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Podcast 374: Magnesium

Magnesium is one of the four most important minerals that the human body requires. It is a cornerstone piece of all physiology in the human body. Learn all about different forms and uses of this important mineral with Martin and Miri!

Podcast 374 about Magnesium

Martin: Hi everybody! This is Martin Pytela, health coach at Life Enthusiast! We are coming to you with the goal of restoring vitality to you, and to the planet. Today I have with me Miri Okocha, one of our clients for many years, who also recently joined us on our mission. Hi Miri!

Miri: Hi Martin. How are you? I’m so excited to talk to you today! You know, I brought up talking about this topic today, because just like you, I’m on a mission to help people have better health. And as you know, I have struggled with my own health concerns. You know, I am a woman in my sixties, I’ll be 63 next week. I struggled with weight, fatigue, and overall just not feeling my best. And like so many people who are struggling are looking for ways to improve their health, I’ve been wanting to improve mine! And it was only after I met you that I was able to actually find solutions to these struggles and problems I was dealing with. And I really feel that without your help, it wouldn’t be possible for me to enjoy my life again.

I really think life is to be enjoyed, and I’m on a mission to help not only myself, but other people as well. And as you know, I’ve been really enjoying all of the products that you suggested, and my health has improved immensely. Over the past year that I’ve really worked with you closely, I have just got more and more energy, and I feel like I have more energy than I did in my twenties, which is pretty amazing. And I’ve learned that it’s possible to feel better as you age, which has been a real revelation to me.

So, Martin, I’d like to just really get to the point of this discussion, and kind of pick your brain about what you think are the critical elements to improving someone’s health, especially aging people.

Martin: You know, the transformation that you have enjoyed was a process of education. I remember you telling me that you were going to do an experiment with a weight loss technique, and it just blew up in your face. And I said it was going to blow up in your face and you went ahead and it blew up in your face. And then you were just shocked when I told you to do exactly the opposite of what all the nutritionists and gurus and whoever was telling you. And then you were saying: “I cannot believe that I’m doing all these things, and they are making me feel better.”

Miri: You know, it’s really funny because it was the opposite! You told me how to eat for my metabolic type, and I had no idea that eating protein and fat would make me lose weight. I thought protein and fat was making me gain weight! And when I stopped eating carbs and especially cutting out gluten, as you suggested, the fat started to melt off of me, I could not believe it! And my friends couldn’t believe it either!

Martin: Yeah, I hear that you’re now turning heads…

Miri: Yes, well, it’s true! And in my sixties I didn’t really think that was going to happen again!

Martin: One of the things that was not working for you was chronic inflammation, that was showing up in various symptoms. For you, it was fatigue, aches and pains, stiffness here and there, and things like that. As the level of inflammation has decreased, these symptoms are receding, right?

Miri: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, they’re all gone! There’s just one little residual thing, that is going away now too, especially after taking some enzymes, MSM, and the Powertein that you suggested, it’s quickly subsiding. So I really can’t believe all the great benefits that I’m feeling. It’s really amazing. It’s nothing short of a miracle. I don‘t want to sound too over the top, but I am just so grateful that I found you and all these products!

Martin: Great! There is no one-size-fits-all approach, it’s very individual. It depends on your biological individuality. Our method is founded on helping you to understand what’s right for you, and what’s not right for you. We help you discover it, we uncover it, and we unpacked the problems and then reverse them. And as soon as you eliminate things that are causing your issues and start supplying the body with things that build health and healthy tissue, it doesn’t take long for you to feel a whole lot younger, more energetic, and overall healthier!

Miri: Absolutely, much to my amazement! Magnesium was one of the very first things that you had me taking, so I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about that today.

Martin: You know that’s a very important point. Magnesium is one of the four cornerstone minerals that the human body requires. There’s the pair called calcium-magnesium, that controls the autonomic nervous system. Calcium activates the fight or flight stress side of it, and magnesium activates the opposite: the rest, repair, and digest. Calcium will raise your blood pressure, magnesium will lower it. Calcium will wake you up, magnesium will put you to sleep. So that’s a cornerstone piece of all physiology in the human body.

If you have symptoms that are inflammatory, that means the sympathetic nervous system is being overly active. If you have symptoms like high blood pressure or diabetes, pre-diabetes, aches, pains, arthritis, it usually means the opposite. There are 300 different physiological processes that we have a list of on our website, that are influenced by the calcium-magnesium interplay, that the autonomic nervous system controls. And if you are deficient in magnesium, you’re going to have any or all of the possible symptoms. Not just one, but multiple symptoms.

Miri: So tell me just a little bit about some of the most common consequences of not having enough magnesium. How would I know that I’m deficient in it?

Martin: You would find it difficult to relax, so you would be tense. You would be easy to upset and difficult to calm down. Your blood pressure would tend to be on the higher side. You would have trouble going to sleep. Your muscles are going to be stiff rather than supple. Wrinkles would start showing up stronger than before.

Miri: That’s true. My wrinkles have certainly been going away! So I’m assuming the benefits of taking magnesium are feeling calmer, better ability to rest, better sleep, having more youthful appearance… And also, there are digestive benefits to taking magnesium that I’ve discovered.

Martin: That’s right. Magnesium activates the peristalsis, the muscle contraction and relaxation. Peristalsis in the arteries shows itself as lower blood pressure. Peristalsis in the digestive system shows itself as smooth, regular elimination.

Miri: So who should be taking magnesium in general, and how often should they be taking it? I think that’s a question that comes up often for people.

Martin: There is a tragic deficiency of magnesium in foods grown in North America. There’s a depletion of magnesium in the soils in which all of the foods are grown. So from the get go, 70-80% of the population is deficient, 60% clinically deficient. That’s why we see these high rates of high blood pressure, and high rates of cholesterol issues, and high rates of insomnia, nervousness, or anxiety. All that stuff is directly related to the imbalance between calcium and magnesium.

Miri: What I think is so sad about that, too, is that people attribute that often to just getting older. I’ve come to discover in working with you that it’s not about getting older! It’s really about providing your body with what it needs, so the process of healing can take place in the body and reach homeostasis.

Martin: Yeah, that’s a beautiful word! Homeostasis means balance. The body naturally strives towards homeostasis provided we give it the inputs it needs. And magnesium is the input that activates the rest, repair, and digest mode, which is the parasympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system. That’s the side that helps you repair, because if you don’t repair, you just keep adding to the damage and wear out!

Miri: The thing I know about our physiology is it’s either improving, or it’s degrading. It’s either getting better, or getting worse. It really never stays the same. You know, everything in the body is constantly moving and changing, and we make new cells all the time. I took a lot of anatomy and physiology in college, because I was a pre-med major, as you know. So I almost went into medicine, but instead ended up in more of a health education type of a profession.

So if your cells are constantly changing, and either getting better or getting worse, you should be feeding them with the proper nutrients, so they’re always getting better. People think getting worse is just a natural part of aging. And because a lot of people don’t understand the way their physiology works, they do age in a not so graceful fashion, and they think it’s just normal. But it’s not normal! Our food is abnormal. Our food supply isn’t nourishing us in the way it could.

There are different forms of magnesium, right? You’ve explained to me that magnesium that’s just gathered from minerals isn’t really in the bioavailable form, so your body can’t readily absorb it, or it might absorb a very small amount but not enough to really be that beneficial. Can you just talk a little bit about the form of magnesium? Can you just go to CVS and buy a bottle of magnesium?

Martin: So we humans are not really quite capable of turning rocks into a bio available material. It really starts in the soil, and in the soil there are microbes, and these microbes are creating this acidic environment in which the minerals are converted to a bioavailable form, and then the roots of the plants draw it up into themselves, making it available for humans and animals, when we eat the plant directly, or eat the meat from an animal that was fed with these plants.

There are more forms of bioavailable magnesium. If magnesium reacts with citric acid, for example with lemon juice, it creates magnesium citrate. If magnesium reacts with malic acid, which is the acid that makes apple sour, we will have magnesium malate. If we let magnesium react with hydrochloric acid, that is found in our stomachs, we end up with magnesium chloride. Those are the basic ones. Some amino acids may make magnesium even more available.

Most supplement manufacturers try to supplement magnesium orally, in the form of pills or capsules you have to swallow. Magnesium in a clinical dose will trigger a bowel flush. It over activates the peristalsis so much, that you empty your bowel within 20-30 minutes if you take a high enough dose of magnesium. And what kind of a dose would that be? One teaspoon of ionic magnesium solution has somewhere around 500-600 milligrams of magnesium, for example magnesium chloride has 538 milligrams of magnesium per teaspoon. (Note: the amount of magnesium that will trigger the bowel flush varies. Start with one teaspoon, and repeat every 30 minutes until the bowel moves. If you take too much, it will be with cramps and a great deal of urgency.)

Once you have it in a liquid form, it’s absorbable. If you drink it, it’s going to go through the digestive system and trigger the bowel flush effect. But there is a way to bypass that and avoid this unwanted effect! If you use the ionic form of magnesium, and by ionic we mean dissolved in water, you can put it on your body topically, instead of drinking or eating it! Everything that you put on your skin, good or bad, will absorb directly into your body, whether it’s a lipstick, deodorant, perfume, or magnesium.

Miri: That’s true! We need to be careful of what we are putting on our skin, right?

Martin: Right! In this case, it is a desirable thing. We can apply magnesium, allow it to penetrate through the skin, and be absorbed directly into the lymphatic and circulatory systems, bypassing the digestion. Thereby avoiding ill effects while getting all of the benefits.

Miri: It is actually better for you to have it absorbed directly through the skin, because all that magnesium that flushes through your system when you ingest it, isn’t really giving you many benefits. You may think you’re getting enough magnesium, but you’re really not.

Martin: Right, because  when you take it orally, and you trigger the flush effect, it’s just going through, passing you by, so to speak, without really getting enough time to be absorbed.

Anyway, we use this special technique, it’s the energetic structuring of water. This is not the most well known fact, but water can be treated in such a way that its surface tension is lowered, and its clustering is smaller, so that it becomes more penetrable to the human tissue, through the skin and directly into the cells.

Miri: And what does that mean for the magnesium? Are we putting the magnesium in that structured water?

Martin: Yeah, that’s the idea. Whatever we put into that specially treated water is going to be transported through the skin into the lymphatic and circulatory systems more effectively. So in our case, we use magnesium chloride, because chlorides are really important for our digestion, for the strength of the ability to digest food, they are used in the stomach to build hydrochloric acid. Chlorides are also involved in carbon dioxide management. If you are under chlorinated, you are going to have difficulty with the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and the pH balance in the body.

Miri: A lot of people think that chlorine is bad for you – is it different from chloride?

Martin: Yes, chlorine is a gas, Cl2, two molecules of chlorine bound to one another, and it is very toxic. It’s especially damaging to microbes, including those living in our digestive system, where the majority of our immune system is located. It is an ironic thing: we put chlorine into drinking water to kill the microbes, because of pathogenic microbes in that water that are harmful to us. But at the same time, we then drink that chlorinated water, and as we ingest it, it’s going to kill the desirable microbes together with the undesirable microbes inside of us.

But back to magnesium! We recommend using it topically, and we use it in combination with chloride. The other one that is very well known as “Epsom salt” is magnesium sulfate, SO4. We offer topical magnesium in several forms.

We have what we call Magnesium Oil. It is not really an oil, but there is a slick feeling when you run it between your fingers, so it feels like oil. That is the fully saturated solution, as concentrated as we can make it. It has 538 milligrams of magnesium per teaspoon.

Miri: And how much do you recommend using?

Martin: A typical desirable dose is about 1000 milligrams a day, so maybe two teaspoons of that. People who suffer from migraines should double that.

Miri: So you recommend that migraine sufferers put it on their temples maybe? Or can they just put it all over the body?

Martin: All over the body for sure. I mean, I would definitely put it on the temples and back of the neck, that would probably be like ½ a teaspoon, and you need at least 2 teaspoons, so you can spread it all over the body.

Magnesium will relax muscles that are tense, so it can help with muscle cramps. Undo cramps. If you are quick to injure, if you have problems running and staying relaxed, put magnesium all over before you hit the track. If only the football players and sprinters and other people who tend to injure themselves on the field started putting magnesium oil on themselves before activity, they would be injury free, most likely.

So that was the Magnesium oil. We also have it in the form of gel. It contains sodium alginate, an extract from seaweed, which is what gives the product its gel consistency. That’s about 50% concentrated compared to the oil. And then we have another form we call Magnesium Gel with Aloe Vera, that is 75% concentrated. The gel version is more soothing on the skin, less sticky than the oil version. Some people may also prefer to use the magnesium chloride flakes in their bath, or in a foot soak.

Miri: If you aren’t quite sure what form you should take, you can always give us a call at Life Enthusiast and have a chat!

Martin: Right! Call us at (866)543-3388! We also have a product called Topically Everything, it contains the same structured water with magnesium, and it contains ingredients from plants that are very rich in nutrients. It contains the extract of alfalfa and seaweed. Alfalfa is an amazing plant, because it grows roots down to 20-30 feet deep, so it extracts minerals from deeper layers of soil than ordinary plants like tomatoes and potatoes for example. And of course, seaweed is full of minerals from the sea. There is plenty of magnesium in the seawater.

Miri: And I’m assuming that it is really about bio-available, right? Are there various forms of magnesium in the sea water.

Martin: Well, it’s in ionic form, which again means dissolved in water, so there will be the sulfates, chlorides, and maybe other forms. When magnesium is ionic, it is always bio-available, as is the calcium and sodium for example. Only when they come out of the solution they go crystalline, and therefore not absorbable for the human body.

We have also developed one product called Topically EveryPain, which is the same formula as the original Topically Everything, but we have added valerian root extract to it.

Miri: Oh, valerian root is very relaxing, I have used that before when I had a hard time sleeping.

Martin: Its unfortunate characteristic is that it smells like a wet dog. (laughs) So we have added some essential oils to it, and we have two versions of it. One that we call the W, which has wintergreen in it, ideal for people who are going to go athletic with it on, and the other one we call F, which has frankincense in it, and that is for people who are looking for mood balancing, anti-anxiety effects.

Miri: Wow, that is an amazing variety of different types of magnesium that we offer!

Martin: Indeed! And yet that there are some marketers that are still trying to reinvent the wheel! I had just recently read about pico-size mineral particles. Pico is like 1000 times smaller than micro, or 100 times smaller than nano. But you know, once you dissolve something in water, it goes ionic, which means that the ion of magnesium, the Mg2 molecule, is loose. You cannot make it any smaller. It is the smallest size it can possibly be. I guess it’s just a marketing technique that makes it sound really special.

Miri: I know from experience that the products you offer on Life Enthusiast are incredible quality, and I hope that more people will partake of them, because I’ve never experienced products like these before. And I’ve been a natural healing student since I was 17; I’ve been into this my whole life, even though I haven’t been really working in this field. I’ve been in health education, but not necessarily in nutrition, and I’ve just never experienced such a high quality in products until I found Life Enthusiast. I think more people should be using your products, I hope more people will learn about them and experience the benefits, because it is truly life-changing.

Martin: Thank you! It is all about understanding what is important versus what’s just superfluous fluff.

Miri: Yeah, marketing. I’m a marketer, so I think I can criticize my own industry a little bit. (laughs)

Martin: Sure thing. All right. So that’s pretty much all the basic info about our magnesium products! Just pour it on the palm of your hand and rub it on your skin. You can also dilute it with a little bit more water, pour it into a spray bottle, and spray all over your body. We have these bottles available in our store as well, but you might have 10 of them sitting around the house, because you bought and used up other supplements that are sold in these simple spray bottles. The Topically Everything and Topically EveryPain are actually sold in the spray bottle automatically.

Miri: Great! I haven’t tried the ones in spray bottles, so I’m looking forward to try those as well! Every time we talk about something new, you always laugh at me, because I always say: Oh, I need to try that one too! Thank you, Martin, for talking to me about magnesium today! And I hope this was educational for the people that are watching this. And of course, as Martin said, you can call him at any time at Life Enthusiast’s and find out more!

Martin: Yes, you can find me at www.life-enthusiast.com, the phone number is (866)543-3388! We are here to restore vitality to you and to the planet.

Miri: Very good. Thank you, Martin!

Martin: Thank you!