Dr. Carolyn Dean: What causes magnesium deficiency is a soil deficiency. If there's not enough soil magnesium, the plants aren't going to pick up magnesium. We don't have fertilizers that supply magnesium, so we are at a stage now where we get about 150 milligrams of magnesium in a regular diet. About 100 years ago, with good soil magnesium, we were getting 500 milligrams of magnesium.
This slide shows the industrialization of agriculture has led to the depleted soil. To the point now with food processing and even cooking, depletion of magnesium, we've got 70-80% of the population being magnesium deficient. This slide shows that it's a terrible joke that we tell about hospitalization where if you eat the hospital food, you will barely survive because it is so deficient in vitamins and minerals. Another few slides that show a woman trying to ask the doctor about adding something to her diet and the doctor saying, she's being delusional and it had something to do with deep underlying psychological problems thinking that she needs to add nutrients to her diet.
Most women who have fatigue, insomnia, muscle cramps, go to their doctor and be told that they need Prozac or some sort of antidepressant. Or the patient is saying, everything in my local supermarket is hardly processed, full of pesticides and other chemicals and lacking the nutrients. The doctor just keep saying, eat a little of everything in moderation and not realizing that the diet is so deficient. So the solutions we come to, deep green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds and whole grains are your sources of magnesium. However if they come from soil that is deficient in magnesium, you are not going to be getting anymore than 150 milligrams. We do hope that organic food sources have more magnesium but you'll actually have to ask your farmers if they are replacing magnesium in the soil.
The supplementation: recommended daily allowance is actually far too low, 300-400 milligrams. We need maybe twice and three times as much. The dimagnesium malate from Jigsaw is one of the prime oral sources of magnesium. It has good absorption and it does not cause a laxative effect. Magnesium oxide for example is the least well absorbed at about 4% and it's highly laxative. The ratio in our diet of calcium to magnesium is very much at a balance. We could be getting six times the calcium in our diet to magnesium, which as I've described earlier can lead to a lot of calcium overload problems and magnesium deficiency problems.
The 2:1 ratio is more appropriate but what I find with people who have magnesium deficiency symptoms and you can find a list of about a 100 magnesium deficiency factors or symptoms in The Magnesium Miracle book to define where you may stand in terms of magnesium deficiency. You may already know from going over the 21 different magnesium deficiency conditions. So the calcium problem we've already talked about, there's more calcium in foods than there is magnesium and calcium supplementation is promoted to the exclusion of all other minerals. So my question has become, is excess calcium the cause of increase heart disease in women?
What I've learned in medical school was the diagnosis of the disease and their treatments with drugs. In naturopathic school, I've learned to treat with nutrients. So if you are seeing an allopathic doctor, usually when you go in with symptoms to a doctor, if you are child, you will get antibiotics, if you are a school kid, you will be put on Ritalin, going to college, trying to stay up at night, you are taking No-Doz, the mother with her baby is on Prozac, the elderly are on Zantac and everything else. So we have a recipe system in allopathic medicine for giving drugs for symptoms, but what you're learning on this teleconference and when you read health books is to take nutrients, to eat the good diet, get your exercise, get proper sleep in order to take care of your health. Now I'll turn back to Patrick to go over your questions. Hopefully we can answer all your questions in the time allotted.
Patrick Sullivan: Dr. Dean, that was really, really helpful. Thank you so much for attending today. Attendees, your chance to ask questions is now. In the bottom right hand corner of your screen, all the way at the bottom, you'll see something that is a little question mark. If you click that, type in your question, I'll get that and post the question for Dr. Dean. So a lot of you're taking in your questions. I'll start with a question. Dr. Dean if you could, talk about the difficulty of measuring the amounts of magnesium that's present in the body?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, that's a good point because only one percent of the magnesium in the body is found in the blood stream. Then the body will use any measures possible to keep that level normal. It will pull magnesium out of the bones, and out of the tissues to keep the blood magnesium at a certain optimal levels to keep the heart going. What happens when doctors measure blood magnesium, they'll always see that this is within a certain range. So it's not an accurate measure of total body magnesium. It's led many people to stray because they all get a blood level and it will look normal, they will think they are fine. In the book I talk about the Exatest at exatest.com, you can look into that. It's a red blood cell type magnesium but they use a scraping from your mouth to look at it under an electron microscope and identify the amount of calcium and magnesium in your blood cells or in your epithelial cells from your mucus membrane, so it is a better test. The research test ionized magnesium is still only available at the research level but hopefully over a time, we'll get better testing of magnesium.
Patrick Sullivan: So basically in summary, it's not necessarily easy to tell how much is really in there?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, that's correct and that's for I have the list of symptoms and factors that identifying magnesium deficiency. Magnesium is a mineral that if you get too much, then you have a laxative effect with it and it goes out in one end and not the other, so it's a mineral that you can't filled up in the body. You build up calcium in the body, unfortunately but magnesium seems to be a very safe mineral that if you take too much, the body eliminates it.
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