The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Know If You're Magnesium Deficient And What To Do About It

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

This episode is sponsored by ButcherBox and Athletic Greens. Think of magnesium as the relaxation mineral. Anything that is tight, irritable, crampy, and stiff—whether it is a body part or even a mood—can be a sign of magnesium deficiency. This critical mineral is actually responsible for over 600 enzyme reactions and is found in all of your tissues—but mainly in your bones, muscles, and brain. You must have it for your cells to make energy, for many different chemical pumps to work, to stabilize membranes, and to help muscles relax. Yet, so many of us are deficient in this important mineral.  In today’s episode of a new series called Health Bites, I discuss why magnesium deficiency is a huge problem, why most of us are deficient, how to identify if you are magnesium deficient, and what to do about it.   This episode is sponsored by ButcherBox and Athletic Greens. ButcherBox makes it easy to get humanely raised meat and wild-caught, sustainable seafood by delivering it right to your doorstep. If you sign up at butcherbox.com/farmacy, ButcherBox will give you two pounds of ground beef free for one whole year. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now, when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 free travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Here are more details from the episode (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Why magnesium deficiency is so prevalent (3:26 / 00:57)  Signs of magnesium deficiency (4:11 / 1:48)  Magnesium use in a traditional hospital setting (5:37 / 3:15)  Testing your magnesium levels (7:26 / 5:02)  Food sources of magnesium (7:51 / 5:27)  Things that deplete magnesium in the body (8:11 / 5:50)  Other vitamins and minerals needed to ensure adequate magnesium levels (9:22 / 7:02) How to stop magnesium depletion (9:33 / 7:10)  Magnesium supplements (10:24 / 8:03)

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We want to make sure we don't keep losing magnesium, so cut down on the alcohol, the sugar, the coffee, the colas, learn how to relax. Meditation is super powerful. One of today's sponsors is ButcherBox. I'm always being asked how I get enough high-quality protein into my diet and where to find it. With all of the conventionally raised animal products flooding the market, it can be hard to find meat that actually supports your health goals instead of making you further away from them with the use of antibiotics and hormones and an unnatural inflammatory feedlot diet. And that's why I love grass-fed ground beef from

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quality protein in your own diet, be sure to check out the grass-fed beef from ButcherBox along with all their other humanely raised antibiotic and hormone-free meats. They make eating well easy, delicious, and accessible. Right now, ButcherBox is proud to give new members two pounds of ground beef for a year. To receive this offer, go to butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy. That's butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, to receive two pounds of ground beef for one whole year. Wow. If you're like me, you could probably use a little extra nutritional boost in your day.

Even if you're eating a whole foods diet, it's super hard to address all of the nutritional gaps because of our poor soils that the crops grow in and just the general stressors and toxins we encounter in our day-to-day lives. And that's where AG1 from Athletic Greens comes in. Their incredible supplement has 75 different nutrients that work together to fill out the gaps in our diet. I take one AG1 every day and I've noticed that I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. Plus, it works with any keto diet, any paleo diet, vegan, dairy-free, even gluten-free. I love this product because it's like investing in an all-in-one nutritional insurance plan. And it's not just me. Professional athletes and health experts recommend AG1 too.

I hope you'll choose to join me in boosting your vitality by trying AG1. Right now, they are going to give you 10 free travel plaques with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. And I'm excited to introduce to you a new feature of The Doctor's Pharmacy called Health Bites, little nuggets of information that you can use to make yourself healthy and learn

more about how your body works. And the one today we're going to be talking about is magnesium, one of my favorite topics because magnesium insufficiency or deficiency is so common, so underdiagnosed, such a huge cause of so many chronic illnesses. And it's something that most doctors don't know how to test for, look for, or treat. And we're going to talk all about that today. Now let's talk about the data because it is kind of scary. You know, magnesium is so important and I'm going to explain why in a minute. But it looks like about 50% of Americans are not getting enough magnesium. And why is that?

It's because there's a decrease in our diet, in the magnesium in our foods because of processed foods. The soils are not able to actually give the plants the magnesium because they're so depleted and lack organic matter that the bacteria in the soil help the plants extract the magnesium from the soil. We drink a lot of coffee, alcohol, sugar, all which deplete magnesium. We're stressed, stress depletes magnesium. So there's a lot of reason why we have low magnesium. And it's super common. And it's so common that it's linked

to heart disease. It's linked to so many chronic illnesses and the costs are huge. So what are the signs of magnesium deficiency? Now, when I first started learning about this, I was shocked because I had treated all sorts of problems when I was in medical school, when I was a resident, as a doctor and so many symptoms we didn't even think of as being related to magnesium, but they are like muscle cramps or muscle twitching, insomnia, anxiety, irritability, sensitivity to loud noises, palpitations in your heart, constipation, spasms in your butt, anal spasms, headaches, migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, high blood pressure, PMS, menstrual cramps, irritable bowel, all these and lots more are

connected to magnesium. It's a critical mineral. It's involved in over 600 or 700 different chemical reactions in the body. It is the fourth most abundant mineral in your body. And it plays a role in so many different chemical reactions that if you don't have enough of it, your body starts not to work. So anything that's irritable or twitchy or crampy,

it's likely magnesium deficiency. And that's why I call magnesium the relaxation mineral because it just relaxes everything. Think about taking an Epsom salt bath, which is magnesium sulfate. It relaxes you at night and it relaxes your muscles and it helps form muscles because it helps the recovery of the muscles. Your muscles need magnesium in order to relax. So it's super, super important and it works on so many different

levels in the body. So when I was in medical school, it's kind of a joke because it's kind of the last resort we use when nothing else was working and none of the drugs worked. So for example, if someone came in with a heart attack and they went into an arrhythmia where their heart was just beating out of control, we give them all these drugs, epinephrine, this drug, that drug. And then at the last resort, if nothing else works,

we give them intravenous magnesium. Why don't we do that first? Or if, for example example they're having seizures and they're for example preeclampsia which is a pregnancy condition what do we do we give them which is you know irritability of the brain we give them magnesium or if a woman comes in in preterm labor like you know where their uterus is contracting then all of a sudden uh it's an emergency right the baby's going to deliver we give them intravenous magnesium as a treatment if uh someone is constipated and their bowels are not

or spas and their spasm basically are not going we give them magnesium citrate uh if we're doing a colonoscopy prep we give them magnesium or milk of magnesium you might have heard about that so we use it all the time in life-threatening situations in the emergency room, in the ICU, in the cardiac intensive care unit. And it's kind of makes me laugh that we don't think about using it just everyday medicine. So there's over 116,000 different medical references on magnesium. And because it's not a drug, nobody's pushing it. You don't really hear that much about it. But it's super common. Apparently, 65% of people admitted to the ICU, the intensive care unit, have magnesium deficiency. So if you want to stay out of the ICU, take magnesium.

It also seems to be about 45% of the population is not getting enough magnesium in their diet. And if you check your blood magnesium level, it's not that great because that 99% of the magnesium is in your cells. So by the time it's low in your blood, you're really screwed. So the key is to do red cell magnesium, but there's also another test called magnesium loading, but it's such a safe mineral. Unless you have kidney failure, you can't hurt yourself with it. You'll just get diarrhea if you take too much of it. So why are we so deficient? Well, I mentioned a little bit of the reasons.

Most of the foods we can eat contain no magnesium. What do you get magnesium? Nuts, seeds, grains, and beans, and greens. And not the staples of most people's diet. All the processed food has no magnesium. Sugar in our refined diet has no magnesium. So it's really low in most of the foods we eat. And a lot of what we do, like I said, we drink too much alcohol, we drink too much coffee, we have soda, like colas are full of

phosphoric acid that depletes magnesium. Often if you're sweating a lot, like I exercise and I sweat a lot, I make sure I take electrolytes because I want to replenish my magnesium. Stress if you're sweating a lot, like I exercise and I sweat a lot, I make sure I take electrolytes because I want to replenish my magnesium. Stress. I read a study about Kosovo during the Balkan War. And if you had high levels of stress, people would excrete more magnesium. They literally pee it out. So antibiotics are a factor. Diuretics. People you take for high blood pressure. High blood pressure is blood vessels that are too spasmy and magnesium helps relax them. But one of the drugs we use is a diuretic to really kind of remove fluid from the body, but that causes you to lose magnesium. So it's kind of weird. So there's a lot of things that are a factor, but most of the problems we

have are just because of our crappy diet and our lack of magnesium in our foods. So make sure you get plenty of those foods like nuts, seeds, avocados, beans, dark, oh, chocolate. That's a good one. Dark chocolate's a good one for magnesium. And also sea vegetables, seaweed. I encourage you to eat seaweed. Great, great source of magnesium. Now you need a lot of other minerals and vitamins with magnesium to make them work, like B6, vitamin D, selenium. So you need those all to kind of work together as a team. And we want to make sure we don't keep losing magnesium. So cut down on the alcohol, the sugar, the coffee, the colas. Learn how to relax. Meditation is super powerful. And make sure you look at your drugs.

A lot of people talk about, you know, nutrient drug interactions. Like, oh, we shouldn't be taking this because, you know, oh, don't take too much of vitamin K or whatever because you're taking a blood thinner. Okay, fine. That's right. But what about the other way around? The drugs interfere with your vitamins and minerals.

So like if you're taking an acid blocking drug, you're going to prevent B12 absorption and even magnesium and zinc absorption. Or if you're taking a diuretic, you can lose magnesium. So you want to make sure that you reduce your drugs if you can, or switch to different drugs that are not depleting the nutrients, or that you actually take the nutrients as a replacement. Now let's talk about supplements because I think that we need to be thinking about how do we get enough magnesium. So diet is first, right?

Getting rid of the things that cause you to lose magnesium is second. And then we need to be taking probably 300, 400 milligrams a day. I take about 400 or 600. I take it at night. It's great for sleep. It's great for insomnia.

It's great for muscle cramps. It's great for constipation. It's great for headaches. It's great for sleep. It's great for insomnia. It's great for muscle cramps. It's great for constipation. It's great for headaches. It's great for anxiety. It's great for palpitations. It's great for so, so many things. But you might need more. I mean, some people need up to a thousand milligrams. I have to tell you a quick magnesium story of a patient. She was a radiation oncology resident. So she was a doctor and she suffered terrible migraines. And she came to see me and she started telling me about these migraines that were so bad. She was a doctor and she suffered terrible migraines. And she came to see me and she started telling me about these migraines that were so bad. She had to take, you know, narcotics and Zofran, which is like a chemo drug for nausea. And she still could barely function.

And she was going to have to quit her residency. And she, you know, she worked all this time to be a doctor, but she couldn't function. I says, okay, well now as a functional medicine doctor, I just don't want to know about her headaches. I want to know about everything. So I started talking about all of her symptoms. It's, oh, anxiety, palpitations, muscle cramps, constipation. I said, how often do you go to the bathroom? She said, I'm pretty regular. I said, well, how often do you go? She was like, go every week. I'm like, what do you mean? That's not regular. So it's regular for me. I go every week. I'm like, no, you're supposed to go every day or two or three times a day. By the way, that's how often you're supposed to go. And so she was severely magnesium depleted. I gave her a thousand milligrams or even more over a number of days,

and she dramatically changed. Her headaches went away, her constipation went away, her palpitations, her anxiety, her insomnia, her muscle cramps all went away by getting enough magnesium. Now, what kind of magnesium should you take? They're not all the same. If you take magnesium carbonate or magnesium oxide, those are things you'll get in a drugstore maybe in crappy cheap magnesium, but it's not absorbed well. So you want to get chelated magnesium. You want to get magnesium glycinate or citrate if you tend to be more constipated. Magnesium threonate is great for the brain. There's many, many different kinds of magnesiums that you can take, but do not take

the carbonate or the oxide or the gluconate. Those tend not to be very well absorbed. Now, if you take too much magnesium citrate, you'll get diarrhea. So you want to use magnesium glycinate. You take other minerals in a multi-mineral complex. Also, hot bath is great. Epsom salt baths. I love that every night, especially in the winter with some lavender drops. It really relaxes me. Magnesium relaxes me and I just drop right off to sleep.

So magnesium, Epsom salt baths are great. And one caveat, if you have kidney disease, you can take too much magnesium. So you want to be careful there, but work with your doctor about that. So magnesium is super important. It's a relaxation mineral. We're all low in it. Pretty much, uh, stop doing the things that make you lose magnesium. Start doing the things that make you actually get magnesium in your diet and keep the magnesium

in your body and pick the right supplements. And, um, that's it for this week's Health Byte on The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you liked it and learned about magnesium. If you love this podcast and you think someone's suffering from magnesium deficiency, send it to them on social media. Leave a comment, how has magnesium treatment helped you? Maybe you have a story you want to share. We'd love to hear from you. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

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