Interesting Facts About Magnesium
So Important to the Body,
Yet 80% of Americans are Deficient

Here are a good number of interesting facts about magnesium.

Magnesium is responsible for many vital functions, as this article points out.

Since most Americans don't get enough magnesium in their diet, in another article Dr. Mercola daily supplement.

By Dr. Mercola

You don't hear much about magnesium, yet an estimated 80 percent of Americans are deficient in this important mineral and the health consequences of deficiency are significant.

One reason could be because magnesium, like vitamin D, serves so many functions it's hard to corral.

As reported by GreenMedInfo1, researchers have now detected 3,751 magnesium binding sites on human proteins, indicating that its role in human health and disease may have been vastly underestimated.

When naming interesting facts about magnesium, it is found in more than 300 different enzymes in your body, which are responsible for:

The health benefits of magnesium
have been vastly underestimated

A number of studies have previously shown magnesium can benefit your blood pressure and help prevent sudden cardiac arrest, heart attack, and stroke. For example, one meta-analysis published earlier this year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition2 looked at a total of seven studies collectively covering more than 240,000 participants. The results showed that dietary magnesium intake is inversely associated with risk of ischemic stroke.

But its role in human health appears to be far more complex than previously thought, and—like vitamin D—its benefits may be more far-reaching than we've imagined. GreenMedInfo.com's database project has indexed over 100 health benefits of magnesium so far, including therapeutic benefits for:

According to the featured report3:

Magnesium also plays a role in your body's detoxification processes and therefore is important for helping to prevent damage from environmental chemicals, heavy metals and other toxins. Even glutathione, your body's most powerful antioxidant that has even been called "the master antioxidant," requires magnesium for its synthesis.

Signs of magnesium deficiency

There's no lab test that will give you a truly accurate reading of the magnesium status in your tissues. Only one percent of magnesium in your body is distributed in your blood, making a simple sample of magnesium from a blood test highly inaccurate. Other tests that your doctor can use to evaluate your magnesium status include a 24-hour urine test, or a sublingual epithelial test. Still, these can only give you an estimation of your levels, and doctors typically need to evaluate them in conjunction with the symptoms you exhibit.

An ongoing magnesium deficiency can lead to more serious symptoms, including:

With that in mind, some early signs of magnesium deficiency to keep an eye out for include:

• Loss of appetite
• Headache
• Nausea and vomiting
• Fatigue and weakness

One of the best ways to optimize your magnesium levels

If you suspect you are low in magnesium one of the best ways to consume this mineral is through organically bound magnesium, found in whole foods. Green leafy vegetables like spinach and Swiss chard are excellent sources of magnesium, as are some beans, nuts and seeds, like almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds. Avocados are also a good source. Juicing your vegetables is an excellent option to ensure you're getting enough of them in your diet.

In order to ensure you're getting enough, you first need to be sure you're eating a varied, whole-food diet like the one described in my nutrition plan. But there are other factors too, that can make you more prone to magnesium deficiency, including the ailments listed below. If any of these conditions apply to you, you may want to take extra precautions to make sure you're getting a sufficient amount of magnesium in your diet, or, if needed, from a magnesium supplement, in order to avoid magnesium deficiency.

Foods with the Highest Amounts of Magnesium

Most people can keep their levels in the healthy range without resorting to supplements, simply by eating a varied diet, including plenty of dark-green leafy vegetables. One important 

point to mention though is that the levels of magnesium in your food are dependent on the levels of magnesium in the soil where they're grown. Organic foods may have more magnesium, as most fertilizer used on conventional farms relies heavily on nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium instead of magnesium.

The featured article lists more than 20 specific foods that are exceptionally high in magnesium, including the following (for the full list, please see the original reports). All portions are listed equate to 100 grams, or just over three ounces:

Different types of magnesium supplements 

If for whatever reason you decide you need a supplement, be aware that there are a wide variety of magnesium supplements on the market, which includes Magnesium glycinate, Magnesium carbonate, and Magnesium citrate. Courtesy of the fact that magnesium must be bound to another substance. There's simply no such thing as a 100% magnesium supplement. The substance used in any given supplement combination can affect the absorption and bioavailability of the magnesium, and may provide slightly different, or targeted, health benefits.

Balance your magnesium with calcium, vitamin K2 and D

One of the major benefits of getting your nutrients from a varied whole food diet is that you're far less likely to end up with too much of one nutrient at the expense of others. Foods in general contain all the co-factors and needed co-nutrients in the proper amounts for optimal health, which takes out the guess work. When you're using supplements, you need to become a bit more savvy about how nutrients influence and synergistically affect each other.

For example, it's important to maintain the proper balance between magnesium, calcium, vitamin K2, and vitamin D. Lack of balance between these nutrients is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attacks and stroke, and why some people experience vitamin D toxicity.

Part of the explanation for these adverse 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 opt for oral vitamin D, you need to also consume it in your food or take supplemental vitamin K2. Taking mega doses of vitamin D supplements without sufficient amounts of K2 can lead to vitamin D toxicity symptoms, which includes inappropriate calcification.

While the ideal or optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be elucidated, Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue (whom I've interviewed on this topic) suggests that for every 1,000 IU's of vitamin D you take, you may benefit from about 100 micrograms of K2, and perhaps as much as 150-200 micrograms (mcg). The latest vitamin D dosing recommendations, which call for about 8,000 IU's of vitamin D3 per day if you're an adult, means you'd need in the neighborhood of 800 to 1,000 micrograms (0.8 to 1 milligram/mg) of vitamin K2.

Now, getting back to magnesium...

Magnesium may actually be more important than calcium if you are going to consider supplementing. However, maintaining an appropriate calcium-to-magnesium ratio is important regardless. Research on the paleolithic diet has shown that the ratio of calcium to magnesium is 1-16. Americans in general tend to have a higher calcium-to-magnesium ration in their diet, averaging about 3.5-to-1.

Magnesium will also help keep calcium in your cells so they can do their job better. In many ways it serves as nutritional version of the highly effective class of drugs called calcium channel blockers, used in the treatment of high blood pressure, angina, and abnormal heart rhythms. Magnesium and vitamin K2 also complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease.

So, all in all, 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 synergistically with each other.

Click here to view the above Mercola article on his website.

Conclusion, Interesting Facts About Magnesium

Magnesium has many functions in the body. It is important to heart health, lowering blood pressure, relaxing arteries and muscles, and even good for helping to treat constipation. Though it is best to get magnesium from our food, a sea mineral supplement may be the next best source, with 422 mg in daily dose of 1 tsp. The magnesium in this supplement is 60% magnesium chloride, 37% magnesium sulfate.

(Return from Interesting Facts About Magnesium to Magnesium for Constipation)