The Dr. Hyman Show - What Are The Symptoms Of Magnesium Deficiency?

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker. The RDA, or Recommended Dietary Allowance, for minerals is set to prevent deficiency, not to optimize health. Yet even small amounts of mineral insufficiency can lead to big problems. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans are deficient in the mineral and essential nutrient magnesium. In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. James DiNicolantonio, Dr. Todd LePine, and Dr. Elizabeth Boham about the importance of magnesium and selecting the best form of magnesium for your personal needs. Dr. James DiNicolantonio is a Doctor of Pharmacy and a cardiovascular research scientist. He has contributed extensively to health policy and has testified in front of the Canadian Senate regarding the harms of added sugars. He serves as the associate editor of the British Medical Journal’s Open Heart, a journal published in partnership with the British Cardiovascular Society, and is on the editorial advisory boards of several other medical journals. He is the author or coauthor of over 250 publications in the medical literature. He also is the author of five bestselling health books, The Salt Fix, Superfuel, The Longevity Solution, The Immunity Fix, and The Mineral Fix. Dr. Todd LePine graduated from Dartmouth Medical School and is board certified in Internal Medicine, specializing in Integrative Functional Medicine. He is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner. Prior to joining The UltraWellness Center, he worked as a physician at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, MA. Dr. LePine’s focus at The UltraWellness Center is to help his patients achieve optimal health and vitality by restoring the natural balance to both the mind and the body. Dr. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker.  Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Mark Hyman Dr. James DiNicolantonio Dr. Todd LePine Dr. Elizabeth Boham

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Anything that's irritable or twitchy or crampy, it's likely magnesium deficiency. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Inflammation is at the root of virtually every disease, whether you're talking about brain health, digestive health, joint pain and arthritis, or metabolic disease, it all comes back to chronic inflammation. So if you're looking to improve your overall health, it starts with reducing unhealthy levels of inflammation in the body. And that's why I'm excited to introduce to you Paleo Valley's Turmeric Complex.

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cold water and drink it once a day. I take AG1 every day and replenish my nutrients and optimize my health, and I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. I take AG1 every day and replenish my nutrients and optimize my health, and I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. And right now, Athletic Greens is giving away 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We're currently seeing an epidemic of mineral deficiencies and especially magnesium.

Unfortunately, most Americans suffer from magnesium deficiency due to a diet lacking in magnesium-rich foods and mineral depletion in our soils. Magnesium is a crucial nutrient that promotes relaxation, improves sleep, supports cognitive health, and so much more. In today's episode, we feature conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on why magnesium deficiency is so common, how to check to see if you're deficient, and why it's important to supplement. First, Dr. Hyman shares everything you may want to know about magnesium. He then speaks with Dr. James DiNicolantonio on a magnesium deficiency case study, with Dr. Todd Lapine on why migraines are often due to magnesium deficiency,

and with Dr. Elizabeth Boehm on how nutrients work in the body and which form of magnesium you may want to take. Let's dive in. 50% of Americans are not getting enough magnesium. And why is that? It's because there's a decrease in our diet and 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 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, and I, you know, when I was in medical school, it's kind of a joke because, you know, 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, they're having seizures and they're, for example, from preeclampsia, which is a pregnancy condition, what do we do? We give them, which is, you know, irritability of the brain, 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, it's an emergency, right? The baby's going to deliver. We give them intravenous magnesium as a treatment. If someone is constipated and their bowels are not, and and their spasm basically are not going, we give them magnesium citrate. If we're doing a colonoscopy prep, we give them magnesium or milk of magnesium. You might've 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 that's 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 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 um so why why are we so deficient well i mentioned a little bit of the reasons uh 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, I read a study about Kosovo during the Balkan War. And if you had high levels

of stress, people would excrete more magnesium. They'd 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 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, oh, we shouldn't be taking this because, 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 four 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 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 talking 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 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. Oh, anxiety, palpitations, muscle cramps, constipation. I said, how often do you 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 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. 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 take the right supplements. We have many, many minerals that are all dynamically interacting together that regulate thousands of different biological functions. And these people think, oh, vitamins and minerals are just 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, 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, 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,

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 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 have documented before, but she had classic signs of magnesium deficiency. She was a doctor, radiation oncology resident, actually worked at Mayo Clinic and seen the top headache specialists had intractable migraines, was on narcotics and Zofran, which is like a chemo anti-nausea drug. And so I talked to her and I said, well, tell me about your other symptoms besides the migraines. I said, how's your digestion? So, you know, I'm pretty regular. I'm like, oh, 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

regular for me. I go every week. And 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 magnesium deficiency. And that's because magnesium is a relaxation mineral. And, and when I gave her magnesium, I literally had to give her 2000 or more milligrams a day in order to get her to 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 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. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here.

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studies and personalized for your body. For a limited time, you can get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store when you sign up at InsideTracker.com slash Dr. Hyman. So if you're ready to get a crystal clear picture of what's going on inside your body, along with science-backed recommendations to optimize what's not working, then visit InsideTracker.com slash Dr. Hyman. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. 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 can be deficient in copper, but the inflammation is 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 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, okay, 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% are overweight, it's normal to be overweight. It doesn't mean it's optimal. 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 blood sugar being normal up to 100. 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, we don't want to make sure we have optimal levels. And, you know, magnesium is an interesting phenomenon. When I, you know, started practicing magnesium, it was one of those miracle drugs that I started using in functional medicine.

It's like incredible. It helped 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 abnormal, 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 deplete the body of magnesium. You don't 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 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. So besides magnesium, what are the other tests? If you're, if you're, you know, wanting to know what your nutritional status, 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, uh, copper. Yeah. So the best test, um, that 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 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 perfills 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 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 have on our healthspan and lifespan in terms of longevity and premature aging?

And how do we get to avoid premature aging and 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 have 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 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. 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, the cells, 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 there is this balance we talk about in the book that it's not also just about 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. There are some key nutrients that are often low in people who have migraines. Absolutely. What's the number one nutrient that you would be thinking? I would say magnesium. Yeah, magnesium. Yeah, magnesium. Now the interesting thing, now this is also another thing where you can sort of connect the dots here,

is magnesium, which is such a powerful, you know, it's involved in like 500 enzyme pathways in the body, is magnesium, when you get to a high enough level, is actually a calcium channel blocker. And guess what doctors use to prevent migraines? Calcium channel blockers. It's a natural muscle relaxant.

Yeah. It's actually, I remember, you know, when I was an ER doctor, it was one of the things we used. When none of the drugs worked, we would use IV or intravenous magnesium for migraine patients. Remember that? Absolutely. And not only that, but we use, in the ER, we use IV magnesium for heart arrhythmias, you know,

life-threatening ones like Torsade de Pointe and VTAC. We also use it for status asthmaticus. All right. You use it for preeclampsia. It's a very powerful element. It's a relaxant. And what you're saying is funny to me because I remember, you know, when you learn these ACLS courses, the advanced cardiac life support and how to run a code and bring people back from death when their heart's not working. And they use all these drugs, drug, drug, drug, drug, drug. And the last thing, if nothing else works, they use magnesium. Why don't you use it first? And then like if someone's got hearts not beating right, you give magnesium and it fixes it. Or people are coming in in preterm labor or have like this preeclampsia, which is high blood

pressure in pregnancy with seizures. They use IV magnesium use it as asthma like you said to relax the lungs they use iv magnesium uh it's pretty funny even for people who are constipated they give them milk of magnesia so it's kind of it's funny doctors don't really think about it and most of us about 40% of us are low or deficient in magnesium oh yeah and i remember this one patient i had who was a radiation oncology resident back when we were at Canyon Ranch and She was just debilitated with migraines. She had the worst migraine She was on narcotics and zofran, which is like a chemo drug that you for nausea. It was that severe She could barely work and she came to see me and I started asking her questions

And this is how you find things out in functional medicine. You try to connect the dots. So usually you can find out from a story if it's a premenstrual migraine, if it's a food-related migraine, if it's a, this is why you're saying we can actually figure this out as functional medicine doctors. And it turned out, you know, I started asking her questions and she had muscle cramps. She had constipation. I said, how often do you go to the bathroom? Are you regular? She goes, yeah, I'm regular. I said, how often do you go? She was like, go every week. I said, that's not regular. She says, regular for me, I go every week. You know, severely constipated, muscle cramps, headaches, insomnia, irritability, anxiety,

palpitations, sensitive and loud noises. These were all symptoms of low magnesium. And so it turned out she needed like normal doses 200, 400 milligrams. She needed like 2000, 000 milligrams a day of magnesium and literally her migraines went away yeah and that's sort of her constipation and all those other symptoms so it's it's often really often very simple if you know what to do yeah absolutely yeah uh are there other nutrients that you would think of that might be helpful because you mentioned mitochondria and there's a couple of nutrients there that can really yeah i mean

there's there's some uh the one i think some of the key nutrients are vitamin B2, vitamin B6, and also CoQ10. Those are probably some of my key mitochondrial nutrients that really can have an impact along with magnesium. 68% of Americans are not getting enough magnesium. And so 68% are not meeting the RDI, the recommended dietary intake. And we have to remember that that RDI was set for just sufficiency. So not having a deficiency in magnesium. So what that means is those recommendations are not set at what is optimal either for that individual person. So they're just the minimum

requirement in a sense. So 68% of us are not getting enough magnesium, 40% are not getting enough zinc, 78% are not getting enough folate. Maybe even 90 plus percent are not getting enough of the omega-3s in their diet. So we're seeing significant nutritional deficiencies and that's leading to so many issues in terms of chronic disease and also just feeling awful, right? So what's fascinating to me is, you know, when I started learning about all this, you know, I learned about nutrition in medical schools, like, okay, vitamin C prevents scurvy and vitamin D prevents rickets and vitamin A prevents, A prevents blindness, and B vitamins prevent this and that. And I never really understood why they were important

other than preventing deficiency diseases, which is sort of why we first learned about them was from these diseases. And then I began to understand this and began to think about, you know, what do vitamins and minerals actually do in the body? Right. But you got to think about, you know, what do vitamins and minerals actually do in the body? Right. And there's 37 billion, billion chemical reactions that happen in the body every second. 37 billion, billion.

That's crazy, right? I don't even know what that is. It's like a, because a billion, you know, I don't know. A lot. It's a lot. And every single one of those chemical reactions requires helpers. And the helpers are... Co-factors. Are vitamins and minerals.

Vitamins and minerals, yeah. Right? And one of the other shocking things I learned was that our DNA, one third of our DNA codes for enzymes. So enzymes are catalysts that convert one molecule to another. So all these chemical reactions I talked about all need catalysts or enzymes. One third of our entire genetic material is coding for these enzymes, and there's variations in how they work that make one person require more or less of a different nutrient, right? So some, for example, is you need more B vitamins if you have certain variation.

You might need more folate or B12 or B6. And if you take the normal amount, quote, the RDI, which is not the optimal amount to create health, it's the minimum amount necessary to prevent a deficiency disease. Yes. So how much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Probably 60 milligrams. How much vitamin C do you need to optimize your immune system to not get COVID?

Probably 4,000 milligrams, right? And it's different for each person, like you get COVID, probably 4,000 milligrams, right? And it's different for each person, like you're saying, based on our genetic makeup, right? And everything else going on in our body, not just our genetics, but what other diseases we're dealing with, how we digest and absorb our nutrients. I mean, so many things impact our nutritional needs. Yeah, it's so true. Your gut microbiome determines what's going on with your nutritional levels. And you may not be producing the vitamins in your gut, like vitamin K or biotin,

because you have a bad gut. So it's so fascinating to me. And really, in functional medicine, our focus is on nutrition as the first line of therapy. And it's both using food as medicine, but also understanding the role of key nutrients and playing a role in how they function. So, you know, you and I have been in this field for a long time and, you know, it's easy to be sort of a little bit arrogant and think that, you know, the traditional doctor, well, you know, people eat food, they don't eat vitamins, waste of time, waste of money. But we get kind of humbled by seeing actually what happens when we test people. And I think despite doctors saying this, you know, when you look at the data, I think 72% of doctors recommend supplements to their patients

and 79% take them themselves. So whatever they're telling you, it's interesting that, you know, and we see studies that show, oh, vitamin D doesn't affect heart disease or cancer and omega-3 fats don't really benefit heart disease or cancer prevention. So we see these studies that are conflicting all the time. You know, I think that happens for so many reasons, right, why those studies are conflicting. One is because we're putting everybody in that same group. So we're not personalizing the approach.

And so it depends on people's health status, how they're digesting and absorbing, how their nutritional status in general. Are they deficient to begin with? What are their genetic needs? So that really impacts how somebody shifts or improves from when we give them those nutrients. So I think that one of the biggest issues with research is we're not looking at individual variations and SNPs in somebody's makeup, their genetic variations that impact what they need. And so it just sort of lumps everybody into one category.

Yeah. So someone, for example, had like a vitamin D receptor gene that made them require a high dose of vitamin D and you took 100,000 people and you saw them taking vitamin D, well, you think they're taking enough, but it might not be enough for that person. And if you actually took that subset and you studied them and you gave them the right amount to get their blood levels optimally, it might be different. It will absolutely be different. So we know with fish oil, for example, if people are eating a couple servings of good fatty fish a week, then fish oil supplements might not be as helpful for them.

But when people aren't eating that, then fish oil supplements make a huge difference and help lower triglycerides and decrease risk of heart disease. So we know that it really is dependent so much on your individual diet as well as all those other things we've spoken about. That's true. I always say, if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything, right? If your omega-3 levels are already good and you take omega-3, it doesn't do anything, right? So I think the studies are challenging. And often, like you said, it's hard to distinguish what the

overall health of the patient is. And so if these patients are eating crappy diets, if they're smoking, they're drinking, they're not exercising, taking a vitamin is not going to help them. They're not that powerful in that sense, right? If you clean up everything and then you add them in, they can be extremely effective and powerful. So that's not to say that if you're overweight and unhealthy, you shouldn't take supplements because I think they will help, but they work much better if you clean up house first. Comprehensive of program, right? So let's talk about how we learn in our practice, the Ultra Wellness Center, about what people's nutritional status is. How do we figure that out?

Well, so we look at it from multiple different angles, right? First, it starts with a physical exam. You know, what is their waist to hip ratio? How are they holding on to weight in their body? Then we look to look for signs of nutritional deficiencies. Maybe their hair is dry or their skin is dry or they have different spots on their nails, which could indicate zinc deficiency. We look at their diet intake. Wait, wait, wait. The nutritional physical exam, I just want to pause because you

teach that course at the Institute for Functional Medicine. And it's fascinating when you learn as a doctor what the clinical signs are of vitamin deficiencies, right? So we know the obvious ones that, for example, if you have scurvy, you get no gum issues, right? If you have B vitamin deficiencies, you get little cracks in your mouth called chelosis. If you have white spots in your nose, it might be zinc deficiency. If it's, for example... Bumps on the back of your arms, you know, or dry skin, we think about vitamin A a lot. We think about zinc. Yeah. And my favorite test is a vitamin D

test. You know what that one is? Yes. Tell us about that. So when you're, if you bang on somebody's leg and they have pain, then that could be a sign that they're low in vitamin D. Yeah. So if you take your thumb and you press right now, ready to go, press right now on their shin bone. And if it's tender, then it means you're probably vitamin D deficient because it makes your bone soft. Now, I take vitamin D, so my bone doesn't hurt at all when I press on it. You're pressing right now. Yeah.

Mine doesn't hurt either. Yeah, you go. I'm taking my vitamin D. I'm taking my vitamin D. So you can do a simple test. So there's a lot of things clinically you can figure out that are signs of nutritional deficiency. That's the first thing.

And I think that's really important to look and examine because biomarkers are not perfect, which are lab tests. But they can be very helpful, but they're not perfect at determining everybody's nutritional deficiencies. For example, magnesium. We know that magnesium, as we talked about, it's a very common deficiency. But sometimes the serum magnesium and red blood cell magnesium can be normal and somebody can still be deficient in magnesium and would benefit from more magnesium whether it's

dietary or supplement wise well that's the other thing we take a detailed history so by actually question ears you can determine mm-hmm what your nutritional deficiencies are so I wrote my book ultramind I literally had question ears in there I don't know if you're zinc deficient, vitamin D deficient, magnesium deficient, folate deficient, you know, so forth. And you can actually do these questionnaires and you're going to get a pretty sense if you're deficient or not. And then you look at their diet too. You know, you look to see what they're eating and what they're not eating. You know, when somebody's a vegan, you're thinking more about, okay,

I've got to really look for B12. I've got to really look for issues with iron. I've got to really think about zinc and the omega-3 fats because they're more common deficiencies, you know, yeah, if you're not eating any animal. Iodine, because you don't eat fish, right? So there's things we have to think about depending on what their diet is like and their digestive system. So we do a comprehensive approach. And the biomarkers can be really helpful too. They're not perfect.

Like blood tests or what other tests? Yeah, so we can look at blood. We look at urine. We do this panel called the ION panel. And it's this all-over nutrition panel. It gives us so much good information. It tells us about amino acid levels. Those are the components of protein in the blood. Building blocks of protein, yeah.

Yep. And it tells us about omega levels, omega-3 levels, omega-6 levels. It tells us about mineral levels. It tells us about all those steps of the mitochondria, steps of the Krebs cycle, which need nutrients to work properly. Like you were talking about, those cofactors, the vitamins and minerals that help those reactions work so we can take our food and turn it into ATP or energy. So when we have deficiencies in certain nutrients, we'll see shifts in this panel called the organic acid testing, which, you know, that's really helpful.

It's a urine test. It's a urine test. So that's really important. So what you're saying essentially is that we use a lot of different kinds of testing yes because your typical doctor will check your blood levels but if you check your blood levels of folate or magnesium they go it's fine you're not necessarily fine so each nutrient requires a very different approach depending on the nutrient so vitamin d yeah you can check your blood level of vitamin d you got to check the right one but it's pretty, yeah, you can check your blood level of vitamin D. You ought to check the right one, but it's pretty good. You can check your blood levels of omega-3s,

pretty good, but you want to check in the right way. Some like folate or B12 or magnesium, not so much. Not so good, right? And I think you mentioned magnesium. It's a really good point. So a lot of doctors will check magnesium. Now, if it's low on a regular blood test, it means you are in big trouble. You're really low. And then you can check red cell magnesium, which is a little bit better. But the true test is something called a magnesium loading test, which is what? So you give magnesium and then you collect urine for a period of time. So that magnesium, depending on the level of sufficiency that somebody has in their body, that will impact how much magnesium that spills over into their urine. So it's not a test we do very often,

but it's, you really want to know, you got to give someone a load of magnesium. If they pee it out, they're good. If they hold onto it and nothing comes out in the urine, they're pretty low. And you know, and you were mentioning folate and B12. I see this all the time. People come in with a B12 level that their doctors did and it's normal. And so then they go, okay, I don't need B12. But many times that's not really telling us about functional markers of B12 or what is sufficient for that individual person. So we'll do things like methylmalonic acid and homocysteine. They're more functional markers of the B vitamins that give us a lot more information than just a serum level of a vitamin. So in other words, is it doing what it's supposed to do in the body? And if it's not, you're going to see a backup of these other compounds that we don't normally test.

Exactly. You know, doctors, just check your B12, folate, they're fine. You may not be fine. Yes. And I've seen many patients who are not fine and who have very severe deficiencies and need different types. And often you can tell if someone needs a certain type of a nutrient. Looking at their genetics and their blood tests, you can tell if they need this form or that form of the nutrient. So it becomes very sophisticated in an approach to functional medicine. I mean, I think that's a great example of where a lot of supplements out there are not great because they're not giving the right type of nutrients within the supplement.

So for example, if a supplement is less expensive, they may use folic acid in the multivitamin. And not everybody, because of their genetic makeup, can utilize folic acid and use it for what the body needs folic acid for, folate for. Yeah. So folic acid is a synthetic form of folate. They may increase risk of problems. Yes. Increased risk may be of cancer, right? Yeah.

So not everybody can take folate in the form of folic acid and utilize it if they have a shift in this, if they have a genetic variation called the MTHFR gene, and there's others as well. And so those are things we look at as well. And when we use vitamins, we use really good quality ones, ones that the body's more able to utilize, like a methylfolate form. And that makes a huge difference for people. Yeah. And in so many aspects, actually picking the vitamin, right,

is not just the form of the nutrient, but is it the form that's bioavailable? Is it absorbed? What is in with it that can prevent its absorption? You know, what exactly is it? So you can say, well, I need magnesium. I'm just going to go to the store and get some magnesium. It's usually magnesium oxide, which is really cheap magnesium. It's in most supplements, but doesn't really get absorbed very well and may not be effective.

Right. So magnesium oxide and also magnesium citrate, right, they're more likely to pull water into the gut. And so they'll loosen up the stools. For some people, they need that, and that's good. But it's not as well absorbed as like a chelated form of magnesium, like magnesium glycinate, which is much better absorbed into the body. So depending on what you're using your magnesium for,

you want to be making sure you're choosing the right one. Yeah. So what's different about here at the Ultra Wellness and what we do in functional medicine is that there's a really deep understanding of the role of nutrition and nutrients in health. And what's so important about these is it's not that they're single function compounds, right? So if you take a drug, it usually hits one pathway, does one thing, right? When you take magnesium, it affects 300 different enzymes and has many, many other functions in the body. It's phenomenal. Magnesium is an amazing mineral and it's so good for us in so many ways. And when people are magnesium deficient, we see all sorts of issues from depression, anxiety, muscle cramps,

hypertension, asthma, restless leg syndrome, diabetes, more insulin resistance. So magnesium is so- Don't forget constipation. Oh my goodness. I forgot constipation. Headaches. Headaches. Yep. Right? Migraines. Yeah. Twitchy muscles. people get twitchy eyes yeah i had a lot of twitchy eyes in residency i love magnesium it helped my twitchy eye so people get treated for all these problems right they get treated for constipation they get treated for and we and this the sort of ironic thing about magnesium is that it's used all the time in medicine as a last resort. Right? So when a woman comes in who's in preterm labor and their

uterus is contracting like crazy, they get IV magnesium. If a woman is high blood pressure in pregnancy, they come in, they're about to have a seizure, they give them IV magnesium. Why? Because it works better than anything else. If someone's having a cardiac arrest and arrhythmia, when all the other drugs fail, give them magnesium as the last step because it helps to relax the heart muscle so it's the i call it the relaxation mineral so anything that's twitchy irritable or tense whether it's anxiety insomnia constipation muscle cramps twitchy blood vessels high blood pressure twitchy heart which is you know palpitations you know twitchy emotions which is anxiety but all these things are related to insufficient magnesium and

they're treated, you know, take Xanax for anxiety, you know, take a laxative for constipation, take a migraine pill for your headache, take, you know, this or that for this or that. And it's unfortunate because it just, this is such a simple solution. And we know it's a vicious cycle, right? We know that chronic stress, when we're under chronic stress, that that causes our body to excrete more magnesium in the urine. So we become more deficient in magnesium. Chronic stress? Who's got that? I know, right? So then you become more deficient in magnesium. Stressless time right now. And then you get more anxious, and then you use up more of your magnesium. So we know that when

we're dealing with chronic stress, we're using up our magnesium, we're excreting more magnesium, and we need even more magnesium because that was what helps us feel calm. And so it's... Well, go through all the things that actually cause us to lose magnesium. So, I mean, we... Stress. Stress, a big one. It's huge. I remember, if I just interrupt, I remember one study I read of Kosovo, and they did magnesium studies.

And they found that people in Kosovo, under all that war and stress, they had really huge amounts of excretion of magnesium, whereas people who weren't in that environment didn't. Yeah. Right? We know that people who take, like, proton pump inhibitors. Acid blockers. Acid blockers, yeah. And, I mean, like, Protonix and Prilosec and Nexium and all those drugs. Yeah, that, like that decreases your magnesium absorption.

So, you know, just depending on your medication, that can deplete your body of magnesium. Diuretics. Yep. Blood pressure pills, which you need magnesium to control your blood pressure. You're taking a pill that causes you to lose magnesium. Right. Again, that vicious cycle that we see all the time. Yeah.

Alcohol? Alcohol depletes your body of magnesium and all the B vitamins. So I think that's important. Smoking. Well, nobody's into smoking. Sugar. Yeah. And my favorite of all of them, coffee. Yeah. Right. Coffee causes magnesium loss. So you live an American lifestyle where you're drinking coffee, drinking alcohol, lots of stress. You have, you know, probably a pretty grubby diet. And then you take a proton pump inhibitor. You take an acid blocker. You take an acid blocker if you're eating a grubby diet. And then on top of that, you're eating a very low magnesium diet. So talk about how that plays a role. You know, magnesium is in so many of our foods. Magnesium's in our...

Well, not the foods we actually eat. Well, yeah, but it's in our nuts and seeds, our beans and legumes, our vegetables. Greens. Greens, yep, our vegetables. And it's in whole grains like quinoa and buckwheat. So it's in a lot of our food. But when you take, for example, brown rice and you make it white rice, you deplete... About 90 plus percent of the magnesium is released or is lost in that processing. And so, and they don't spray that back on, you know, they'll spray back on some B vitamins, but not the magnesium. So when people are eating refined and processed foods, they're getting a more magnesium deficient diet. So even sometimes people don't even realize they're getting

refined and processed foods. I mean, sometimes people are like, I have a healthy diet, but they forget about that piece of toast at breakfast or the crackers at lunch that are made up of, have white flour in them and that are more magnesium deficient. So, and as we get older, we can't really eat as many calories as we used to. So we're more likely to have problems over time as well. I think, you know, the diet is so magnesium deficient, our lifestyle is so magnesium depleting, and so we're kind of getting it from both ends. We see this as one of the most common problems in our practice that is undiagnosed.

The patients think we're geniuses because all these problems they've suffered from just go away and they're like wow how did you know like you know it's not that hard it's just good medicine and we know I mean this is not functional medicine it's just medicine and it's often being missed and let's talk about the patient you had and talk about what happened with this patient because I think putting a face on this is going to be very helpful. So I had a 68-year-old woman who came in to see me. And she was really struggling with chronic pain. She had anxiety. She had hypertension. So she had elevated blood pressure. She was pre-diabetic. She had restless legs. So she had poor sleep. And

her legs were like, she couldn't really calm down at night because her legs were sort of twitchy um like we were talking about and um she had constipation so she had all these signs anxiety that too blood pressure yes so you know yeah yeah so she came in the average patient we see here at the old center right and of course we did a comprehensive program for her but so many of her symptoms were pointing to low magnesium. So we did a comprehensive program. We changed her diet. She's like one of those people who felt like she was on a really good, healthy diet. But when you look deeper, especially for her level of activity, she was wasting calories, right? She was wasting calories on that piece of toast at breakfast and crackers at lunch and a little bit of cake at dinner, right? So she wasn't eating, you know, she had

a lot of vegetables in her diet. She had a lot of good, healthy foods in her diet, but she also had some of these other things that just took away from the nutrient density of her diet. So I always work with all my patients on nutrient density, because I think that's such an important point, right? You want to have, you want to be choosing the foods that have the most nutrients per calorie. And especially as we get older, or depending on our level of activity, we really can't waste a lot of calories on foods

that have poor nutrient content, or low nutrient density, right? In my first book we called it the nutrient to calorie ratio. Which is how many nutrients per calories are you getting? So broccoli has a lot of nutrients, very few calories. Yes. Coca-Cola has a lot of calories, but no nutrients, right? Right. So for her, we worked on shifting her diet.

We did an elimination diet for her because she also needed to pull away some common inflammatory foods. But we then shifted instead of, you know, choosing a piece of toast at breakfast, we had, we had her have some sweet potatoes with her with her omelet. And then at lunch, instead of having crackers, we put some quinoa on her salad, ways that you get more nutrients per calorie and more magnesium, right? Because we, and we also gave her magnesium,, you know, she, she was at a point where we needed, yeah, her tank was low and we needed to supplement. So, you know, we gave her, we gave her both the type of magnesium that helped increase her bowel movements because she was constipated. And we gave her the magnesium glycinate that's better absorbed. So we gave her both. And it was,

it was really helpful. She had improvement in her blood pressure. She definitely had improvement in that restless leg. So she slept better. She had improvement in her pain. Her pain decreased significantly. She had improvement in her headaches. So it's really, it's a magical mineral. And if I saw her today, because we're doing more IV magnesium now at the Ultra Wellness Center. We have a combination called Ultra Calm which has IV magnesium in it. We can use that right away to see, okay, is this going to help with somebody's headaches

or help them feel more calm and less anxious? I've had people in my office with headaches or migraines and literally give them a shot of magnesium and it goes away instantly. That's very powerful. I was joking. That's what we do in a cardiac arrest. The heart's not going. We give them intra shot of magnesium and it's like it goes away instantly yeah that's very powerful and that's i mean i was joking that's what we do like in a cardiac arrest and the heart's not going we give them intravenous magnesium we give them magnesium for preterm labor or for you know preventing seizures with high blood pressure i mean it's so powerful yeah and it's

one of my favorite things it makes i've had ivy magnesium have you had it um it's so it makes you feel like warm and relaxed and calm it's like it's the most amazing thing it's instant, it's like instant value without all the side effects. Yeah. And you know, and it's safe for most people, you know, it's really safe for most people, people with kidney issues. So renal insufficiency on dialysis, you know, kidney issues, you have to be careful. You want to be really working. We always want to work with your doctor, but you have to be more careful. But for most people, you know, for most people, it's a safe mineral that we can use. You also talked about briefly the different forms of magnesium. So this is another aspect of nutritional therapy that we do in functional medicines. It's very customized. So

this person might do better with magnesium glycinate because they may have more detoxification issues. They might not have constipation. They might be prone to diarrhea. You can use this for you have more constipation issues. You might use magnesium citrate. If there are more neurologic issues, you might use magnesium threonate, which has a better neurologic profile. So it's a very personalized, customized approach. And we make sure the nutrients don't have junk in them, fillers, impurities, that the potency is there. We use very rigorous evaluation of the companies we use to actually figure out which supplements. Right. I mean, you mentioned like so often people go, oh, I need magnesium and they just grab one and they take it and then they start getting diarrhea and

then it didn't help. And then you're like, and they're like, oh, this is crummy because it's just not the right, it's not the right form. It's not a good quality. Yeah. And we didn't even talk about menstrual cramps and all that stuff. You know, I mean, you know, another patient I had, she was a 30 year old woman who was really struggling with PMS. So she was for the week before her period, she was really irritable. She was feeling more angry and sad. She had more cramps with her period. She had lots of cramps that were keeping her in bed for a couple days when she got her period. And, you know, and magnesium was really effective for her. We could give magnesium for the, you know, I gave it to her all the time. She didn't need the citrate form. So I just gave her a magnesium glycinate. And that really, that really helped her throughout her whole month, just feeling more calm. And it helped decrease the amount of PMS she had.

And then when she was getting her period, we gave her even a little more magnesium glycinate and that helped with the cramping too. And so, and she just felt better. I mean, we know that magnesium deficiency is associated with depression. You know, we know that it impacts this NMDA receptor in the brain probably. And that may be the connection with depression. And so when we give magnesium, we can decrease the amount of depression. And for some people, I mean, it's not the cure-all for all depression, but for some people it's even better than an antidepressant, you know, depending on what's going on.

Well, that's the whole point. It's very personalized. And while magnesium may work for some person, it may not work for another person. I just want to share a story. I remember this magnesium patient I had. She was a doctor. She was a radiation oncology resident at Mayo Clinic, seeing the best doctors in the world.

She had incapacitating migraines. I mean, just was on narcotics and any vomiting medication used for chemotherapy. And she was constantly going off work and just struggling. And she wasn't like a sort of emotionally unstable person who was, she was just having these debilitating migraines. So I took her history. I'm like, okay, what else is going on? Because this is what we do in functional medicine. It's like, oh, let's focus on your migraines. No, let's focus on the rest of you because that's where the clues are. So what

did she have? usual she had severe constipation I said said you have regular bowel movements she goes yeah I got regular bowel movements I said how often you go she goes once a week I'm like I said that's not regular she was regular for me I'd go every week and and and she just thought that was normal right she had palpitations which is the irritability of the heart she had anxiety she had insomnia she had muscle cramps she had all these things that were like neon flashing lights of magnesium deficiency and if you go to a medical textbook you will read that those are the symptoms but somehow it's nutrition so doctors just don't pay attention

i don't understand so i'm like right, let's just try magnesium. See what happens. And I gave her a lot. And I said, take enough to make sure you go. And she needed like over 2,000 milligrams a day, which is a lot. Most people need 200, 400, 600. It was a lot. And she started going to the bathroom.

Her palpitations went away. Her insomnia went away. Her anxiety went away. And her migraines went away. And she could go back and do her career as a radiation oncology doctor. Amazing. And you're like, wow, that was easy. But it's really finding out how to navigate to that issue, which is exactly what we do in functional medicine.

It's so different than traditional care. We have a different roadmap that focuses on the cause and not just the symptom. Constipation is a symptom. Muscle cramps are a symptom. Headaches are a symptom. Depression is a symptom. It's not the cause. And not everybody, it's magnesium for each of these problems. Absolutely. But it's important to figure out how do you navigate to the root cause? And that's what we do in functional medicine. And we do it through a very detailed set of questions, history, which we have you fill out. And then we do another detailed set of questions in person. But now we do it all on Zoom too. So we have virtual care.

Anybody from anywhere in the world can see us here at Delta Wellness Center. And then we do appropriate testing. So rather than guess, we test. And it's extraordinary how much nutritional deficiencies we see. I just recalled a patient recently who was a vegan. I was struggling with his health. He was 20 years old. And I was like, oh my God. Like this is a very wealthy, well-to-do guy from a good family. And I'm thinking, this guy's not malnourished.

He's eating food. He had no omega-3 fats. He was severely B vitamin deficient. He was severely B vitamin deficient. He was severely vitamin D deficient. He was magnesium deficient. He was iron deficient. He was selenium deficient. I was like, whoa. And your body can't heal, right? You know, when you're deficient in so many things, your body's not going to heal. You know, that digestive system's not going to heal. Your skin's not going to heal. Yeah. And we talked about like the magnesium and 300 different enzymes, but each one of those, they're multifunctional substances that are designed to support your

body's normal functions, which is very different than drugs. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to 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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