I was at Pilates this morning and the subject of magnesium came up.

No one realised its importance. I recall posting a blog about magnesium and Cancer some months ago. So, here to remind myself and hopefully help someone out there is my rough take on Magnesium for general health.

Have a read….

Magnesium – For Better Health

Magnesium is perhaps one of the most overlooked minerals. This is especially important because, an estimated 80 percent of the western world is deficient in it. The health consequences of deficiency can be quite significant, and can be aggravated by many, if not most, prescription drugs.

Magnesium—One of Your Most Important Minerals

Magnesium is a crucially important mineral for good health, performing a wide variety of functions, including but not limited to:

• Activating muscles and nerves
• Creates energy in your body at a cellular level
• Helps digest proteins, carbohydrates, and fats
• Acts as a building block for RNA and DNA synthesis
• Assists neurotransmitters like serotonin (affecting your mood and behaviour)

Nowadays few people get enough magnesium in their diet. Meanwhile, calcium tends to be overused via excessive dairy consumption.

This can cause more harm than good, as it’s important to have a proper balance between the two minerals.

If you have too much calcium and not enough magnesium, your muscles will tend to go into spasm, and this has consequences for your heart in particular.

“What happens is, the muscle and nerve function that magnesium is responsible for is diminished. If you don’t have enough magnesium, your muscles go into spasm. Calcium causes muscle to contract. If you had a balance, the muscles would do their thing. They’d relax, contract, and create their activity,”  (Dr Carolyn Dean)

Magnesium is thus critical for heart health, as excessive amounts of calcium without the counterbalance of magnesium can lead potential problems.

How much Calcium and Magnesium ?

Over the past 30 years, women have been told to take calcium to avoid osteoporosis.

Many foods have also been fortified with extra calcium to prevent calcium deficiency among the general population. Despite such measures, osteoporosis has continued to climb.

“I’ve heard statistics like a 700 percent rise in osteoporosis in a 10-year period, even while taking all this calcium,” Dr. Dean.

“The myth that’s been created about calcium is that we need twice as much calcium as we do magnesium. Most of the supplements reflect this. We’ve got a situation where people are taking 1,200 to 1,500 milligrams of calcium and maybe a few hundred milligrams of magnesium.” (Dr Dean

In actual fact the ratios need to be about the same. For example 400mg of Calcium and 400mg of Magnesium.

Also Address Your Vitamin K2 and D Ratios

Calcium and magnesium also needs to be balanced with vitamin D and K2.

These four nutrients balance together, with one supporting the other.

Lack of balance between them is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attacks and stroke.

Part of the explanation for these side effects is that vitamin K2 keeps calcium in its appropriate place. If you’re K2 deficient, added calcium can cause more problems than it solves, by accumulating in the wrong places.

Similarly, if you take vitamin D, you need to also take vitamin K2 and more magnesium. Taking mega doses of vitamin D supplements without sufficient amounts of K2 and magnesium can lead to vitamin D overload and magnesium deficiency symptoms, which include inappropriate calcification.

Magnesium and vitamin K2 complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease. So anytime you’re taking any of the following: magnesium, calcium, vitamin D3, or vitamin K2, you need to take all the others into consideration as well, since these all work together with one another.

Dietary Sources of Calcium and Magnesium

Calcium. You can typically get enough calcium from your diet by eating nuts, seeds, deep green leafy vegetables, and dairy products. Homemade bone broth is another excellent source. Simply simmer leftover bones over low heat for an entire day to extract the calcium from the bones. (See my Blog Entry on Bone Broth)

Magnesium, on the other hand, tends to be a bit scarcer in our modern food supply.

Magnesium has been farmed out of the soil much more than calcium.  A hundred years ago, we would get maybe 500 mgs of magnesium in an ordinary diet. Now we’re lucky to get 200 mgs. So, you do need to supplement with magnesium

Industrial agriculture has massively depleted most soils of beneficial minerals like magnesium. If you find biologically-grown organic foods (grown on soil treated with mineral fertilizers), you may still be able to get a lot of your magnesium from your food.

Chlorophyll has a magnesium atom in its centre, allowing plants to use the suns energy. Seaweed and green leafy vegetables like spinach and Swiss chard can be excellent sources of magnesium, as are some beans, nuts and seeds, like pumpkin, sunflower and sesame seeds. Avocados also contain magnesium.

Juicing your own vegetables is an excellent option to ensure you’re getting enough in your diet.

However, most foods grown today lack magnesium and other minerals. Herbicides and pesticides block the plant’s natural uptake and use of minerals.

As a result, I believe it would be unusual for anyone to have access to foods that are rich in magnesium, which is why I believe it is wise to consider a magnesium supplement.

This is my personal strategy even though I am lucky to have access to highly nutrient rich organic food.

Which Form of Magnesium Is Best?

Be aware that there are several different forms of magnesium.

The best sort is Magnesium glycinate a form of magnesium that tends to provide the highest levels of absorption and is typically considered ideal for those who are trying to correct a deficiency.

The cheapest sources of magnesium are magnesium oxide supplements, which are poorly absorbed by your body. A mere four percent is absorbed when you take this kind. The remaining 96 percent goes through your intestines, which is why magnesium oxide tends to have a laxative effect, which can be useful if you are challenged with constipation.

Besides taking a supplement, another way to improve your magnesium status is to take regular Epsom salt baths. Epsom salt is a magnesium sulphate that can absorb into your body through your skin.

 

Magnesium oil (from magnesium chloride) can also be used for topical application and absorption.(Which I use – a lot !!)

The reason for the wide variety of magnesium supplements on the market is because the magnesium must be bound to another substance. There’s no such thing as a 100% magnesium compound supplement.

The substance used in any given supplement compound can affect the absorption and bioavailability of the magnesium, and may provide slightly different, or targeted, health benefits:

Magnesium glycinate is a form of magnesium that tends to provide the highest levels of absorption and bioavailability and is typically considered ideal for those who are trying to correct a deficiency	Magnesium oxide is a type of magnesium, bound to an organic acid or a fatty acid. Contains 60 percent magnesium and has stool softening properties
Magnesium chloride / Magnesium lactate contain only 12 percent magnesium, but has better absorption than others, such as magnesium oxide, which contains five times more magnesium	Magnesium sulphate / Magnesium hydroxide (milk of magnesia) are typically used as a laxative. Be aware that it’s easy to overdose on these, so ONLY take as directed
Magnesium carbonate, which has antacid properties, contains 45 percent magnesium	Magnesium taurate contains a combination of magnesium and taurine, an amino acid. Together, they tend to provide a calming effect on your body and mind
Magnesium citrate is magnesium with citric acid, which has laxative properties	Magnesium threonate is a newer, type of magnesium supplement that appears promising, primarily due to its ability to penetrate cell membrane

Prescription Drugs may reduce your Magnesium

Two major lifestyle factors that deplete your body of magnesium are stress and prescription drugs.

Unfortunately, the conventional medical approach for dealing with stress often leads to prescription drugs, making your situation progressively worse.

• The scenario is very basic.
• You go to your doctor. You’re under massive stress.
• Massive stress means you’re losing magnesium.
• You’re burning magnesium out of your body, because it helps support your adrenal glands. It helps keep you away from anxiety and depression.
• It helps relax your muscles.
• If you’re all tight and stressed, your magnesium is being lost, which makes the muscles of your blood vessels tighten. That tightness is going to cause increased blood pressure.
• Your doctor… will say, ‘Oh, your blood pressure is elevated. We’ll give you a diuretic.’
• The diuretic will drop the fluid level in your body to take the pressure off your blood vessels, so your blood pressure will drop. But diuretics also drain off your magnesium… A month later you come back, and the doctor finds your blood pressure’s even more elevated. Yes—because you’ve just lost more magnesium! Your doctor then puts you on a calcium channel blocker.
• Now, they have that part right. They know that without magnesium, your calcium is going to become elevated and will tighten up your blood vessels, so they try to block calcium. But they don’t know that magnesium is a natural calcium channel blocker.
• Your doctor may also put you on another blood pressure drug… So, you go away with three drugs now. After two or three months, you come back and have blood taken to make sure that drugs aren’t hurting your liver… All of a sudden, your cholesterol and blood sugar is elevated.
• What does the doctor say? ‘Oh, we just caught your cholesterol and blood sugar in time. We can put you on medication for that.’

But they didn’t catch them; they caused them. And …So it goes…

The more you deplete your magnesium, the more out of control your cholesterol will get, because magnesium helps balance the enzyme that creates cholesterol in your body, helping your cholesterol levels. Interestingly, statins destroy the same enzyme that magnesium balances.

Magnesium deficiency is also a common symptom in diabetes, so drugs may inadvertently contribute to diabetes simply by depleting your body of magnesium.

In short.

Take 400mgs per day of Magnesium Glycinate for better health.

End of Message.

I have had a couple of conversations with people in the last month about Statins. Coincidentally, I came across this article today in the Magazine “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”.

As usual, the tale is one of drugs giving a benefit to the drug company, rather than to the patient.

The long term solution, once again, seemingly lies in diet rather than a “Quick fix pill”.

Hence, “Statin the Obvious”. Here is the article for anyone who is interested…..

Statins are the world’s best-selling drugs. Designed to lower our levels of ‘bad’ LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol—the stuff that blocks arteries and causes heart disease—they are the ultimate just-in-case drug given even to healthy people when they’ve reached the age of 50 or so.

Not surprisingly, they are seen as life-savers. The UK’s drugs assessor, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), reckons the drugs could save 50,000 lives a year if every British male over the age of 60 and female over 65 took them regularly. Because of this enormous benefit, doctors in the UK are encouraged to start every 60-year-old on statins, whether or not there are heart problems or any risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

Yet the cost to the UK taxpayer is enormous. The bill for statins runs to around £450 million a year, which can be added to the drug’s worldwide revenues of around £20 billion . But if the drugs are saving that many lives every year, the cost is fully justified.

However, NICE estimates of lives saved seem to be wildly at odds with the evidence. Researchers from multiple centres across the UK reckon the drugs would save just 750 lives in the UK every year. They looked at death rates from  heart disease between 2000 and 2007, and noted that numbers had fallen by 38,000.

Just 1,800 could be directly attributable to statins; the vast majority were due to changes in lifestyle, such as improvements in diet and exercise.

But what does it even mean to save lives? Surprisingly, scientists seem to be vague about this; often a life is considered ‘saved’ when compared with someone else, usually a participant not given the drug being tested who died while the trial was being conducted. It’s a form of statistical juggling that has meaning within the tight logical framework of a scientific study.

Danish researchers decided to take a closer look at this  ill-defined area, and came up with a very surprising discovery. Rather than looking for lives saved, they instead used a more precise measure: the average postponement of death. With this definition, the scientists were able to see exactly how long people lived after their lives were considered ‘saved’—and the average was between just three and four days.

In other words, statins were extending life by an average of up to four days in people with a heart problem who were taking  statins. The greatest extension of life across the 11 studies they reanalyzed was 27 days in heart patients who took a statin for more than five years; at best, these statin patients were living nearly a month longer than someone not taking the drug.

This very modest benefit has been seen in other trials. In one review, patients with heart disease had their risk of death reduced by just 1.2 per cent if they took a statin for five years, but even that benefit disappears in people who don’t have heart disease. For those with a less than 20 per cent chance of developing heart disease over the next 10 years, there is absolutely no benefit in taking a statin.

If they’re not helping us live longer, do statins at least offer protection from a heart attack or stroke that might leave us debilitated or destroy our quality of life? Again, the benefits are hard to see: the drugs achieve a one in 140 risk reduction for a non-fatal heart attack or stroke in people who have a low risk—which means less than 10 per cent—of heart disease over the next 10 years.

Put another way, the drugs are no better than a placebo, or sugar pill, say the researchers from Cambridge University who reviewed 11 statin studies involving more than 65,000 people, half of whom were taking the drugs. Those not taking a statin had higher levels of LDL cholesterol, yet similar numbers from both groups had died during the four years of the study, suggesting there is more to heart disease than ‘bad’ cholesterol and statin therapy.

Two researchers from University College Hospital in Galway, Ireland, came to a similar conclusion when they took a fresh look at 55 studies that had previously been published. Instead of seeing benefits, they found that people taking statins weren’t living longer and were just as likely to develop heart disease as those not taking the drugs. Worse, women, diabetics and young people taking a statin were actually more likely to develop heart disease.

The possibility that statins actually increase the risk of heart disease and death was beginning to emerge in the Illuminate trial—later described by researchers as medicine’s best-kept secret—before it was hurriedly closed down after participants started dying suddenly or developed cancer.

How can this be when health regulators, like  NICE, are so positive about the enormous benefits of statins? The studies they rely on to shape public-health policy are invariably funded by drug manufacturers, which have a vested commercial interest in achieving a very positive outcome.

To put it starkly, drug companies use “statistical deception” to exaggerate the benefits and downplay the risks of statins, say two researchers, who reckon the drugs help just 1 per cent of the population.

Researchers David Diamond, of the Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Florida, and independent researcher Dr Uffe Ravnskov ran the data again from some of the biggest statin trials and concluded that the drug-company funders had used statistical deception to create the illusion that statins are wonder drugs, when the reality is that their modest benefits are more than offset by “the numerous adverse effects of statin treatment”.

In the UK, NICE’s decision to expand the group being prescribed a statin was partly influenced by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists Collaboration (CTT) which, it was  revealed, was receiving substantial funding from drug companies; for example, Merck, one of the biggest manufacturers of statins, had donated £217 million.

Side-effects and adverse reactions are common among statin patients. One population-based survey—USAGE (Understanding Statin use in America and Gaps in Education)—has revealed that up to half the people taking statins stop within the first year, with 62 per cent citing some side-effect—such as muscle weakness, joint pain, nausea or ‘brain fog’—as the reason.

At best, statins may have some marginal benefit in those who already have heart disease—but they would do just as well, if not better, by eating a healthier diet—while no independent evidence even suggests that the world’s most successful drugs do a thing to benefit the rest of us.

Cholesterol: What’s your score?

Just as many know their blood-pressure reading, so they are familiar with their cholesterol ‘number’. The ideal score is 5 mmol/L (millimoles per litre of blood), which is made up of 1.3 mmol/L of HDL (high-density lipoprotein), the ‘good’ cholesterol, and 3.7 mmol/L of LDL cholesterol, although doctors like to see the HDL reading at 2 or higher.

The typical score in the UK is around 6.1, and any LDL reading above 4 will automatically trigger a prescription for a statin.

But your cholesterol score is more the stuff of fashion than health. Go back 20 years and the healthy score was around 7, and this was lowered to 6.5 10 years ago before reaching today’s .

It’s predicted to fall again soon to 4—currently the ideal score for anyone who has already suffered a heart attack—and cardiologists reckon it will then drop to just 2.5 over the next 10 years.

Just eat well

Eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly can prevent six times the number of deaths from heart disease as can a statin.

If statin drugs save 750 lives every year in the UK, as UK researchers suggest, then healthier lifestyle choices could save 4,600 lives.

This makes sense because up to 80 per cent of cardiovascular disease is caused by lifestyle choices, such as an unhealthy diet of junk food, smoking, drinking too much alcohol and being physically inactive.

A bad diet seems to be the major cause of heart disease and, conversely, eating healthily has the greatest protective effect. In fact, eating just one apple a day has the same protective effect as a statin for preventing a heart attack in someone who is healthy. The Mediterranean diet, especially when supplemented with 30 g/day of nuts or 4 Tbsp of extra-virgin olive oil, can reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke by a third.

Intriguingly, these risk reductions are seen even in people with high levels of ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol

“Concentrating on LDL-lowering alone as an end in itself might be counterproductive. Indeed, insulin resistance may emerge as the single most important determinant of coronary artery disease,” says leading cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, of Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, UK.

Stressing the negative

A bad diet may be the major cause of heart disease, followed closely by smoking and inactivity. But is there another cause? Dr Malcolm Kendrick, author of The Great Cholesterol Con (John Blake, 2007), reckons that stress and isolation are unrecognized causes, and ones that are growing with the rise of the nuclear family.

Although stress may be a good thing to help us overcome a challenge, the persistent kind, when we feel powerless and there’s no end in sight, can lead to heart disease, he believes. This can include working for a bullying boss, having long-term money worries and suffering from constant racist abuse,etc. etc.
So..

Some food for thought.