Magnesium and Bone Health: Prevent Osteoporosis and Osteopenia

Why Is Magnesium Deficiency So Prevalent?

There are many answers to that question. Primarily, magnesium is no longer in the soil, it’s been farmed out. A hundred years ago, we could get 500 milligrams of magnesium from our food. Now we’re lucky to get 150 milligrams. When you consider that magnesium is required to operate 80% of known metabolic functions, we have a real problem. All living cells require magnesium.

Beyond soil depletion, magnesium gets cooked out of food and processed out of food. We have so much stress now, and stress is a real depleter of magnesium. Drugs also deplete magnesium. But what brackets this whole scenario is that we don’t have blood tests that will identify magnesium deficiency. On an electrolyte panel, they don’t even include magnesium. So even though 80% of metabolic functions require magnesium, we don’t test for it, doctors don’t recommend it, and they don’t learn about it in medical school. Everybody is walking around with symptoms of magnesium deficiency.

Why Isn’t Magnesium Deficiency More Well Known?

Even those tests aren’t accurate. The serum magnesium test measures only 1% of total body magnesium, which means only 1% of the body’s magnesium is in the blood. You put your dipstick in the blood and you don’t get an accurate measure. I think that’s why doctors don’t bother testing for it.

There is a magnesium RBC test where they spin out the plasma and measure the magnesium in red blood cells. But here’s the problem: red blood cells don’t contain mitochondria. Mitochondria are where the Krebs cycle occurs, and the Krebs cycle requires six to eight magnesium interfaces to make energy. Since red blood cells don’t have mitochondria, they’re limited in the amount of magnesium they contain. So how is that a good measure?

The research I’m doing is looking at ionized magnesium testing. They have ionized calcium tests, so why don’t they have ionized magnesium tests? That’s what we need to push for—better testing so we can diagnose magnesium deficiency.

Will the Ionized Magnesium Test Be Available in the Near Future?

Hard to say because it’s only in research facilities. The universities I’m working with have ionized testing machines—maybe there are 5,000 operating now. Eventually we’ll get there, but at present, you cannot walk into a lab and get an ionized magnesium test. People have to go by how they feel, and magnesium deficiency symptoms are very easy to pinpoint.

Is There a Link Between Magnesium Deficiency and Anxiety and Depression?

One thing that struck me most when I started your book was how you pointed out that anxiety and depression are symptoms of magnesium deficiency. I hear about these issues constantly—not only in my patients, but in their children and overall in society. Can you speak about the link between magnesium deficiency and anxiety and depression?

When you’re under stress, the adrenal glands pump out a lot of adrenaline, which starts the heart beating faster, makes you clammy, and makes you jittery. Magnesium dampens the expression of ACTH (adrenal corticoid stimulating hormone) that’s made in the anterior pituitary. This hormone stimulates the adrenal glands to release adrenaline. Magnesium attenuates that activity.

Additionally, magnesium, along with vitamin C and B vitamins, is very important for creating adrenaline. When you use up your adrenaline, you need nutrients to make more. When we overstimulate the adrenal glands and get excessive adrenaline, we start palpitating and getting jittery. People think they’re having an anxiety attack when they’re actually having a magnesium deficiency attack.

Regarding depression, when you don’t have enough magnesium to calm your muscles and nerves, problems arise. Magnesium relaxes muscles—it allows calcium to go into a muscle and create an action potential for movement, but then magnesium closes the door and won’t let more calcium in. If there’s not enough magnesium, calcium keeps entering the cell until it activates itself to death. The same thing happens with nerves.

If you get too much calcium, you’re twitching and cramping, which interferes with sleep. If you don’t get good sleep, you wake up in the morning with symptoms that can be misdiagnosed as depression, when it’s actually fatigue from not sleeping properly because you’re magnesium deficient. It’s a terrible vicious cycle.

When you go to a medical doctor with palpitations, anxiety, depression, and fatigue, they put you on antidepressants and anxiolytic drugs instead of asking if you might be magnesium deficient. It’s a very sad state of affairs that we’ve allowed medicine to avoid the use of nutrients or even the research of nutrients to understand how vital they are as co-factors for everything the body does.

Relationship Between Levels of Calcium and Magnesium

I’ve noticed when my clients tell me they have muscle spasms, I’ll ask about their calcium intake versus magnesium intake. You mentioned that if calcium is too high—but are we saying calcium is too high in absolute terms, or relative to the magnesium you’re taking?

It’s relative to magnesium. What’s happened in our society is that we have biological factors that limit our intake of magnesium, we get a laxative effect when we have too much. Parallel to that, we have factors that grab onto calcium, like vitamin D, so we get rid of too much magnesium while we keep grabbing calcium.

This happened ancestrally because humans grew in cultures close to water and the ocean. Ocean water has three times the magnesium compared to calcium. If your diet is mostly from the ocean, you’re getting a lot of magnesium. Calcium was harder to get, you hear about animals traveling hundreds of miles to get to calcium licks. You’d get calcium from bones, for example.

In our society, we somehow got the idea that we needed more calcium. Even orange juice is fortified with calcium. We’re now at a state where we can have a ratio of 10 parts calcium to one part magnesium, which is horrific. That’s what’s calcifying us. Many early researchers on anti-aging said that calcification is the cause of aging. Our arteries get calcified, our joints get calcified. We should be fluid and balanced with enough flexible magnesium compared to rigid calcium.

General Recommendations on Magnesium and Health

Is there anything else you’d like to share regarding general health, wellness, and magnesium?

In my book, The Magnesium Miracle, I identified and listed 65 health conditions, medical conditions, or diseases that could be mistaken for magnesium deficiency. To me, it was amazing: migraines, headaches, choking symptoms, eye twitches, cramping of the jaws, heart palpitations, angina, blood pressure issues, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, leg cramps—any muscle in the body can cramp up. Even acid reflux: if your stomach is in spasm, you’ll reflux. If you don’t have enough magnesium, you’re not producing stomach acid to digest your food.

If your blood sugar is starting to go off, take magnesium. One of the signs of diabetes is low magnesium. If you take your magnesium, you’re helping about ten different metabolic functions related to the pancreas, the release of insulin, and how insulin helps glucose get into cells before you become insulin resistant.

Also, to digest sugar you use up a lot of magnesium. Glucose and fructose are different—fructose requires twice as much magnesium to digest as glucose. People going into vegan or vegetarian diets tend to eat too much fruit and can get into trouble with mineral deficiencies. I’ve had many vegetarians and vegans say they’re drinking 40 ounces of green drink a day and developed palpitations, insomnia, and cramps. They take some magnesium and get better because they’re basically healthy.