I recommend the Redmond salt from, for real salt from Redmond. I mean, so how do we, how do we have to think about iodine in the, you know, 21st century? Cause I'm now seeing when I test people, uh, iodine efficiencies and, and I'm sort of surprised about it, but I think it might be because of our changes in our dietary consumption of the type of salt we're eating. I mean, it's talking about why, why, um, it's a problem and what we should be taking. Should we be taking iodized salt? Should we be adding iodine? Should we be eating more seaweed or fish? What should we be doing?

Starting point is 00:48:03 Well, that's a great question. And one of the primary reasons that a lot of people don't realize is we actually lose a lot of iodine through sweat. So we don't just lose salt, we lose iodine. And I think that's one of the keys. We lose about 50 micrograms per hour of exercise. So if you're not eating a natural salt that contains the iodine, right?

Starting point is 00:48:21 You are then just simply becoming depleted. And we know that iodine controls our thyroid hormones, right? Iod then just simply becoming depleted. And we know that iodine controls our thyroid hormones, right? Iodine literally makes up T3, T4, and that controls our metabolism. So you could literally have low thyroid functioning, not only from a lack of nutrients, particularly iodine, but also salt because salt is required to drive iodine into the thyroid organ. So it actually moves a lot of other nutrients as well, salt. So the reason why we are likely deficient in iodine is A, our salts are typically depleted in it, unless you're consuming a healthy, something like a Himalayan or Redmond, or you're just overexercising and you're losing that iodine through sweat.

Starting point is 00:49:07 So do we think we should be taking iodine supplements? Well, there's kind of like this narrow therapeutic range with iodine. And so you have to be careful because typically the sweet spot is about 150 to 250 micrograms per day. But you start getting into the three, 400, and you can actually start increasing the risk of thyroid disorders and autoimmune issues. It's, and so selenium is actually what's really important too with thyroid health. Yeah. Right. In order to activate the thyroid hormones, selenium is required to do that. So it depends on your overall intake. If you're getting if you're eating a lot of pastured eggs and you're getting a lot of sources, good sources of iodine, maybe you don't need it.

Starting point is 00:49:53 But if you're not eating good amounts of iodine, then, yeah, you probably want to either get it through supplementation or through a salt that actually contains it. But there is that narrow therapeutic range with iodine. You got to be a little careful. So talk about the food we should be eating and the minerals that are in the food. Let's break down like the foods by the top minerals that we see are deficient that you sort of outlined. Give us the top ones and then sort of quickly go through

Starting point is 00:50:18 what are the foods that these minerals are found in and how do we increase the intake of those? Okay, that's a really good question. So how I sort of build my diet is I start with about 10 to 12 ounces, let's say of pastured red meat. Typically I'd like to actually do bison or elk or venison because that's true ancestral meat. And those meats actually have about 50% more minerals than even grass fed cattle. There's numerous reasons for that. We don't need to go into that, but I try to eat true ancestral meat. And then I try to build, um, things off of that because if you're not getting a little bit of red meat, it's going to be very difficult to

Starting point is 00:50:56 get the B12, the protein, the zinc, and, um, uh, the iron, uh, right. Because those four nutrients are packed in animal foods. And once, once you have that down, then you can build and start adding plant foods to that. Right. Um, and so plant foods are really great for things like potassium and magnesium. And that's the key. A lot of people in calcium, a lot of people are deficient in calcium, potassium, magnesium, and it's like, try to get those greens, uh, into the diet, um diet because they're very, very high. Like kale and spinach are high in potassium, calcium, magnesium. And magnesium is very, very low in most animal foods. Yeah. And it's also high in beans and greens and nuts and nuts, a lot of magnesium and nuts, right?

Starting point is 00:51:40 Yes. And some fish has a decent amount of magnesium. Some actually, what I love is lobster and crab because A, it doesn't really destroy our ecosystem like fishing does of pastured liver per day for the copper folate and vitamin A. Just adding a little bit of pastured liver is a great source for those nutrients. You can get folate and vitamin A through pastured eggs. So I think most people should be consuming a little bit of pastured eggs as well because that brings vitamin D. It's very difficult to get vitamin D in the diet unless you're consuming pastured eggs. And they're also good sources of lutein, zeaxanthin, omega threes as well. So I like to have some three pastured three to four pastured eggs per day, some pastured red meat, one ounce of liver or a half ounce of liver per day. And then you can do your plant foods for magnesium, potassium, calcium.

Starting point is 00:52:51 Yeah. And the liver, you know, the liver has actually more vitamin C than carrots or apples. I mean, it's amazing. If you look at your, for, for a hundred gram portion, for example, of an apple or, or so you get like seven milligrams of vitamin C with beef flavor, you get like 27 milligrams of vitamin C. So actually it is probably the most powerful superfood on the planet, believe it or not. And it's higher in most nutrients and minerals than, than, than plant foods. Well, what's interesting too is that stressed out animals actually produce up to 10 times more vitamin C. So if we were actually hunting an animal, we would be stressing that animal out incredibly. And it would be,

Starting point is 00:53:36 its production of vitamin C would have been much higher. And we don't typically eat fresh meat, but we've sort of lost our vitamin C through that mechanism. We sort of buy supermarket foods that have been hanging for two, three weeks. And that doesn't have nearly as much vitamin C as a fresh kill would have. So the key is, is try to eat as fresh as possible when you can. So so basically you're outlining like, you know, grass fed or wild meats, a little bit of liver, a pasteurized eggs, lots of greens, vegetables, and also nuts and seeds. I mean, selenium is high, for example, in Brazil nuts and zinc is high in pumpkin seeds. And I mean, iodine is high in seaweed and obviously fish. So by understanding where these come from, you can start to create a diet that is actually more nutrient dense. But you're often saying that that's not enough, even if we figured

Starting point is 00:54:25 out how to eat all the foods that, you know, and I once had a patient, she was an obsessor. She's like, look, I don't want to take any vitamins. So I'm going to have my like three Brazil nuts a day, my 17 pumpkin seeds, and my, she figured it all out. And I guess that's okay to do, but make sure you check and test to see that you're actually using and absorbing it. What, assuming we're doing all the great dietary changes that help us upgrade our mineral intake, who should be taking supplements? What should we be taking? How do we get these and upgrade our mineral levels? Right. And that, that comes down to the difference between, are you getting the RDA and are you getting an optimal intake? And so, and what's

Starting point is 00:55:05 your diet actually made up of? So what's interesting is the, you only need about 150 milligrams of magnesium to live per day, but the optimal intake is sits more around 700 milligrams. So it's like a three, fourfold difference between just maintaining balance and having optimal intakes of minerals and same thing with copper and selenium and the list goes on and on. So whether you're building your diet appropriately, like some of the foods that we talked about and hitting optimal nutrient intakes, then maybe you don't need to supplement as much. Um, but most people are still going to be lacking boron and manganese because those nutrients are very, very difficult to source, um, in the diet. So probably those would be great to take. And a lot of people are deficient in magnesium, even eating good amounts of the foods

Starting point is 00:55:52 we talked about. And so I love to drink mineral waters for that reason, natural mineral waters, like Gerald Steiner, which is high in magnesium and calcium and bicarbonate to offset some of the acidosis from the animal foods that I consume. It's a really good bioavailable source of minerals as well. Yeah. So the key is to, one, make sure your diet is upgraded. So just to review, magnesium is found in nuts and seeds and greens and beans. Selenium is high in Brazil nuts, pumpkin seeds, and I would say oysters have high zinc, and so does animal protein, as you mentioned. Iodine, you know, you can get from fish or seaweed. And, you know, some of these other harder to get minerals, you sometimes need

Starting point is 00:56:39 to use mineral waters or supplements. You know, should everybody be taking a multi-mineral supplement? Should we be taking more of some other minerals? Should all we be testing first before we take minerals or should we just assume it's okay to take them? And what's your, what's your sense? Well, this is, this is really interesting. They did, they did a study. They looked at the typical diet and 50% of the population was deficient in things like magnesium, calcium. Then they gave them a multivitamin mineral, almost the same amount of people were still deficient because they don't typical multivitamins and minerals don't add back the key nutrients that are missing in our diet, like magnesium, like calcium,

Starting point is 00:57:22 like copper. So it's, it's like the multivitamin mineral doesn't get you there for a lot of those that are still deficient. Yeah. And that's what people take, right? Things like calcium or magnesium, um, or, or even copper because of that. And so I do think a lot of people probably would benefit from, from actually taking, uh, not just a multivitamin mineral, but separate minerals, especially things like selenium, zinc, because it's typically not high enough as well in those type of multis. So why would you say you need to extra because you're not getting the high enough dose is what you're saying. But if you got a good dose as a multimineral, you'd be okay. But the things that I think are most important people take are magnesium. That's a miracle supplement. Zinc is another common one that I'll clinically

Starting point is 00:58:08 use. Calcium, often I think people can get from their diet if they upgrade things like chia seeds and tahini and sesame seeds and other things that have a really powerful, you know, mineral content. I think that sometimes, you know, we'll give extra, uh, iodine or chromium or boron, depending on the clinical situation. But what you're saying is that we sometimes need to take separate minerals because of this, and we need to measure our levels and we need to upgrade our diet. And that will help to address this sort of rampant mineral deficiency in our society. Exactly. And I think, you know, the other thing people don't realize is they don't think, oh, you know, I'm going to take this medication and it's going to work on this single pathway doing this one thing, right? A proton pump inhibitor for acid blocks this one pathway in your stomach.

Starting point is 00:58:55 The problem is that these are not like drugs. Nutrients are multifunctional substances that literally affect dozens to hundreds of different biological processes every second, right? You have 37 billion, billion chemical reactions every second in your body. And every one of those reactions needs an enzyme. And the vitamin minerals are the helpers for those enzymes. So magnesium might help regulate hundreds of different enzymes, all doing the things that you mentioned, whether it's keeping your blood pressure good or your

Starting point is 00:59:28 brain function or your DNA regulation. I mean, all of these things are so critical to our biology, and we're low in these nutrients, even though they're in small amounts, can have profound effects. I mean, really profound effects. And just an example,, I just, just, just an example. We, I used to work in the emergency room and we had this incredible scene where people would come in with alcoholism. They'd be completely wiped out, drunk and have never eaten food. They're very nutrition deficient. They get a thiamine deficiency and they have encephalopathy, which means they're basically psychotic. You just give them a vitamin and the psychosis goes away overnight, like literally. So that's the power

Starting point is 01:00:10 of these nutrients, incredibly small doses that can have profound biological effects. Right. And we didn't, I mean, we didn't even know about these issues until we started polishing rice, right? Or until people started doing these abnormal things to their bodies. And then all of a sudden you just give one, you give thiamine to someone and all of a sudden, right. It goes away. And so sometimes health really is that simple. It's just in the vitamin or mineral that you're deficient in. Well, this is such a great conversation. I think, you know, we're, we're willing to pay attention to this now more than ever, given this idea that we're more nutrition efficient ever, that COVID is actually exposing that. And we have, you know, over-nutrition of starch and sugar and under-nutrition of real nutrients.

Starting point is 01:00:55 And your book, The Mineral Fix, How to Optimize Our Mineral Intake for Energy, Longevity, Immunity, and Sleep and More is out now. It's great. It's on Amazon. Go there and get it. It's called The Mineral Fix. It'll really enlighten you. It's a big book. I think of it as like a Bible for minerals. I was like, whoa, this is a big book. It's going to cost me extra money to ship it home from Hawaii.

Starting point is 01:01:16 And I think we just can really, by tweaking our nutrition, particularly the micronutrients, can have a profound effect. And they don't just make expensive urine. Like we all were taught in medical school. So, so James, thank you for the work you do. Thank you for being so obsessive about nutrition and studying the literature and translating it for all of us. Your work is really quite amazing. And all the scientific papers you write are just fabulous. I've learned so much from them and continue what you're doing. And for those of you listening, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please share with your friends and family and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave a comment, tell us how you've been affected by mineral deficiencies and what you've learned about it. And we'd love to hear from you and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Starting point is 01:02:02 Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays.

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The Dr. Hyman Show - How Common Mineral Deficiencies Impact Our Health with Dr. James DiNicolantonio

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