How To Know If You're Magnesium Deficient And What To Do About It

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, or the coffee, the colas. Learn how to relax. Meditation is super powerful. One of today's sponsors is Butcher Box. 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 ButcherBox. Ground beef is probably the easiest protein out there that can be worked into any type of dish. I love how quickly it can help make up a healthy meal. And when you go to grass-fed, you're getting a great source of omega threes, vitamins and minerals too. 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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/hyman. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/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. 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. 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. 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 irritability of the brain, we give them magnesium. Or if a woman comes in and in preterm labor, like where their uterus is contracting, then all of a sudden it's an emergency, right? The baby's gonna deliver. We give them intravenous magnesium as a treatment. If someone is constipated and their bowels are not spasm 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 magnesia, 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 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. 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. 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, 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 that 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 wanna make sure we don't keep losing magnesium. So cut down on the alcohol, the sugar, or 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 gonna prevent B12 absorption. and even magnesium and zinc absorption. Or if you're taking a diuretic, you can lose magnesium. So you wanna 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 six hundred. 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 just tell you a quick magnesium story. 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 had to take, you know, narcotics and Zofran, which is like a chemo drug for nausea. And, 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, now, as a, 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 said, I 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 this the carbonate or the oxide because those are, or the gluconate, those tend not to be, 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 them 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 get dropped right out to sleep. So magnesium Epsom salt baths are great. And, you know, one caveat, if 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 the 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. And, that's it for this week's health bite 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's 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 podcast and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. 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 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. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to Dr. Hyman.com/picks to sign up. That's Dr. Hyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. this podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

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