MINERALS (Helpful Therapies)

Welcome back to Medicine Health. Dr. Paul Anderson, that's me. I'm Dr. Paul, and this section is going to be on minerals. So we're doing a little series on natural treatments or integrative treatments, etc., that maybe somebody, uh, like a naturopathic physician, integrative physician of some type, or maybe, maybe your chiropractor, or maybe some other type of healthcare provider might recommend to you. And I get a lot of questions on the various social media platforms about, you know, this particular supplement or that one or why do we use it. So I thought I'd do some little short takes on different types of supplements. So minerals, most people understand, are things like, say, calcium and magnesium are very commonly taken as a supplement, or you find them in a lot of multivitamins, for example. So you kind of have a couple of groups of minerals. So there's the, the what we consider maybe the larger used, higher quantity in the body minerals, which might include iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium. All of these are very, very important for all of your body's processes. Now, just like with a vitamin or an amino acid or any other thing, you can have too low or you can have too high. And so, as I say with all of these supplement things, you should be getting most of your nutrients that you can from your diet. but a lot of times people don't get enough, and that's fairly clear in the research if you look around. Now, obviously, when we get to things like calcium and magnesium and bone health and all that, you've got other things involved, like the fat-soluble vitamins we'll talk about in a separate little vignette, but on the face of it, calcium and magnesium live on the outside and inside of your cell. Sodium and potassium live on the outside and inside of your cell. If the cell is what we call an excitable tissue, meaning it's going to do something like a nerve tissue, it's going to create an action potential or something in your brain, etc., the calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium will have to trade places in order to create this electrical potential. So what happens is your excitable tissues have a suppressed— it's a negative electrical potential. And then you open up the gates and you let the stuff inside the cell go out and the stuff outside the cell go in through these channels. And it changes from a negative millivolt to a positive millivolt. And it creates what we call an action potential. Now, action potential, say, for your skeletal muscles, rather quick. Action potential for your heart's a little bit elongated by about, you know, 100 times actually, but they're still in milliseconds. So it's not like they're sitting around activating forever and ever. But calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium are really responsible for those movements. Okay. Also, of course, calcium, magnesium are responsible for a lot of your bone health, not all of it, but a lot of your bone health. And sodium and potassium are very critical nutrients. And what you see is if your calcium, magnesium, sodium, or potassium go either too high or too low, the first thing that can happen is that you get a dysrhythmia, sometimes called an arrhythmia, where your heart changes its rhythm, which we don't want. If they go too far, you could go into a fatal dysrhythmia, et cetera. So that's why one of the, common tests that are done by your doctor just checking on your health is the electrolyte panel, part of the metabolic panel, and that looks at sodium and potassium and calcium. Magnesium usually is an add-on for a variety of reasons. Now the other big one in high volume is iron, and again, like all things, you don't want too little and you don't want too much. Too much iron and you are sort of pro-oxidizing. It's not great for your body. Too little iron and you don't make energy anymore, right? You've heard of people, or maybe you've been iron deficient, anemic, most common form of anemia, and you can feel, uh, not only very tired, but you have brain fog and all kinds of things. It's not, not enough iron. So iron is one of those things like all the other minerals where you supplement it or eat it into a particular range, and we want to keep it there. So with mineral supplementation where it's sort of low level, you're just adding into your diet what you're eating, et cetera, usually that's not gonna shift your lab values around. If you start taking a lot, or let's say you, you're anemic and your doctor says, okay, we're gonna give you, you know, oral iron supplements or a hematonic supplement, and we're gonna do it until your labs get to this certain place. What they're saying is we're gonna let your body process this. at the rate it can. And then once we get enough stored iron in your system, which there are lab tests for, then we're going to stop giving you that or lower the dose or recommend you eat in a certain way. Just like I said with the vitamins, you can look up online very quickly high calcium foods, high iron foods, high magnesium foods, etc. Everything you can out of your diet, but a lot of times you might need extra of these things. So the big ones: calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium. You know, sodium is very easy to find in the diet, in the modern diet, so you shouldn't have to supplement that. Potassium, you may be good. Calcium, magnesium, you may have enough to run your excitable tissues, but you might want some for other reasons such as bone health, et cetera. And sometimes then, as I was saying, you know, some healthcare provider like a naturopathic doctor or integrative doctor or some other healthcare provider might say, well, we're going to give you some extra magnesium because your muscles are tight or something of that nature. So they might have a sort of a recommendation or a prescription for extra of something, just the same as if you're low in iron. you might get more of that. So those are possible. But then there's the other group of minerals that you usually see like at the bottom of the list on a multivitamin mineral that are called trace minerals. And these are, these are at trace levels, so you'll need a little bit. So when you're thinking about trace minerals, we think about things like copper and zinc and chromium and molybdenum and, you know, vanadium and other things that you see on a multi-mineral or, or a multivitamin. When you are looking at trace minerals, the biggest thing to remember is that just like calcium and magnesium balance each other and sodium, potassium balance each other a little bit, the trace minerals have some balances too. The most famous one is zinc and copper. So what happened a lot during COVID is because people heard that zinc was important for antiviral effect, which it is, and we talked a lot about that on the show, you know, the last few years. Yeah. People might have, you know, mistakenly just taken a lot of zinc for a long time, and now we're seeing people, you know, who have real high zincs and some copper depletion. Now, you don't want a lot of copper. It's like iron can be a pro-oxidant, but you don't want no copper or your body will not work. You need copper to help with a number of neurological functions. You need copper to help with the formation of your, uh, you know, red blood cells, etc. So copper is important, but you just need tiny amount. So what I tended to tell people, uh, and to this day through COVID was, you know, yes, you know, for a month or two you could take extra zinc, but really your smart move would be if I think you need extra, you know, zinc and some other nutrients like selenium is important, etc. you want that to be in a multimineral. So again, kind of like I said, you might take a multivitamin that has B vitamins in it in low amounts, but your doctor might say you need more B vitamins, so you take a B complex alongside it. It's kind of the same with the minerals. You might get a multivitamin in your diet that kind of covers little trace amounts, but during, you know, cold and flu season, et cetera, you might be on a little extra of a multimineral. And the reason the multimineral is usually a little safer than à la carte prescribing is because if, like I said, you know, it happened a lot during COVID you're really banging on the zinc and taking a lot of that and then your copper levels start to drop, that can create trouble within your system. Now there are times where medically we might manipulate these things such as copper levels and maybe zinc, et cetera, But for general good health, again, you want to start with diet. And a lot of that diet has to do with how you're digesting and absorbing. Then you want global or generalized supplementing and then specific supplementing if you're getting that advice, say, from a healthcare provider. So the trace minerals are in trace levels in your body. And they'll have ranges that they're supposed to be in. And unless you've been real depleted, or you're— there are wonderful— not for the patients involved, but there are wonderful studies of areas where there was maybe too much of a mineral in the soil or too little of a mineral. And so the food that people ate in the area made them either excessive or deficient in those minerals. And then they wound up with some dysfunction or even a pathology because of a low amount of a trace mineral. Now, a low amount of a trace mineral will not be as immediately noticed as, say, a real low calcium or real low potassium or something where you might get a cardiac dysrhythmia. A trace mineral will have other functions it does, and those other functions will be impeded by the low level of trace minerals. So I gave the example of depleting your zinc too much. And as I say, it's, it's like iron. We don't want too much, but we need enough to keep our body running. So if we deplete your, your copper and the, the zinc is too high, so we've been, you know, you've taken too much zinc over time and copper's low, you probably won't get like a cardiac problem, but you might start to develop— actually, an anemia can happen, and there's a number of other things that can go on from that. Same with selenium. Selenium is very important for stabilizing your cell membranes, very important for keeping glutathione cycling. It's very important for some immune functions, kind of like zinc is, etc. So if it gets real low, it may show up as a problem in maybe your immunity or maybe one of the other areas that it is trying to help out. Then there's things like chromium and vanadium, and again, these are trace elements, and again, they're better coming from diet than general supplements like a multimineral, then maybe specific supplements. So chromium and vanadium are sometimes given in blood sugar control issues. You'll see them, especially chromium, in blood sugar support supplements, etc. And as long as they're being monitored and you're looking at things, etc., trace minerals are very, very safe. But I always recommend that beyond your diet and maybe a multivitamin mineral, if you need to add trace minerals, rather than just buying one, get a multi-mineral which will have the big ones— calcium, magnesium, and stuff— and then the trace minerals like chromium and selenium and molybdenum and zinc and copper and the stuff, because then they'll be sort of in a balanced, uh, balanced dosing format. Well, we're just about out of time for this particular process. The other thing I was going to say about minerals is beyond helping run your heart and your nerves and all the stuff and, and helping to operate your bone marrow, etc., they're also used with B vitamins as a cofactor to help operate the enzymes so the enzymes can operate at the right speed. So That's another thing that will slow down if you don't have enough of the minerals available and you've got the B vitamins. It, it will bind partially, the B vitamin part. Maybe you don't have the mineral here and it will slow that process down. So that's another thing to keep in mind. But we're out of time for this one. Please like, share, and subscribe. Do the notifications on any of the formats, and we'll be right back with the next session.