Podcast Episode #45: The Shocking Information About A Compound That Pharmaceutical Companies Really Don’t Want You to Know About.

In this podcast episode, the shocking information that pharmaceutical companies don't want you to know. Transdermal magnesium therapy and how to improve your mitochondrial density.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Welcome back to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. You know, every once in a while I come across some type of exercise technique or nutritional compound that I get very excited about and this happens to be one of those times. Today I'm going to introduce to you an entirely natural and incredibly inexpensive compound that is all around you and that could be used to vastly improve sports performance. I really, truly believe that a whole new world of sports medicine and sports performance is going to explode onto the scene. When athletes and coaches discover this 100% natural and 100% legal compound that they could be using today. You are going to become an expert on it. And when you finish listening to this show, you'll know everything that you need to know about it. This is going to be one of the most exciting podcasts that we've put out in quite some time. Now the other things that we're going to go over on this show are a great question on mitochondrial density and also fat utilization during exercise. Before we get onto our special interview for this week as well as our listener Q and A, however, I do have just a few special announcements. Special Announcements first of all, for anybody listening in who's from the Spokane, Washington or Coeur d', Alene, Idaho area, I know that I promised that I was going to be putting on some fat loss classes over the course of the summer and all those classes have been scheduled. I've got a link in the show notes to this podcast, but what I've put together is not a run of the mill program. It's not a standard weight loss clinic. You're going to be exposed to some pretty cutting edge tactics like toxin free food planning, hyper metabolic response, exercise circuits, dietary thermogenic supplementation, food allergy elimination, hormonal response, meal timing, grocery shopping, mind trick, and psychological strategies for fat loss, metabolic testing secrets, and much, much more. I'm taking on 12 individuals at the Coeur d' Alene facility and 12 individuals at the Spokane, Washington facility. If you want in, you need to email me The Coeur d' alene starts on June 22nd. The Spokane class starts on June 29th. And these are going to involve some hands on exercise session. They're also going to involve quite a bit of simple sit down and learning. And when you finish this class, it will be the last class that you ever need to take to really learn how to truly take control of your body and lose fat for life. So those start this summer and you can make this the year that that you actually take charge of your body. So go check out the link that I have in the show notes and you can read about and register for those classes. It's not a huge chunk of your life. It's a five week series of classes. You have to be there for about an hour every night and it will be well worth your time. So what else do we have for special announcements? Remember that just last week on May 19, for any of you skinny guys listening in, my friend Jeff Anderson released that Hardgainer X program. I've been hearing a lot of positive feedback from people who got that program and have begun to try it out. If I wasn't racing in triathlon season and trying to actually keep a little muscle off my body, I personally would be grabbing his program and doing it just for fun, just to see how much muscle I could actually put on. I know a little bit narcissistic, but I think it'd be fun to try. I know that some of you listen to this show, know that I used to be into bodybuilding and he has a really cool program that he's put out. It's called Hardgainer X and I put a link to that in the show notes. Okay, Special announcement number three. There are only 20 of the Ben Greenfield Fitness CDs left. This is a 10 CD multi disc set. It comes in two Jewel DVD cases and it's about 1500 minutes worth of audio, completely commercial free and announcement free from the show. If you want to listen in your car, if you want to listen on your home stereo audio player, this is what you need. It's 47 bucks. And if you use the discount code audio then you get a $10 savings automatically on that.

So grab that.

I've only got 20 left. I'm not sure that I'm going to make more, but if you would like to get your hands on that CD set for the summer, for any road trip that you plan on making, highly recommend it. And then finally you're not going to want to miss the action that's over at that Shape 21 Lean Body Challenge site two weeks ago I took on 21 males and 21 females to take part in a 63 fat loss challenge using a copy of the book Shape 21. There's some entertaining videos on there. Everybody's before photos are up and it's pretty cool. You're going to want to go check that out if you're interested in how much fat people actually can lose over 63 days. Here's a letter that one of the participants wrote in to me says I bought all the food, started working out a week ago Tuesday. A little hard to fit in the schedule but trying and just love the menu. I have lost eight pounds in seven days and just getting used to the workout and not getting in as many circuits per day as desired. But working my 4am to 7pm schedule is sort of tough. I started at 2:43 and now at 2:35. Age 51, 5 foot 10 and not really fat, but BP. I assume he means blood pressure was 150 over 92 and now 136 over 91. So progress happening. My goal is one hundred and ninety. The food is really great and my girlfriend will graduate Arizona School of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in Tucson in August so she knows all that herbal stuff and she likes the menu when I cooked for her last weekend. So I think I am all in for the 63 days. And that's an individual who is doing the entire Shape 21 lean body program. That's a book that I wrote that's grocery shopping list tells you the exercises you need to do for each day. It's designed to melt fat off your body and there's a lot of people trying it out and you'll be able to track what they think over there at the Shape 21 Lean Body Challenge website. So go check that out. The link is in the show notes to this podcast. So we're going to go ahead and move on to this week's Listener Q and A and that's going to be on mitochondrial density and fat utilization during exercise. Listener Q and A this week's Listener Q and A comes from Listener Al and Listener Al says is there value in training hard after depleting a third or more of your glycogen stores to improve mitochondrial density? That's part one of his question and part two of his question is can one train his or her body to preferentially utilize fats at race pace? Now for those of you who are not triathletes or those of you who do not race. The answer to question two is still going to be relevant because essentially what Al is asking is, can you teach your body how to burn more fat during exercise? I'm going to answer question two first because it strikes close to home as just yesterday in my lab, I was doing an exercise metabolic test on a father and his son. And what the metabolic test allows me to see is how much carbohydrate and how much fat someone is utilizing during exercise, specifically during a graded exercise test that starts easy and gradually gets harder. What I observed was that the son, who is a soccer player, very kind of on off start, stop, interval based sport, during the course of the test, which took place on a bicycle, he was actually cycling between carbohydrate and fat utilization at a very regular up down rate. And so if you looked at his graph of total calories utilized, he would jump up and use a bunch of carbs, and then he would jump down off of carbs and use more fat up in carbs, down in fat. And that's a very classic profile of someone who has done a lot of, of interval based training, or specifically, almost solely interval based training. In other words, someone who's not necessarily aerobically trained, but has done a lot of hard, easy efforts the same way that someone would train for soccer. Now, his dad's carbohydrate fat profile was very long and steady and generally a mix of fat and carbohydrates without that cycle up and down between fat and carbohydrates. Now, everybody burns a mix of fat and carbs while they're exercising. But we can see from this example that one person had trained their body to jump back and forth by doing intervals. And one person had trained their body to basically settle into a certain percentage of carbohydrate and fat utilization. In this case, he was at about, I believe, 30% carbohydrate, 70% fat. Now, what you can do if you want your body to preferentially utilize fats when you're exercising, is you can include as part of your training longer, slower exercise sessions at your peak fat burning heart rate. If you don't know what your peak fat burning heart rate is, you can approximate it. It's usually about 50 to 60% of your maximum heart rate. You can also get it tested in a physiology laboratory where you can find out exactly the heart rate at which you're burning the highest number of fat calories. Now, if you're doing these long slow sessions at your fat burning heart rate, I would caution you because they're not going to burn a lot of calories and they're not going to build a lot of fitness. What they will do, however, is teach your body how to utilize fats a little bit more effectively. When I write out programs for people who are trying to lose fat, we generally prioritize what I call metabolic resistance training circuits or weightlifting that's done at a little bit higher intensity. We prioritize cardiovascular intervals because those elevate the metabolic rate just a little bit more. But we include these fat burning sessions in one of two ways. We'll either do two to three long 45 to 60 minutes fat burning sessions during the week, or else every day in the morning when the liver's carbohydrate stores are empty and you can actually jump start those fat burning enzymes a little bit easier. We'll do 20 to 30 minutes of fat burning exercise prior to breakfast on an empty stomach or in a fasted state. So those are a couple of ways that you could actually get the body to burn fat just a little bit more preferentially during exercise. And I generally see when high aerobically trained athletes, such as an ironman triathlete coming to my lab for testing, that those people are generally utilizing fats very effectively, or put in another way, conserving their body's carbohydrate stores just a little bit more effectively. So the first part of Al's question was, is there value in training hard after depleting a third or more of your glycogen stores to improve mitochondrial density? Okay, I know that's a mouthful. Essentially what he's asking is if you burn through your body's carbohydrate stores on purpose, basically deplete your body's carbohydrate stores, and then go out and do an exercise session that is hard, can you improve your mitochondrial density? Well, let's go ahead and look at what mitochondria are. And what type of training has been shown in research to actually improve your mitochondrial density or the number of the mitochondria that are actually in your muscles. The basic idea behind mitochondria is that they're tiny little microscopic parts of your cell, and they're the parts of your cell where aerobic energy production actually takes place. And what aerobic energy production is, is it's the use of oxygen. When you breathe in oxygen, the mitochondria use that oxygen to actually create essentially a gradient that converts energy or makes energy from something called ATP. So basically, oxygen plus ATP equals energy, essentially the mitochondria use the oxygen to split a molecule of ATP in your body. So what a mitochondria is, it's, it's called an organelle. It's just a little, little part of the machinery of your cell. And they've got two membranes, the mitochondria do they get an outer membrane and an inner membrane. And the outer membrane is essentially just the surface of the actual organelle, whereas the inner membrane is the place where all of this oxygen utilization and splitting of ATP actually occurs. Now, endurance exercise is actually a very strong stimulus to improve the proliferation of what are called mitochondrial enzymes. And when these mitochondrial enzymes increase their activity, you get an increase in your mitochondrial density. And when you increase your mitochondrial density, it increases the amount of time that you can perform aerobic endurance exercise. And actually mitochondria are very popular among kind of the anti aging movement, because the whole idea is that the more mitochondria that you have, the more oxygen you're able to utilize, the more energy that you have and the longer you're able to live. Now what happens is that generally more fats are used to generate ATP when you actually increase your mitochondrial density. And the whole idea behind that is that endurance exercise uses quite a bit of fat as a fuel. So if you can increase your mitochondrial density, you can also increase the amount of fat that you burn during exercise. So let's look at exactly how you could increase your mitochondrial density. The first thing that you got to understand is that there are basically two signals that signal your body to generate more mitochondria. One of these is the amount of calcium that's inside, basically the fluid that surrounds your cells. And an increase in calcium within the cells of your, of your skeletal muscles can actually induce what's called mitochondrial protein synthesis, or the growth of the mitochondria in your body. So one is to increase the amount of calcium that's inside the cells of the muscle. The other is to actually reduce the amount of ATP that you have available. Now interestingly, when you exercise very hard, what happens is there is actually observed a calcium increase in the muscle cells. So you get a release of calcium. And that's just. We're not going to go into it today, but it's just based on the electrochemical gradient that has to occur in order for your muscles to produce a contraction. So we get a release of calcium when you exercise, and that's often one of the reasons that you feel sore after you exercise hard is that calcium buildup. The other thing that we get is A decrease in the amount of that ATP. And that's the other signal that signals mitochondria to become more dense. And the way, or the, or, I'm sorry, the rate at which that ATP decreases or the extent to which that ATP decreases directly correlates to the increase in mitochondrial density. So in other words, the harder that you exercise, the more likely it is that you are going to induce an increase in your mitochondria concentration. And there has actually been exercise duration studies that have found that exercise duration is longer than about 60 minutes at a controlled easy aerobic intensity actually don't result in significant additional mitochondria density. Whereas very high exercise intensities like up around your VO2 that last around 30 minutes, that are, for example, you know, two minutes hard, four minutes easy, very intense, 30 second all out sprints, that these will actually increase the mitochondrial density. So the long slow aerobic stuff does not necessarily increase the mitochondrial density, the interval training does. And this returns to why in all the programs that I write out for the triathletes that I train, we include lots of intervals and then we include just enough aerobic exercise for recovery and to teach the body how to, for example, sit in a bicycle saddle for a long period of time. It's the same reason that most of the athletes that I work with get away with about 10 to 15 hours a week of training for Ironman Triathlon, which for a lot of people, people is not that much. So we increase the mitochondrial density through decreasing that ATP very quickly and exercising very hard. So what we can take away from that is actually returning to Al's question, let me pull up his question here so I don't get off topic too hard or too far. Is there value in training hard after depleting a third of more your glycogen stores to improve mitochondrial density? Well, let's ask this question. Does depleting our carbohydrate stores to improve our mitochondrial density actually cause a large release of calcium or does it cause a large depletion of ATP energy stores? Well, the answer to the first question is likely no. I've never heard of shutting down carbohydrate availability to a muscle, actually increasing the amount of calcium production. As far as I know, that would not induce a calcium release by basically stripping your muscles of carbohydrate and then exercising hard. Now the second question, or the second part, in terms of decreasing the amount of ATP that's available, that's kind of an interesting thought because when your muscles use ATP, they have to regenerate more ATP. And one of the components that's used to produce ATP is called nadph. I'm not going to go into the actual name, just trust me. The abbreviation is nadph. Well, the only way to make NADPH is it's kicked off of part of something called the Krebs cycle. In order for your Krebs cycle to actually occur, sugar must be present. Basically, sugar is fed into the Krebs cycle, the Kreb's cycle kicks off nadph and that's used to produce more ADHD ATP that can then be split via the production or via the consumption of oxygen during exercise. So when you think about it, if the body doesn't have enough sugar available, then the Krebs cycle would actually slow down. Less NADPH would be available, therefore less ATP could be available. Therefore technically you could signal a higher production of mitochondria or increased mitochondrial density. And by exercising hard without much sugar on board, you could actually, if you think about it, cause that to occur to it to an even quicker or greater extent. So on paper, it would actually work. My question is, if you're really feeling starved and you don't have enough sugar on board, are you going to be able to train hard enough? Are you going to enjoy your training, which is a big part of it, and are you going to be able to avoid over training when you're exercising hard without much fuel on board? So, really interesting question, Al. And I guess my final thought would be I'd like to see a research study that actually compares glycogen depleted people with glycogen sufficient people and see if there was a difference in the mitochondrial density generated, you know, after a four or six or an eight week period of cardiovascular interval training.

So there you go.

If you have a question for me for the podcast, you can call toll free 877-209-9439 and you can leave me a voicemail. I will play the voicemail on the show. That's always interesting. You can Skype me at Pacific Fit or you can email ben greenfieldfitness.com so let's go ahead and move on to the moment we've all been waiting for. The awesome interview on transdermal Magnesium Therapy with Dr. Mark Serkis.

Featured topic.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and on the other line, I have a doctor who is one of the most prolific writers in medicine. He holds the honorary title the Doctor of Oriental Medicine, and he was actually one of the first nationally certified acupuncturists in the Nation. His name is Dr. Mark Serkis. He was trained in acupuncture and oriental medicine at the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in the School of Traditional Medicine in New England in Boston. And for many years, Dr. Serkis has been researching the human condition and the causes of disease. He has quite a bit of research under his belt, but his primary focus recently has been looking into environmental toxicity. And he's written extensively on poisons in the environment, in our foods, in our medicine, even in our dental practices. And he's the director of the International Medical Veritas association, which is advocating radical changes in orthodox medicine. And in addition to some of these qualifications, Dr. Serkis happens to have been doing quite a bit of study in the field of magnesium oil and sports performance. And today we're going to talk quite a bit about some of Dr. Serkis research and some of the things that he's been involved in, but also some things that most coaches, most athletes, most teams, especially in the United States, are completely unaware of when it comes to some of the powerful things we can be doing to enhance sports performance and recovery. So, Dr. Serkis, thank you for coming on the show today.

Oh, you're welcome, Ben. Pleasure to be here.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background, expound on that just a bit and what you've been up to in terms of the type of medicine that you practice and the type of research research that you do.

Well, to sum it all up, I'm basically founding a new medical approach and it's called natural allopathic medicine. Natural and allopathic would normally be thought of as an oxymoron, things that two words that don't normally go together. But in my research I found kind of I stole in the dark of night into the emergency rooms around the world and the intensive care wards and discovered that their most effective medicines are actually natural, are not pharmaceuticals. And principally it's magnesium chloride or magnesium sulfate, iodine and sodium bicarbonate. These are substances that are only considered legally medicines when you inject it in the emergency room. But you can buy sodium bicarbonate, carbon in any supermarket. You can buy either any pharmacy or supermarket. And magnesium chloride, or what is called magnesium oil is something kind of new. It's only been out basically the last five or six years though the product I endorse is 250 million years old. It's been around in nature for a long time. So I've basically applied apply these substances and a full protocol behind it. But this is part of My holy trinity of medicine, these three substances. And I apply these substances that can save your life, especially magnesium chloride or sodium bicarbonate in a heartbeat, if you're having a heart attack or stroke or it's a chronic disease, or to the swine flu.

Holy trinity of medicine. Now, what were the three again, just to clarify to the audience, Magnesium chloride.

Which is something that's abundant in the sea. Iodine, which is an old universal medicine. 100 years ago was one of the most popular medicines, along with medical marijuana. And sodium bicarbonate, which is something they use all the time in chemotherapy, emergency rooms, intensive care wards, something you can brush your teeth with, use as deodorant, wash your refrigerator with it. You know, very common. You know, bake food with it. But it's also used appropriately, a very strong medicine.

So what is magnesium and why is it important?

Well, magnesium. I have a chapter I'm redoing. My. My first book was called Transdermal Magnesium Therapy. It was first book in actually in print and Transdermal magnesium Therapy. Therapy, Right. And it's one of the reasons why.

Is that book available, for example, on Amazon? Where can people find that?

Yes, it's on Amazon.

Okay.

It's. Right now I am coming out with the second edition. I have a whole line of ebooks on my IMBA site. And I have two new books on magnesium. One is called Magnesium the Ultimate Heart Medicine, and the other one's called Magnesium Medicine. And those that work will be integrated into the second edition of the transdermal book. But basically, magnesium. I have a chapter in one of the new books called the Lamp of Life. And without magnesium, there is no. On this planet. Why is that? Magnesium is the atom. It is the metal that is in the heart, the very heart of chlorophyll. And it enables chlorophyll and plants to capture light energy and turn it into chemical energy. Without that, there is no life. So one of the reasons we need to eat plants, need to eat vegetables, is we get a lot of magnesium from that. And the. The body takes. It takes the chlorophyll, knocks out the. The magnesium, takes the magnesium. Magnesium and puts an iron and you have hemoglobin. So there's a very associated relationship. But basically, magnesium is the oil of the body. Like you take an engine and take out the oil or deplete the oil down to 20% and you run the chance of seizing the engine. It's the same with magnesium. It's involved in everything, everything. 325 enzyme reaction, cell Wall permeability, blood, brain barrier integrity, insulin production, insulin resistance, mitochondrial function. So ATP production, detoxification, everything. Everything. So when you start running down on magnesium. It's a good analogy. The body stops working at its high performance, performance level starts dropping, physiology gets compromised, and everything becomes more difficult for the body to do.

So we're talking about essentially a dry bike chain with no oil.

Exactly.

It might still go around, but it's not going to go around smoothly.

Right. And the more it drops, the more chance of a breakage. When you have a heart attack, almost everybody who has diabetes or has a heart attack has very low magnesium levels. When somebody dies of a heart attack, what are they dying of? Are they dying of a heart attack or magnesium deficiency? When an athlete drops dead, it's basically in the middle of nothing, in the middle of a marathon from a heart attack. There's really a combination of two things. It's magnesium deficiency and a tremendous concentration of mercury in the heart.

You know, this is something that I wanted to get into a little bit later on in the interview, but because you brought it up, and before we go a little bit deeper into magnesium deficits and before we talk about health recovery and human performance, when you talk about heart attack in the athletic population and magnesium deficiencies, that strikes very close to home right now, because yesterday, one of the greatest triathletes in America, Steve Larsen, died of a heart attack during or after a run. Why would magnesium be so important in the function of the heart of athletes during exercise? Why physiologically or where physiologically, does magnesium actually help?

Well, it's not just during exercise, but exercise compounds the problem, the magnesium. If your magnesium levels in the blood drop, they drop far enough, which is not just a little bit personal. Have a heart attack. That's just all there is to it. You need magnesium to. To the heart muscles themselves need the most energy of all. The tissues of the body, especially an athlete, they're cranking out. You need optimal physiological performance. If your magnesium is low, then you have a buildup of calcium in the heart tissues. Calcium is something that is very rigid where the magnesium is very soft. The Chinese used to call magnesium thousands of years ago. The beautiful metal calcium is just kind of the opposite. So things get very gooey and very solid. The energy, nutrition can't get into the heart cells, and the toxic poisons from respiration can't get out because the cell walls get a little calcified. And so things don't go in and out so easily. Easily so. And then the magnesium, the ATP, doesn't keep up. So it's a setup. I mean, people are not dropping dead every day right and left from it. But you increase your risk factor the minute you start to drop your magnesium levels. And the other complication is mercury. People, United States government does not want any. Anybody to know. And athletes.

I lost you for just a second as you were saying, that the United States government does not want anyone to know what.

I'll start right there. United States government does not want anybody to know that there's a huge problem with mercury in the United States, in the whole northern hemisphere, that the United States coal industry for electric power generation is putting 50 tons of mercury in the air and the density are putting these toxic waste dumps in people's mouths, the amalgam, which is 50% mercury. And they're promoting flu shots which have mercury. These things get concentrated in the cells where people, everybody in America is mercury toxic. And they're not giving anybody a clue to this. So they're not giving anybody an idea of how to detoxify from their mercury.

Poisoning history to tie into magnesium.

Well, it ties into this. We're talking about a heart attack. There's a case, I remember, where an athlete died and they did a tissue analysis of his heart, and it had 22,000 times the normal concentration of mercury. So this is part of the problem is magnesium deficiency and mercury toxicity create these sudden heart attacks. When these athletes just fall all over, the mercury gets more concentrated in the heart tissues for some reason, and probably more so in athletes because they're really using their hearts and that particular tissue to an extreme extent.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. These magnesium deficits, I'm assuming, and I would imagine the response is going to be yes, but I was going to ask you, is our magnesium definitely deficits common, and if so, is the deficit more common among the athletic population?

Well, an athlete will use more magnesium, so they're going to need to eat more magnesium. And yes, officially, officially, 67% of the American population is magnesium deficient. But the way they measure that is using blood serum test. And the blood does not budge the blood. The body conserves magnesium in the blood, so you don't have a heart attack and it'll suck out all the magnesium from the rest of the tissues. So whenever they're testing, you very rarely see the magnesium deficiency. And yet, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledges that 67% of the population are not getting enough magnesium. So I would assume, like easily over 90 to 95% of the population are Having a problem with magnesium. Their oil levels are not topped off, they are deficient. And it's a problem. And it's one of the basic reasons that chronic disease is increasing. One of the reasons people die of something like a flu, because you put some stress on the engine and the oil is low and something pops, pop a gasket.

Now I seem to remember at some point in one of my science courses at university that we learned that magnesium is stored in the human body. Now if magnesium is stored in the human body kind of similar to I guess like a fat soluble vitamin, how could a magnesium deficit be so common?

Well, because the intake, it's not a micro mineral like selenium, it's a macro mineral. You need, oh, according to the federal government you need say 500 milligrams a day. So if you're eating through only 300 and you're running a deficit of 200 a day, you very quickly or year by year, month by month be running down your stores just like you, you're running an engine. You run down the oil, you go from New York to California, you're going to be using up probably two quarts of oil every day. Every day we need to eat the magnesium. And another, a background reality is that the foods, the mineral and vitamin contents of food has been decreasing dramatically these last 50 years for many reasons. And so when you eat an orange or you eat any kind of food, it's not going to have the same vitamin C content that it had 50 years ago. Magnesium is not refurbished into the soil. They don't fertilize. Very few people fertilize the soil with magnesium though it could be. So the over farming and modern farming methods is depleting the amount of minerals inside the food. So it's almost impossible today actually to eat and get everything you need. And this is critical for an athlete because their performance is dependent on it injuries. We're going to be getting to this. The magnesium is a transdermal. Magnesium therapy is ideal for athletes because it's yes, you can drink magnesium chloride but you can put it on the skin like you would the sunscreen and it goes right into the tissues. So if you have a swollen knee and you put the, you just lather the stuff on, do it three, four times a day, you're actually treating the local tissues. And magnesium is an anti, anti inflammatory. Any kind of injury is an inflammation creates inflammation. Magnesium is the, is the God of anti inflammatories. It's just amazing stuff. And the effect is almost immediate.

What are some dietary sources of magnesium? If I wanted to get it from food, what would I need to eat?

Well, you certainly would eat brown bread, organic brown bread, not white bread, whole wheat, wheat, rice, not white rice, sugar cane, as opposed to white sugar. Anybody who's eating white sugar, white bread or white rice, Guaranteed, no test needed, guaranteed magnesium deficiency.

How about seeds or nuts?

Well, the highest. The sesame seeds is one of the highest sources of magnesium. Spirulina, also very high source of magnesium. All the organic vegetables and seeds.

What you're saying is that the soil that these type of foods are grown in doesn't actually contain enough of the magnesium mineral or not enough of the magnesium gets transferred into. To the fruit or the vegetable or the food because of modern agricultural practices.

Yes. This is not just with magnesium. This is a universal characteristic of the modern age. And of course it varies from location to location. Some places in the world are lower in magnesium in the soil than others. Same with problem with selenium. And there are many studies that show heart disease higher in certain areas and lower than other areas. And they correlate this with both selenium and magnesium, the basic minerals that are crucial for health.

I have an organic garden in my backyard that I get a lot of my vegetables from. I know that it's not leached of probably as many minerals as a typical fertilizer or sprayed farmer's field is, but I'm an ironman athlete. I'm a triathlete. Am I getting enough magnesium from the high vegetable, fruit, seed and nut intake that I currently take in? Or should I be worried about my heart or about my performance during exercise based off what you've observed from a magnesium deficiency standpoint, especially with people who.

Are exercising a lot.

Where, where do you live? Where is your garden?

I'm in Washington State.

Washington state. Well, if you lived in a pristine environment, you could probably answer. I could answer the question, say yes, it probably would be sufficient, and then they would still be iffy. Well, but living with. Wait, let me finish. Living where you live and anybody else, anywhere else, you know, states coming across the Pacific Ocean is a bank, a fog of pollution coming in from China, the mercury and many other chemical poisons. Like 30, 30% of all the pollution on the West Coast, United States is coming from China. And then also just in being in the modern environment is toxic. If you're getting any, taking any kind of drugs, any kind of vaccines, or have dental amalgam you're using up to defend the body from these poisons, you need minerals you need the vitamins, but you need these. Magnesium, selenium, even the calcium. You need these things to buffer and protect and help eliminate. So just dealing with the poisons increases the need. Forgetting about being an athlete and pushing your body to the, you know, to its limits, you're. The toxic load is demanding more nutrition when actually we're getting less though having your own garden, if you sprayed your garden with magnesium, with the, with this magnesium oil we're going to be talking about, you'll be increasing the magnesium content of the foods you're eating.

Interesting. Now, is it going to give me any added benefit to use it from an athletic standpoint or from a health or recovery or an immune system standpoint?

Well, I'll tell you, I started taking, using this magnet, what's called magnesium oil, which is not an oil, it's magnesium chloride. 35% magnesium chloride and the rest is basically water. The first time I took it is the only thing I've ever taken in my life where I actually felt a difference. I get on my bicycle and after a few days of taking it, I could feel my endurance change. I could feel my power increase. I never took anything. The only thing, other thing I've taken that I feel something is niacin. You take niacin and you get a flush. You can feel it. It the same with the magnesium. If you're in my experience. Actually my personal experience is when I started doing this, got into this magnesium thing, I had gone back on the tennis court after 53 years old. I got back on the tennis court after 15 years off and I come home every day in pain. I was hurting. And I have, you know, here in Brazil, many of us, even if we're not, have that much money. We have a maid, I have a maid and she would give me a rub down with this magnesium oil and I'd get off the table with a smile and the pain would be gone. And I literally survived the first year of training with the magnesium. Every day I'd come home and I'd get the magnesium rub and it would make, make all the difference in the world. So an athlete, somebody like you, who's used to really feeling their performance, it's like if you're going to go out and do a race, it makes sense to top off your oil. It makes sense to put this magnesium all over the body, not only for performance sake, but as a preventative against injury, because it prevents injury or treats injury, because you can. It's an anti inflammatory, it goes right into the tissues. It's a pure tonic, meaning whatever's going wrong, whatever's hurt and injured, it's going into those tissues and will support its regeneration. It will support the detoxification. It just support the physiology of the injured cells.

What about strength gains or muscular gains?

I would say there might be a slight. And here I'm just intuiting strength. It's more. I think the thing a person feels more the endurance. You as an athlete would have to really test it out and have other athletes testing it out and talk about strength. I did not. There was nothing I was doing that I could say, oh, I felt stronger, I felt more powerful as far as endurance. But I didn't test that against weights or anything like that.

Right, right. Is there, is there any hormonal effect that you're aware of from a testosterone or cortisol standpoint?

Yes. Magnesium, as I say, is so fundamental to physiology. It's involved intimately in the whole hormonal system, in the master hormones which break down to the other hormones. So, yes, if you're slightly or grossly magnesium deficient, there'll be a hormonal problem.

Now, what would be the problem? You're talking about perhaps doing some type of a soak or some type of a spray? What about just taking magnesium orally via a supplement or via a multivitamin?

Well, there's. Taking magnesium in a pill form is different than taking magnesium chloride, which is liquid or magnesium sulfate. The body can absorb much easier liquid vitamins than solid because with the solid, you have to. Any kind of solid magnesium supplement, you have to break down the magnesium. That takes energy, takes good levels of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. And oral absorption of magnesium is very iffy. You maybe absorb 50% of it, if you're lucky, some people a lot less. If you're going to use magnesium as a medicine, if you take drink enough magnesium where you're really using it as a medicine or really enhanced performance, it'll provoke diarrhea, like too much vitamin C. I see. So. So using it in my book, I recommend using both orally and transdermally. Transdermally has a different effect, especially to an athlete, because it gets right into the muscles. You're bypassing the stomach. The first doctor actually before me who was beginning to speak about this transdermal approach is Dr. Norman Shealy, and he has a patient pending using the only train. Only when you use it on the skin, for some unknown reason, does it stimulate the dhea, the master hormone. Somehow the magnesium chloride is interacting with the fatty Tissues. And so we talk about the hormonal situation. But if for athletes it's a matter of, you know, you put using it on the body and if the whole body is receiving it and it becomes available for the muscles. If you're going to do real intense sports or competition, what I recommend, actually I have a chapter called magnesium bicarbonate which is something that exists only in the sea. Magnesium bicarbonate together or using which you can't really buy, but using magnesium chloride and sodium bicarbonate. Sodium bicarbonate, if anybody doing any kind of sports increases your oxygen carrying capacity because it changes and raises the ph of the blood. Both magnet and here's another key point for athletes, both magnesium and the bicarbonate are essential for the dynamic of the red blood cells and their ability to carry oxygen. The magnesium is very intricately involved because of this whole relationship with chlorophyll. If you don't have enough magnesium, the shape of the red blood cells is not going to be quite perfect. Meaning it will reduce its ability to carry oxygen. The bicarbonate increases CO2. I just published a two part series on CO2. CO2 is very much linked to oxygen capacity. If you don't have enough CO2 you can't carry as much oxygen. So you take bicarbonate which used to be Alka Seltzer. You actually. And that's also immediate effect. If you take a teaspoon of bicarbonate before you go out and work out, you're going to find your oxygen right away. More oxygen available to the cells. So again increase performance. Tying the magnesium bicarbonate together. You need bicarbonate to get the magnesium into the mitochondria. So the two together I call the ultimate mitochondrial cocktail. So again we're increasing performance because we're increasing ATP production. So these are critical things. And.

You know, while I was talking to you, I actually looked up just a couple of studies that I'm looking at on magnesium and I wanted to ask you about these or if you were familiar with these. There's one here that was done at Western Washington University on football players that found that a magnesium supplementation increased free testosterone levels and muscle strength in NCAA football players. Players. I see another one here where young athletes experience significant increases in endurance performance during aerobic exercise supplementing with magnesium. And both of these studies it looked like they use an oral magnesium. I'm just wondering how much greater the effects would have been if they'd used a topical application. Then there's another one here, an eight week training program in which athletes who supplemented with magnesium had a two and a half times greater muscle strength gain than a placebo group. Now, I'm assuming and looking over the methods of these studies, it looks like all of them used an oral magnesium supplementation. However, if people were wanting to use this transdermal magnesium to try and get some of these metabolic or some of these strength benefits, is this something that would be Applied, for example, 30 minutes prior to exercise? Is this something that needs to be used for several months leading up to an exercise event? Or what are the recommendations with transdermal magnesium?

Well, it's something for an athlete or anybody who's either interested in maintaining health and maximizing their health or preventing disease or maximizing, preventing sports injuries or maximizing sports performance. Using this as a regular aspect of life is, I mean, for me, magnesium is number one on my protocols. Way ahead of vitamin C or calcium or anything else that you would. People, I mean any really high performing athlete I believe would feel after three days of using it, they would notice a difference. Yes, you'd use it right before sports performance, you know, maybe an hour before and then wash it off and then after, after you did a performance to relax everything. And it's just, it's something that has to be tried. Using transdermal magnesium supplementation is the, I don't know what word were to use. It's the, it's the, the ultimate way of using it. You can use, you can inject it, you can, you know, you can eat it. I dilute it and put it in my eyes. You can vaporize it right into the lungs with a nebulizer. There are many ways of getting into the body, but the easiest way, instead of using sun, sun lotion, just put it all over the body or you can put it in very high concentrations in a bath. And if somebody gets a sports injury, the first thing you want to do is you want to throw them into, put it all over their body, get them into a hot bath and throw in, you know, 3, 4, 5 pounds magnesium chloride and it's going to be a miracle.

Now what about cramping or spasming in the muscle? You know, I realize that with the heart, magnesium is crucial for that electrochemical gradient. But what about for athletes who are dealing with spasms during exercise from electrolyte loss or who are dealing with chronic cramping in the hamstring, things of that nature. Would magnesium be indicated in a situation like that?

Well, yes, magnesium, but not just magnesium. You have to pay attention to make sure that you Have a balance of calcium, which would have. If you have a good diet, if you're eating a lot of dairy, but eating bananas to get. Potassium phosphate, potassium, potassium, very crucial. You could be. The cramps could be from low magnesium and also from that, too. So when you get into the dealing with cramps, you got to look at the full spectrum of minerals. Something like Berlin is very helpful for that. Eating good salts like Himalayan sea salt or Dead Sea salt, of course, your organic vegetables, you need really a balance. If you're having. You could be using a lot of magnesium and still get cramps. And that means you got to be looking at the other minerals at the same time.

Now, with the health of bones, bone density, I know that mineral intake is very important. From that perspective, is there a role that magnesium or transdermal magnesium has to play in, for example, the healing of stress fractures or the enhancement of bone density?

Absolutely. If you look at the difference between human teeth and the teeth of a tiger and the teeth, the tusks of an elephant, the thing that makes a bone harder and harder and harder, you look at these bones, the higher the magnesium, the stronger the bone. Elephant tusk is or tiger tooth, very high in magnesium compared to a human tooth. So, yes, magnesium is instrumental in bone density and magnesium controls calcium also. If you have a low profile of magnesium, then calcium becomes a big problem.

Do you have any experience with athletes actually using magnesium and seeing breakthroughs in sports performance or seeing breakthroughs in their events?

Ben, this has been a frustration of mine. I wrote my first, my only essay on sports medicine and magnesium must be from my first book three, three and a half years ago. I have been wanting to break open this story to the sports world ever since then. And the opportunity, I tried once or twice to create an opportunity and it just didn't happen. And it's a sad thing to me.

It's just like, you know, well, it's happening right now.

I'm hoping that a lot of people will listen to this. But, yeah, from a sports performance standpoint with what you're telling me, it amazes me that I'm not flipping open Runner's World magazine or Triathlete magazine or any of these publications that are associated with, say, endurance sports, a sport with a high amount of attrition, I never see magnesium or minerals. I've never come across anything like transdermal magnesium oil.

The only thing I can think of is a sports doctor, sports medicine, just like all the other doctors, the oncologist or pediatrician.

For just a second there, I Lost you. You were talking about the oncologists and the pediatricians.

Yeah, I would think, I would think the, one of the. One explanation is that the sports doctors, allopathic sports doctors, are very similar to their brethren. And the oncologists and the pediatricians, they just want to remain ignorant. They don't want to educate either themselves or the people they deal with to these. It's amazing. It's just totally amazing. I mean, especially with the sports of medicine, with people dropping dead from a heart attack that they wouldn't. A sports doctor wouldn't finally say, look, let's look at the magnesium levels. And so, yeah, it's amazing. And I hope you take a sports club, you know, team, competitive team, you take the whole team and you give them the right minerals, magnesium, bicarbonate, and do it the right way, man, the whole team is gonna raise in performance. They're gonna, you know, I wouldn't want to. Want to come up against them or be at a disadvantage on this level. And for sports injury, I mean, if you're getting injured or to prevent, you know, the tragedy of an athlete when they hurt themselves, I mean, the agony of that, a lot of it can be avoided by just topping up the oil, keeping the magnesium levels to their maximum levels. And the transdermal effect for an athlete in this sense is optimum. It's because you're putting this stuff right onto the tissues that would get possibly injured.

Yeah. And you know what? I've come across a couple of interesting things because during our discussion, I've been on your IMVA website, I'm going to actually post a link to a very interesting article on transdermal magnesium mineral therapy and sports medicine. I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes to this podcast, as well as a link to a couple other very interesting PDFs that I've just come across on transdermal magnesium. Now, I realize that for most of the people, and especially for the athletes listening into this show, that this may not be something that is readily accessible to you. I myself am still trying to determine the best way to actually find transdermal magnesium. Do you have any resources that you would point the audience to be able to utilize this as a resource in recovery or in sports performance or in what sounds like just general health?

Yeah, I've been involved, you know, these last four or five years, four years, basically, with different companies, different kinds of products, have researched, you know, people have sent me products from all over the world. And about a year and a half ago I found that 1500 yards underneath Europe is a sea, an ancient underground sea of trapped ocean water that's 250 million years old that's turned totally into magnesium, this magnesium oil, and they pump it up like oil and it's the purest. We've tested it down to 2 parts per billion and found no mercury. One of the ways you can buy this is seawater evaporation. When they make salt, after the salt settles out and you get the magnesium chloride settles out as a liquid. But these ponds, these ocean ponds are not protected and the birds can shit in it. And it's just not high quality for medical use. So I recommend this stuff called ancient minerals. You can buy very easily in two forms. In the oil form, which is pretty expensive because it's incredibly pure. I mean pure like the pure like an eating clay. I mean it's just super pure. And then they sell this flakes, which is a lot less expensive. You can buy six and a half pounds of flakes and use that. You put it in your baths and use it transdermally. So either way you cover yourself.

How would you use a flake transdermal?

Well, you put in your baths, you make foot baths, you put in a regular bath, you can add water to it. And it's not quite the same as a pure magnesium oil.

Now what if I'm going out on a four hour bike ride and I want to have magnesium oil with me? Is there a way right now, anywhere on the market that I would be able to have like an oil that I could spray?

Yes. This ancient minerals, you could just take it in a little bottle and every 15 minutes just pop a little spray in your mouth. I use it pure. You could mix it with a little bit of water in your water. I mean, the best thing actually for an athlete is to put a little bicarbonate, a little magnesium in their water and just keep drinking it. I mean that would be, I mean, because as you're doing your, say, 26 marathon, you're constantly like you, A doctor would give it intravenously through an IV constantly going into the body. You can do that. This magnesium, nobody sells actually a mag. Well, I wouldn't say nobody, but they're not selling the magnesium oil to drink it. It's not, it's not rated that way. But for sure, I mean, you can't find anything in the supermarket is pure. So you just either mix it in water or like it's great for the gums and the bones and the teeth.

You don't Think that there would be a problem with diarrhea if taken orally in that amount?

No. Anybody who's going to use this athletically shouldn't have to experiment with it. I'll take like 15 sprays in a little glass of water. If I do that twice or three times, I'll get a little bit of loose stools. So you know, to cut back the dose just a little bit under the bowel tolerance and then you'll be fine.

So what about applying it transdermally like on the forearm or.

No problem. All over the body? That will not give diarrhea. So it's not a problem.

And will you still get the benefits?

Yeah, sure. The best way, of course, would be to use both together. You take, you're taking some orally, you put some on the skin and you're really maximizing that. You want the oil to get into every part of the engine. So you, as far as taking it into the body, combine. I have a chapter combining the oil with transdermal. So yes, you take some orally and you can, as you say, if you're doing a 26 mile run, it would be good to constantly in taking it. The body is going to enjoy that. Especially if you mix it with the bicarbonate. You're going to increase the endurance and the performance. There's no, no doubt about it. It's, it's almost mathematics. It's like it's the same level of physiology as oxygen. If you cut off somebody's oxygen or you're going to run a 26 mile run with your mouth taped over in one nostril closed, you're going. Bicarbonate is covering the CO2 side of things, which is very important. You're talking basic physiology, the magnesium also. So if you're covering these basic, it's putting the rocket fuel, high octane fuel, and turning on the afterburners at the same time. On the jet fighter, you're dealing with the primary substances that govern basic performance, basic physiology.

Now, from what I understand and what a couple other physicians have actually mentioned on this show, is the fact that magnesium, in addition to enhancing sports performance, can assist with such issues as chronic fatigue or resistance to weight loss, metabolic issues. Do you have any experience with observing the use of magnesium for things of that nature?

Yeah, I have a book coming out probably in about a month called New Paradigms in Diabetic Care. Excuse me. So you have to retain. In Brazil we have these cars going with loudspeakers passing by. I'll start again in a Minute. In about a month, I'll be publishing my book called New Paradigms in Diabetic Care. Diabetes, of course, which is metabolic disease. Diabetes, like heart disease, is totally, totally correlated with magnesium. The more magnesium deficiency you have, the increase of the chances of metabolic disease and diabetes. One of the reasons why is metabolic syndrome is like a fire, like a house burning down. There's a general inflammation, a systemic inflammation. Why? Because there's not enough magnesium to keep like a fire extinguisher. The key, the inflammation under control. And also magnesium is crucial as far as insulin production, the shape of the insulin, and also the receptivity of the cell walls to the insulin. So magnesium is right in the middle. So for diabetics who are having neuropathy in the feet, I mean, transdermal magnesium therapy is like a drink because you can treat directly the feet. You just put your feet inside the magnesium.

Interesting.

You don't have to drink it and hopefully it gets inside and gets down into the feet. You soak your feet in a high concentration and.

Interesting. Well, you know, the feeling that I'm getting is that magnesium plays a pretty significant physiological, really pivotal role in energy production and in maintaining health. And as we spent most of the time discussing today, maintaining or improving sports performance, and it appears that not enough.

People are getting it.

It appears that there are pretty high deficiencies of magnesium, as you mentioned, most likely due to the leaching of minerals in the soil and then for athletes, the fact that they're just using greater amounts of energy than the average population. I am going to post as many resources as I can on the show notes to this podcast, but I would encourage those who are listening in. If you would like to ask me more questions or perhaps have me forward a question to Dr. Serkis, you can email me Ben greenfieldfitness.com this is an issue which I would like to explore as deeply as possible because I've seen enough studies and talked to enough professionals who have spoken about magnesium so highly on this show and face to face that I think that it's high time that we actually did something about it, made the general population aware and also made athletes aware of the enormous improvement, the enormous benefit that this could give them. I mean, this could be kind of like the way that creatine was the magic supplement for the past decade for especially strength and power athletes. I have a feeling that magnesium may be the magic supplement for endurance sports for the next decade. Going forward, we just have to get the news out to athletes about the power of this supplement. Dr. Serkis. Are there any other resources that you would like to point the listeners to?

Well I'd like to point the listeners to my site. H3 HTTP publications.imva.info that was the back door, now the front door to my. I have a whole series of sites.

I have that website pulled up in front of me and I'm going to make sure that that one ends up on the show. Notes.

And don't forget listeners, don't forget the bicarbonate, the mixing, the magnesium and the, the bicarbonate. On my site you'll see my book Sodium Bicarbonate the Rich Man's Poor Man's Cancer Treatment. It also has the chapters on the application of the magnesium both orally and transdermally and a chapter on transdermal medicine in general and why transdermal is not just for magnesium or bicarbonate. Bicarbonate also you can put it in a liquid and put it right on your skin or put it by the pound in the bath with the magnesium. The two go together really, really, really well.

And you know, I have to ask you one other thing, Dr. Serkis. I would imagine that some of the research that you do and some of.

The.

Some of these theories that you're talking about, I would tend to think that this stuff wouldn't be too popular among traditional western allopathic medicine. Have you run into that?

Well I run into plenty of, you know, allopaths who are opening up to this but in general it's not authorized. It's not part of the protocols of the medical health officials and medical authorities. Doctors are afraid to step out of the lockstep. They're afraid to do something different. Many of them at least, or maybe the majority of them I've never done did a poll but these things are non pharmaceutical. They're not, there's not much money to be made from these things. They only help people. They only help the things that help help and are inexpensive and are not dangerous. Are not very popular. No, but you won't find these in the media. The media promotes the pharmaceuticals. They promote poisonous medicines. When this is the thing to remember, this is not legally it's a supplement but it's also a really high profile medicine. If you inject it and you're having a heart attack, it'll save somebody's life in a heartbeat.

Interesting.

And I'm happy that we're getting happy.

That we're getting the word out about this. Well Dr. Serkis, I would like to thank you for coming on the show today and I would encourage our listeners to look at some of the resources that Dr. Serkis has sent our way. And I think that's about it. So thanks for coming on.

It's been a pleasure, Ben, and I hope some athletes really get this message. I really do hope so.

Folks. The crazy thing about this magnesium oil is that it's available. It's out there. I've already started using one source. It's made by a company called Magnetic Clay and it's called Ancient Minerals Ultra Pure Magnesium Oil. I put a link to it on the show Notes in this podcast you will be shocked at how dirt cheap this stuff is and how easy it is to actually use with zero side effects. I've also put a link to Dr. Serkis book Transdermal Magnesium Therapy as well as the three top articles that are easy to understand, that are full of research studies that I was able to find, one on magnesium and sport performance, one on magnesium and musculoskeletal integrity, and one on transdermal magnesium therapy. If you're a healthcare practitioner, if you're an athlete, if you're a coach, if you're someone who just wants to optimize their life, then you'll want to check out these links. Remember, you can ask me a question by calling toll free to 1-877-209-9439. If you're from the local Spokane Coeur d' Alene area, you're definitely going to want to check out that new summer clinic, the Unparalleled Secrets of Fat Loss. If you're a skinny guy who needs muscle, remember to check out Jeff Anderson's Hardgainer X program that you can click on in the show Notes to this podcast as well as the 1500 minutes worth of CD audio from BenGreenfieldFitness.com that you can listen to in your car or home stereo player. So make sure that you view visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com and all those notes are going to be right there. And then the last thing is leave us a rating in itunes. Did you know that you can actually you can make the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast rank higher in itunes by pressing subscribe a bunch of times? Yeah, just one person that's kind of cheating but just press subscribe once. Subscribe to an itunes or go there and leave our post some feedback. Write a a quick note or just give us a few stars and let us know what you think. And until next week, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. Have a great week.