Just as vitamin D is probably the most versatile, safe, and cost-effective vitamin, I nominate magnesium has the most versatile, safe, and cost-effective mineral. Magnesium is an essential cofactor in 80% of the biochemical reactions that constantly go on in the body. This means that if you are magnesium deficient, 80% of your biochemistry is impaired.

Tony was in his late 20s when I first saw him. He had not been able to sleep well for seven years because he had restless legs syndrome. He was very fatigued. An intravenous infusion of magnesium and vitamin B6 stopped the restless legs like hanging stops a horse thief. Tony began to take magnesium and B6 by mouth. Restless legs started again after a few days. I gave him another IV which was the last one he needed. When I heard from him several months later he was free of restless legs syndrome but it started to return if he forgot to take magnesium and B6.

How may magnesium deficiency show up in your life? As you might suspect, since 80% of your biochemistry is impaired, there can be many symptoms. Some of the more his common are:

• Restless legs syndrome

• Weakness

• Inappropriate fatigue

• Muscle twitching

• Muscle pain and soreness

• Shooting pains

• Sound sensitivity

• Light sensitivity

• Irritability

• Delayed recovery from from exercise

Magnesium deficiency may also be a complicating factor in:

• Congestive heart failure

• Arrhythmias

• Asthma

• Migraine

• Hypertension

• Increased risk of death from heart attack

There is a hidden epidemic of magnesium deficiency because:

• There is very little magnesium in food produced by agribusiness. Analysis has shown that organically grown food has 10 times the magnesium content of agribusiness food.

• Magnesium is difficult to absorb even when taken in adequate quantities.

• Overstress causes increased loss of magnesium through the kidneys while at the same time interfering with absorption from the gut.

• Another hidden epidemic, gluten sensitivity, causes gut damage that further impairs absorption.

• Eating large quantities of sugar increases renal loss of magnesium.

Jennifer was in her 50s when she began to have a esophageal spasms when she ate. These were painful and frightening because she could not swallow and she felt she was strangling. Magnesium injections quickly relieved the spasms. She started taking magnesium and B6 by mouth which reduced her need for injections from once or twice a week to once every several weeks.

How to find out if you are magnesium deficient

It’s easy to tell that you have enough magnesium if you have none of the symptoms on the list in my most recent post.

If you do have one or more of those symptoms it gets tricky because there are causes other than low magnesium that can cause several of the symptoms. This is where lab tests come in handy, but lab tests themselves are tricky. The blood test, which is the one usually performed, is unreliable unless it is low. A normal blood magnesium does not necessarily mean that you are not magnesium deficient. This is because magnesium does it work inside the cell and having enough magnesium in the blood does not mean there is enough inside the cell. There is what’s called a magnesium pump in the cell wall. Sometimes the pump breaks down and even with plenty of magnesium in the blood the cell is magnesium deficient and you get symptoms.

A better test is the red blood cell (RBC) magnesium test. This test gives you the average of the amount of magnesium that has been in cells in the last four months. The best test is the white blood cell (WBC) magnesium. The white blood cell, unlike the red blood cell, is a metabolically active cell. Its magnesium content lets know how much of magnesium was in the cell at the time the blood was drawn. Unfortunately, the WBC magnesium is complicated to do and most labs do not perform it. We actually get along very well with RBC magnesium plus considering these symptoms. RBC magnesium is the test I use when I need to test. Usually I don’t, because I learned in the past 25 years how to recognize the symptoms and symptom patterns of magnesium deficiency.

If you have ever been magnesium deficient and correct the deficiency, you are unlikely to forget how it feels to be magnesium deficient compared with how it feels to have enough. People who have had this experience a few times usually become expert at detecting the early warning signs that their magnesium level is about to fall below a symptom threshold.

The bottom line: if you have none of the magnesium deficiency symptoms, smile and assume that you have enough magnesium. If you have one of more low magnesium symptoms decide whether you want to try increasing your magnesium intake (a therapeutic trial) or whether you wish to test first. There are labs that will do a RBC magnesium test without a doctor’s order. If you can’t find one, perhaps you know a physician who would order it for you. If you decide to do a therapeutic trial on magnesium or you test for it and find that you don’t have enough, you need to know how to take magnesium correctly. If you don’t know that, you can make your magnesium deficiency worse by taking magnesium.

Magnesium: How to Get It Right

If you have low magnesium symptoms and have decided you want to take magnesium to see if they will go away (a therapeutic trial) or if you have had an RBC magnesium test which shows that you are deficient, you need to know how to take magnesium correctly. This involves more than taking a certain number of milligrams of any kind of magnesium. It is possible to make a magnesium deficiency worse by taking magnesium and in the process to create other mineral deficiencies as well. To take magnesium correctly you need to do five things.

1. Get your magnesium from a reliable company. There are some excellent companies making and marketing nutritional supplements and there are some crooks. There seem to be a lot of crooks because the two surveys I have seen published on the quality of nutritional supplements purchased off health food store shelves showed that over half of the products did not contain what the labels said they contained. The health food store brands I trust are Nature’s Way (green leaf logo) and Nutricology. For most people, the best way to get good quality trustworthy nutritional supplements is from Life Extension or Emerson Ecologics.

2. Take the right kind of magnesium. The right kind of magnesium is magnesium citrate malate. The wrong kind of magnesium is magnesium oxide. It is the most difficult form of magnesium to absorb, the most likely to give you diarrhea, and it is also the cheapest, so that’s what you find in many magnesium supplements. Magnesium citrate is significantly more of absorbable and gentler on your gut. Malate means that the magnesium citrate is complexed with malic acid, which ushers the magnesium into the cell where it is needed, thus making each milligram of magnesium more effective..

3. Take the right amount of magnesium. Two little will not correct to your deficiency. Too much will make it worse. Too little magnesium often causes constipation, which can be severe. Too much and you get diarrhea. For magnesium and most other minerals to be absorbed efficiently they need to stay in your digestive system for at least 16 hours. The length of time it takes what you swallow to make the trip through your digestive tract from end to end is called your gut transit time. 16 to 24 hours is probably ideal. If you have only one bowel movement a day you know your transit time is more than 16 hours. Start taking magnesium citrate malate 150 to 200 mg twice daily with meals. If your magnesium symptoms are not improving after two weeks you will need to do a gut tolerance protocol. This is similar to the vitamin C gut tolerance protocol but there are important differences.

To do the protocol you will need to know your gut transit time. In the next post, I will tell you how to discover that, how to proceed with the protocol, and do steps 4 and 5.

How to Get It Right, Part 2

We are continuing the discussion of Step 3: Take the right amount of magnesium.

Let’s say you have already tried taking magnesium citrate malate 200 mg twice daily with meals. It’s been two weeks and your low magnesium symptoms have not disappeared. Now, the right amount of magnesium is the maximum you can take without shortening your gut transit time below 16 hours.

Here’s how to discover your gut transit time, which is the time it takes what you’ve swallowed to go through your digestive tract from end to end. There are several markers you can use. The simplest is corn. Eat some whole kernel corn and don’t chew it very well. Write down when you swallow the corn and the next time you see it again. Do the math and that is your transit time. You can use other markers such as a tablespoon or two of sesame seed. Probably the most elegant is charcoal. You can get some activated charcoal capsules from a pharmacy or a health food store, take five or six before a meal and watch for the charcoal to show up again.

If you don’t want to go to the trouble to do a gut transit time, there is a down and dirty way that may work. You can increase your dose to 200 mg three times a day and see if you start having more bowel movements. If not, and if your low magnesium symptoms don’t go way, after a few days, say three or four, you can take 200 mg four times a day, with meals and at bedtime. If after a week on that dose nothing has changed, better do the transit time and follow the protocol in Step 4.

Step 4: Take magnesium at the right times.

With a magnesium, timing is important, like in a trapeze act. You will only absorb a certain amount of magnesium with each dose. If you exceed the amount you can absorb you will absorb even less because of the shortened gut transit time. Frequent small doses work much better than a single dose of the same total number of milligrams. Ordinarily the right times to take magnesium are three times a day with meals. Some people will need to take four doses a day with the fourth dose taken at bedtime.

In the unlikely event that you are by now taking 200 mg four times daily and nothing has changed, you can increase your dose by 100 or 200 mg daily until something does change. If what changes is the disappearance of your symptoms, it would be neat to post a comment about that. If the change is a short transit time or a belly ache, that’s worth a comment also and you might want to look for a physician in your area who understands magnesium and may be able to help you. You can see a good doctor finder page by clicking www.acam.org.

Well, this turned out to be little more complicated than I anticipated and I have run out of time for now. I intend to really finish this up with Step 5 in the next post. I’m not sure when that will be because I have discovered I’m going to be out of town for a week and I don’t know how much time I’ll have available for blogging. I do plan to check e-mail and my blog daily and look forward to responding to any comments that come in. In the meantime, may your magnesium experiences be spectacularly successful. I’ve been hearing some great magnesium success stories lately and wouldn’t mind hearing a few more.

How to Get It Right, Part 3

Suzanne got it right. In her 50s, she came in with a long list of symptoms including severe constipation, with which she had suffered for as long as she could remember. I prescribed the magnesium protocol. When she returned in two weeks for a follow-up visit she was astonished and delighted. “The day after I started the magnesium protocol, the constipation I’ve had all my life stopped. I had a bowel movement and have had one every day since then.”

The final step in getting your magnesium program right is to give the magnesium an essential cofactor for maximum effectiveness in your body. That cofactor is the activated form of vitamin B6: pyridoxal-5-phosphate, a.k.a. P-5-P. It is available from Emerson Ecologics. The dose is 50 mg twice daily. You can probably accomplish the same thing with vitamin B6 100 mg twice daily in addition to whatever B6 is in your multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. However, some people may not effectively convert vitamin B6 into P-5-P. Just be sure you take a high potency multiple vitamin and mineral supplement to balance the large dose of B6 you will be taking. Otherwise, you may get into trouble with a B vitamin imbalance.

Here’s one more success story. Sandy, 40 something, was a highly successful executive in a national Corporation until she was disabled by fibromyalgia of seven years ago. She spent the past seven years in an implacable search for a cure. She tried many different treatments, none of which gave satisfactory results. She and I have been consulting for about a year and she has developed the most comprehensive holistic healing program of any of my patients. For the first time since she became disabled she is regaining the ability to function. She thinks she is back to about 50% of her previous health and she is still gaining. Of the many different components to her healing program she believes magnesium has been the most useful. She gives herself magnesium injections much like a diabetic gives herself insulin. We expect that as she improves her digestive system and increases their ability to absorb magnesium she will be able to discontinue the injections. In the meantime she is very happy to be able to resume her career.

I just answered my own question about which of the dozen things I intend to blog about I will do next now that I have finished with magnesium. It is going to be about finding the right multiple vitamin and mineral supplement, since that is the foundation of your entire nutritional supplement program. Logically, I should have done that first but it doesn’t sound very interesting (foundations usually aren’t), so I thought I should start with something that would be more likely to get your attention. Since you are reading this, I must have your attention so in the next post I will tell you how to find your best multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. It isn’t easy and took me 50 years so I think I can save you some time.

The multiple vitamin and mineral discussion will round out what I consider to be the Big Four nutritional supplements: vitamin C, vitamin D, magnesium, and the right multiple vitamin matter or supplement. There must be more than 100 nutritional supplements out there, each with its own list of benefits, usually hyped. I’ve seen a lot of them come and go in the past 50 years. The Big Four have come and stayed because, in my experience, they give him the most bang for the buck and improve more of the most frequent symptoms with which people suffer and do the most to extend the health span and improve quality of life.

So the next post will be about how to find the right multiple vitamin mineral supplement for you. I think I can even do it all in one post. After that, I’d like you to help me decide what to do next since I have this list of more than a dozen topics that I think are interesting, important, and useful. I’d appreciate a comment about what you’d like to know about next.