Magnesium Deficiency and Brain and Body Health: How this Essential Mineral Protects Your Body and Mind with Dr. Carolyn Dean

Are you living with Parkinson's and looking for natural ways to support your brain and body health? Or simply curious about optimizing your overall well-being? In this illuminating episode of the Live Parkinson's Live an Exceptional Life podcast, we dive deep into the often-overlooked world of essential minerals with a leading expert, Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD, ND.

Join us as Dr. Dean, a renowned author and specialist in magnesium and mineral health, uncovers the critical role of magnesium in cognitive function, neuroprotection, and overall vitality. Discover why this single mineral is so vital, yet often deficient, and how addressing it can make a profound difference in your daily life.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The foundational role of magnesium in supporting total body and brain health.
• How magnesium specifically influences cognitive functions like memory, focus, and mental clarity.
• The surprising signs and symptoms of magnesium deficiency you might be experiencing.
• Magnesium's powerful role in neuroprotection and supporting neurological health, particularly relevant for those with Parkinson's.
• The interconnectedness of all essential minerals and why balance is key for optimal health.
• Practical, actionable advice on how to increase your magnesium intake through diet and high-quality supplementation.

Dr. Carolyn Dean shares her extensive knowledge and practical insights, empowering you with the tools to potentially improve your brain health, support your nervous system, and enhance your overall quality of life. Don't miss this essential conversation that could be a game-changer for your health journey!

Listen now and unlock the power of magnesium for a healthier brain and body!

Call to Action:

• For more empowering content and to subscribe to our FREE monthly newsletter, visit liveparkinsons.com!
• Explore Dr. Carolyn Dean's groundbreaking work and products at drcarolyndean.com and rnareset.com.

#MagnesiumDeficiency #BrainHealth #ParkinsonsDisease #Neuroprotection #CognitiveFunction  #EssentialMinerals #DrCarolynDean #NaturalHealth #HolisticHealth #WellnessJourney

Chapters

• 0:15 Introduction to Exceptional Parkinson's Podcast
• 1:27 Dr. Carolyn Dean's Magnesium Journey
• 7:28 Understanding Magnesium Deficiency
• 15:51 Magnesium and Brain Health
• 23:01 Calcium-Magnesium Balance Explained
• 31:43 The Mineral Ion Absorption Process
• 40:05 Minerals and Thyroid Function
• 46:37 Proper Magnesium Dosage Guidelines
• 51:33 Hydration and Sea Salt Strategy
• 57:29 Concluding Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

and live an exceptional life. I'm your host, chris Kastenbader, and I've been living an exceptional life with Parkinson's for the past 15 years. This podcast is about sharing science, stories and strategies to help you live your best life with Parkinson's for the past 15 years. This podcast is about sharing science, stories and strategies to help you live your best life with Parkinson's. Now, today, I'm honored to have Dr Carolyn Dean, md, nd. Now.

Speaker 1: 0:34

Dr Dean has been researching nutrients, homeopathy and alternative therapies for over five decades. She integrated her application of alternative therapies along with traditional medicine. She became one of the first functional medicine doctors in Canada, and her credentials include training as a certified dietitian, nutritionist, naturopath and Chinese medicine herbalist. Dr Dean became a best-selling author with her landmark thesis on magnesium with her book the Magnesium Miracle in 2017, which became one of the most highly referenced publications on magnesium by healthcare professionals and consumers alike. In 2014, dr Dean launched RNA Reset, where she used her knowledge and experience to develop proprietary, unique formulations that give every individual, at any stage of wellness or illness, the necessary building blocks to sustain health, vitality and well-being. Dr Dean hosts a weekly podcast Mondays at 7 pm, eastern Standard Time, called the Dr Dean Podcast, and Dr Dean believes in sharing factual, validated health information, and that's one of the cornerstones of this podcast as well sharing evidence-based information to help you live a great quality of life. So, without further ado, welcome, dr Dean. It's a great pleasure to have you.

Speaker 2: 1:52

Well, thank you, Chris, and call me Carolyn.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Okay, carolyn. Well, thanks for being on the podcast today. Now what I wanted to do is just give everybody a quick roadmap of where we'll be going today, and we're going to break it down into five different segments. So we'll start off with giving you a foundation on magnesium, so we'll try to understand what magnesium's role is in the body and the brain. Then, in segment two, we'll talk a little bit about magnesium's impact on brain health in terms of memory, focus and mental health. And then, segment three, we'll talk a little bit about neuroprotection and do a little bit of a scientific deep dive on how magnesium can protect the brain and help with neurodegeneration. And then, segment four, we'll talk about how the minerals work together magnesium and some of the other minerals and then in segment five, we'll talk a little bit about some practical strategies that you can all use to help incorporate these into your daily life so that you can live a healthier and more vital and vibrant life. Sound good.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Sounds good. I know a lot of podcasts I do. We tend to go all over the place, so it'd be interesting to see if we can keep on track.

Speaker 1: 3:05

Well, let's see what we can do All right.

Speaker 2: 3:08

Okay, so you want to know about magnesium? I should just say this is backwards. This is my magnesium book, but, chris, I wrote it in 1999.

Speaker 2: 3:23

And the 2017 edition was like the third edition and it went from 300 pages to 600 pages. So what I did last year was write what's this called Magnesium, the Missing Link to Total Health Shorter book, much easier for people to delve into. Magnesium was my way of getting healthy because when I was in New York in the late 90s I was doing AIDS and chronic fatigue research using natural protocols and I was on a lot of New York TV and a publishing company Random House asked me to write a book on magnesium because I guess I was talking on. I was on the View a lot talking about magnesium. So I wrote the book. It was supposed to come out on launch on the day of nine. I was in New York during 9-11. So that put it back a couple of years because everything just shut down New York.

Speaker 2: 4:27

But in my world, when I started looking at the research on magnesium to write the book, first of all I thought how can I write 300 pages on one mineral? And I found out that my leg cramps, heart palpitations, neck pain, insomnia dozens of symptoms were magnesium deficiency. So I thought, wow, I've discovered the holy grail. But then when I went to the health food store to get a bottle of magnesium so I could take more than was in my multiple. I got an immediate laxative effect. So as soon as we got the magnesium miracle out I guess it was 2001, I began research to try to find a non-laxative magnesium for myself. Couldn't find a company that was interested, so I got a chemist who was able to make a non-laxative magnesium, which is. I had to create my own company to get this done. It's a stabilized ion of magnesium that the body accepts without a laxative effect and you're able to take enough to help your brain and your whole body. Up until this time, people who try to take magnesium to help all their magnesium deficiency symptoms, they get the laxative effect and they stop before they get to tilt. To be fully saturated.

Speaker 2: 5:59

I've defined in this book is over 65 conditions, including Parkinson's, alzheimer's, dementia, over 65 conditions that could truly be magnesium deficiency. But they're misdiagnosed Because in medicine I guess the way I'd say it I'd say Chris is we look at the macro level, the macro of, even in diet, proteins, fats, sugars. We look at the macro and it's gotten into the drug macro. We are not looking at nutrients in any productive way and it's because doctors, researchers, never learned about nutrients in their scientific training. There's no blood test for magnesium that's reliable. If you look at an electrolyte panel, magnesium isn't even mentioned. Yet 80% of known metabolic functions require magnesium. Metabolic functions require magnesium, 80% In the brain where energy is made, the ATP energy in the Krebs cycle, krebs cycle is in the mitochondria.

Speaker 2: 7:15

So mitochondria, the energy factory running energy molecules through the Krebs cycle In the brain, each neuron molecules through the Krebs cycle In the brain, each neuron, of which there are 86 billion, each neuron has 2 million mitochondria. The heart, which I always used to think, had the most magnesium because it had to keep your heart rhythm going properly. The heart cell muscle only has 5,000. So you are looking at what Two million mitochondria in each neuron to make energy, to make the brain work properly. And the clincher of the whole thing is ATP doesn't work unless it's attached to magnesium. So every energy molecule that's made in all these mitochondria and all these neurons, they require so much magnesium that we are not getting. I say about 80% of the population is magnesium deficient. Everybody knows magnesium is important. But they've gotten to the point of saying well, you know, it gives me the laxative effect, I'm not going to take it and then they go off with their magnesium deficiency symptoms to take drugs to try to treat magnesium deficiency.

Speaker 1: 8:39

So how would someone recognize that they're magnesium deficient? You mentioned? There's really no blood test for it. How would someone recognize that they're magnesium deficient, you mentioned?

Speaker 2: 8:45

there's really no blood test for it. Well, there are blood tests but they're inaccurate. I mean, I facetiously would say everybody needs magnesium. If you have insomnia, if you have headaches, if you have twitches you know the eyelid twitch if you have aches or pains or numbness or tingling. Anything to do with muscles and nerves requires a balancing of magnesium and the blood test, the serum magnesium test. It has a very narrow range. What happens is because magnesium is so vital to the body, when that narrow range goes down too low, below quote normal, then the body will pull magnesium out of muscles and bones and always keep that range. So that's why doctors say why bother doing a serum magnesium test? It's always okay.

Speaker 2: 9:43

And what happens is in conditions like seizures, or even in the seizures of eclampsia in pregnancy, what do they do? They put up an intravenous magnesium drip. The testing that I've been working with in research, where we've done university studies, where we use an ionized magnesium blood test, but that's not available to the public, the one in between is RBC, red blood cell magnesium. It has a wider range and I just tell people well, just look to be at the top of that range. If the test is 4.2 to 6.8, and you're 4.3, and your doctor says you're fine. You're not fine, you're too low. So you can follow your symptoms. You can follow the RBC blood test.

Speaker 1: 10:35

Okay, Well, I guess this is a two-part question then. So how do people get magnesium in their diet? What types of foods? And then the second part of that would they have the same absorption through their diet as they would with supplementation?

Speaker 2: 10:52

Okay. So the diet factor is very interesting because magnesium is not in most agricultural soil anymore. A hundred years ago, the US Department of Agriculture found 500 milligrams of magnesium in the average diet. Now we're lucky to get 200 milligrams and we need five or 600 milligrams, so the diet isn't helping you. In order to figure out the diet aspect, and also for food security, I live in Maui and all my extra funding goes to an organic farm and I can't do without my magnesium supplementation and just eat off the farm, even though it's organic, and we put extra minerals on the soil. There's either something about the extra stress that we have in our environment, the toxicity, all those things that are making our food not the source of our magnesium.

Speaker 1: 11:55

Okay, so supplementation is going to be key then, and we'll talk a little bit about your proprietary formula a little bit later here, but that's what's going to help make sure that we get the 500 milligrams of magnesium. Okay and then? So why do you think there's such an epidemic of magnesium deficiency? Is it just because of you mentioned a couple of things, that agriculture, the stress is there anything else that might play a role? Anything else?

Speaker 2: 12:23

that might play a role. Sure, chlorine in the water will bind away magnesium. Fluoride is even worse. Fluoride and magnesium when they bind together they make a brittle substance called cellate and that deposits in tendons and joints and muscles. So it actually causes side effects. And there's a lot of fluoride drugs now on the market. I'd say now, but maybe the past 15, 20 years they realized that if you bound fluoride molecules in with a pharmaceutical compound it would help it get across the fatty cell membranes into cells.

Speaker 2: 13:08

So 80% of our common drugs Prozac and certain anesthetics inhaled anesthetics. In surgical procedures they have fluoride, dental products, fluoride. You go to a doctor and they're still saying oh, I'll give you a fluoride treatment to stop you from getting cavities. Now that's been disproven, but for the doctors I guess it's a moneymaker, it's a poison and it binds up magnesium. So drugs are binding magnesium. After surgery a lot of people will have heart palpitations and they'll be put on beta blockers or different drugs.

Speaker 2: 13:48

It's a magnesium deficiency, the stress, the toxins and all the rest of it. When you have a lot of heavy metals in the environment mercury, people with mercury fillings you bind up mineral receptor sites with heavy metals. If you don't have enough minerals to be where they're supposed to be. So the more deficient you are in your magnesium or your selenium or your zinc or your copper, then the more likely you are to pull in these heavy metals, because they're in the air, they're in drugs, they're in our food supply. You test any water source anywhere in the world there'll be heavy metals and chemicals and prescription drugs.

Speaker 2: 14:38

So we're kind of fighting a battle and I'm not negative about that because I know, with the proper nutrients I'm not negative about that because I know with the proper nutrients food-based vitamins, methylated Bs, bs, picometer-stable ions of minerals we have a fighting chance. Here I am. In 2000, let's say 25 years ago, I found out I was magnesium deficient and I felt I was in bad shape. So here I am, I'm 76 now and I feel better than I did when I was 30. It's because I make sure my cells are completely healthy and happy and we'll get into more of the brain effects and what's going on, as you say, with research, and I'm not going to make it all about magnesium, but it is the baseline of what people really need to stay healthy.

Speaker 1: 15:34

So, in terms of supplementation, not all supplements are going to be the same, then right, and how your body absorbs the magnesium.

Speaker 2: 15:43

Right, yes, the absorption. So in the diet there is some research that will say well, a healthy gut will absorb whatever 10 to 40% of a nutrient into 40% of a nutrient. So when you take a supplement and it's 100 milligrams of something, then you have to factor well, only 10 milligrams, maybe 40 milligrams, will get through the gut and then in the bloodstream. What are the transporters for these various supplements? The compound of a mineral. Our magnesium is derived from magnesium chloride. But if you just took a magnesium chloride pill, in the bloodstream that compound with these two factors, magnesium and chloride, has to disassociate into the ions of magnesium and the ions of chloride In the infinitesimal second. That magnesium is an ion. That's when it's absorbed into the cell. Magnesium is so hyperactive it'll join right back up or join the fluoride or immediately become a compound again, because an ion is unstable. But what my chemist did was stabilize the ions of magnesium and the other minerals so that they stay as ions and they're allowed to go and pass through the cell mineral ion channel which is the size of an ion. That's all that can get into cells. And in our research in Purdue University they did an experiment where they shone a laser through our liquid magnesium and it didn't bounce off any solid substance because it's in an ionic state, so it's not a solid, it's below microscopic level. So this is the biochemistry of minerals With vitamins.

Speaker 2: 17:44

What happens with vitamin C? It's transporter. Chris, this is very fascinating because I heard your sugar podcast. The transporter of vitamin C, ascorbic acid. The transporter of vitamin C, ascorbic acid, is insulin, and insulin transports glucose, sugar. They fight. If you have a lot of sugar in your diet, you will get the transporter pulling up the glucose and ignoring the vitamin C. Vitamin C won't get into your cells properly, where it is absolutely necessary to detoxify the metabolic byproducts of energy, the breakdown of the sugar. If sugar is not broken down properly, it'll turn into sorbitol, which is a crystalline sugar, and it'll hang out in the cell and can't get back out and that's what causes the cell damage in, say, diabetes or neuropathies. So vitamin C, as I said, it's competing with the glucose. So it means we have to stop our sugars and take more vitamin C.

Speaker 1: 18:57

Interesting Now is there specific receptor sites on the cell membrane for the magnesium to go through to get into the cell?

Speaker 2: 19:05

Mineral ion channels that are actually coordinated by magnesium. Let's go back to how cells function. A lot of the activity in cells is caused by calcium. Calcium will cause a nerve action potential or a muscle to fire. So in order for calcium to get into a cell, magnesium has to open up the cell. If you don't have enough magnesium, calcium will just sort of jam up the cell and cause disruption of the cell, irritability, the twitching. A lot of the magnesium deficiency symptoms are calcium excess symptoms. Magnesium and calcium are supposed to be kind of a one-to-one ratio Somehow. Actually it was a mistranslation of a French researcher who said never take two times the amount of calcium as magnesium. It causes problems. So it was translated into we need twice the amount of calcium as magnesium and all the. I don't know if it's changed lately, but five years ago all the calcium-magnesium supplements had two parts calcium, one part magnesium and it almost should be the other way around.

Speaker 1: 20:22

Interesting. Now this will probably lead us into the next segment, on neuroprotection and neuroinflammation and having Parkinson's myself. One of the things we talk about a lot is what I've talked about before is the gut-brain axis. There's a lot of research going on that and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I read that 70% of our immune system is in our GI tract and that in terms of Parkinson's, a lot of the misfolded the alpha-synuclein proteins get misfolded and can be transported up to the brain via, like the vagus nerve pathway. Will magnesium help with that in terms of being transported to the brain to help with neuroinflammation or neuroprotection? I?

Speaker 2: 21:03

don't know if that question makes sense.

Speaker 2: 21:06

Well, it's a huge question, A lot of layers there. Let's see how to go about that. Yes, In the, in the gut, we make 90% of our serotonin. I don't. I don't know about dopamine and I know with Parkinson's. The whole L-DOPA business is quite fascinating. L-dopa is the drug that supposedly is a precursor to make more dopamine. I don't know that it works that well in the sense that how can a synthetic substance create a natural substance? So there's some force that's going on with, say, high doses of L-Dopa that will force the production of dopamine. That's the way they're looking at treating Parkinson's. And what I said about the whole macro business is that's the macro level.

Speaker 2: 22:01

This is what dopamine is lacking, let's get more dopamine. And what they're missing entirely is, well, what is making dopamine? And magnesium is involved. I think they're kind of sidebarring in Parkinson's to NMDA and BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and NMDAs and methyl aspartate. Those are protein. They could be peptides that function to. If they're deficient, then they find this deficiency in Parkinson's. So they're thinking, okay, we have to increase BDNF and they don't know how to do it. Again, magnesium is necessary for the creation of these proteins, which is, it's fascinating proteins, which is fascinating. Omega-3 fatty acids is necessary, I think it's for the BDNF part. Stress depletes BDNF, sugar depletes BDNF. And on the positive side, the omegas, the magnesium, relaxation, exercise, walking all that. When you look at those factors, the pros and cons of BDNF, you will never get a drug that will increase BDNF.

Speaker 2: 23:22

And this is what we have to recognize in a lot of the chronic diseases is with the pharmaceutical companies taking over and just saying, oh well, we found this receptor and then we can manipulate it. It goes back to the days of Candice Pert. I don't know if you ever came across her. She was the PhD researcher that discovered the opioid receptors. So she found, oh my gosh, in the human body there are receptor sites for opioids. Now that can be the natural neurotransmitters. But the drug companies they got right on it and they started looking at opioid drugs and also they said, well, with these endogenous receptor sites, with these internal receptor sites, we can actually make drugs that will affect the emotions. So I know I'm skipping around a lot here. It's a huge story because Candice wrote a book called Molecules of Emotion, because she found that all the cells in the body seem to have receptors for everything you mentioned magnesium, receptors for minerals, for neurotransmitters, for dopamine, for GABA. They're all neurotransmitters that affect our emotions but they're also affected by emotions, affect our emotions, but they're also affected by emotions.

Speaker 2: 25:03

So if you've got someone who's having a lot of negative thoughts, that can actually either shut down or open up your neurotransmitters to the neurotransmitter that causes either more joy or more sadness. It's undeniably scientific. More sadness, it's undeniably scientific. And at the time I think because I was there at the time, I mean I've been at this for over 50. And a lot of people took that up as the hippie generation. I didn't do drugs, I studied nutrition back then in California and everybody, all molecules of emotion.

Speaker 2: 25:37

Let's just meditate and do hippy-dippy things and we'll be high and happy. And what we know scientifically if we go back and look at her work is that we have to be very careful about how we conduct ourselves, that the more negative thinking you have, the more it will affect your body, and that it is so important and it's not to say to people, oh, just buck up and whatever it's. No, you have. You have a a right to feel happy, you have a right to the bliss state and you can be in control of it. So let's work on that. I don't know if that fits into your philosophy, but when you're looking at Parkinson's and they're identifying dopamine as a problem, well, let's go to what makes dopamine. Omega-3s and magnesium are very important. Let's start there and let's see if, on a day when we seem to have positive emotions, do we feel better. Okay, there's your experiment.

Speaker 1: 26:48

Yeah, that's a great point because that's one of the things I always try to talk about is being positive, and I always try to look at the glass half full and start out the morning. I talked a little bit about it on some other podcasts, with the Gratitude Journal, because I think that helps set the course for the day by writing down things that I'm grateful for, and I think exercise is important as well In terms of brain health. Is there neuron receptors from magnesium in neurons in the brain? Then that help with brain health.

Speaker 2: 27:19

Absolutely. That goes back to our conversation about the mitochondria requiring magnesium to make energy molecules. So there's absolutely receptor sites. After they did the genome project, they were looking at the proteins in the body and then there was a group that was looking at the magnesium receptors on proteins and they came up to about 3,500 different proteins have magnesium receptors. So the more we study these things, the more we're finding out. So, yes, the neurons, absolutely they. Just they pull in magnesium like it's like they're starving and dehydrated and that would come well. It's our fifth point. We'll get to hydration with sea salt and water. It's very important.

Speaker 1: 28:19

Okay, one of the things I talked about on another podcast is oxidative stress and how we want to try to prevent free radicals from doing damage to our cells by, as you mentioned, omega-3s and vitamins and minerals. Does magnesium help protect against oxidative stress?

Speaker 2: 28:36

Absolutely, absolutely. Calcium is pro-inflammatory, magnesium is anti-inflammatory. You can put a magnesium lotion on a painful area and it will decrease the pain. Magnesium IV is used in seizures and migraine headaches. Magnesium IV is used in seizures and migraine headaches, for example. You can't get a pain more distressing than a migraine. You can do an IV magnesium drip and get rid of migraine pain and if a person with migraines takes well-absorbed magnesium, they won't get migraines anymore. I've seen that over and over again. So yeah, magnesium receptors are everywhere.

Speaker 2: 29:25

And I keep coming back, chris, to the 2 million mitochondria making all this ATP in the brain. The brain, we know I think I learned it in med school it uses 20% of the blood glucose, 20% of our sugar supply is used by our little brain and that means a lot, that there's a lot of synaptic stuff going on, there's a lot of activity going on and I'm saying, if you don't supply the magnesium to make the ATP, then this is our apathy, this is our fatigue, this is our depression, it can be anxiety, where the body gets stressed out and the adrenal glands don't have enough magnesium and the reaction to stress is very erratic. You hear whatever backfire of a car. I don't know if they backfire anymore, but you hear loud noise and if you jump, if you're easily startled, that's magnesium deficiency.

Speaker 1: 30:36

I think I've talked to other people as well, but there's a lot of news out there about chronic inflammation throughout the body and there's a lot of research going on with reducing inflammation and neuroinflammation leading to some of the neurodegenerative diseases. And a lot of it you read is related to our diet high sugar, high saturated fats, those type of things and when you have inflammation. So magnesium is going to be something that's going to help modulate or reduce inflammation in the body.

Speaker 2: 31:06

then it will. But about the fats? I'm not against saturated fats. They're actually stable because they're saturated.

Speaker 2: 31:17

What we're looking at now as being very pro-inflammatory is the omega vegetable oils sunflower, safflower, soy, corn and canola. Canola was the first genetically engineered plant that we're still faced with. So what happens when you look at even organic sunflower or safflower? I've been up against this several times. I'll get an organic snack in the health food store or Costco and after a few days my joints will become tight, my fingers can't bend properly and touch my palm. They're swollen and thick and inflamed. And then I'll say, oh my gosh, it's the snack. I'll look at the packaging. Yeah, the oil in it is sunflower or safflower. They are pro-inflammatory. So if people just stop those oils, they won't have the tightness in their fingers, tightness in all their joints, and feel like they're getting rigid. So that's one thing that people can do straight out is get rid of the sunflowers.

Speaker 2: 32:27

What do you use? Luckily I'm in Hawaii. I can use coconut oil, but you can find coconut oil that you can heat and it won't degrade. Olive oil will degrade, so you don't want to heat it. You use that for your vegetable oils. So just look up the natural fats, what Bobby Kennedy is saying now about all the omega-6 vegetable oils used in frying, all these fast foods foods he wants them to go back to lard, to go back to a saturated beef tallow that will not degrade and will not harm the body.

Speaker 1: 33:07

Interesting All right. Well, let's move on, then, to talk a little bit about looking at the balance between minerals, then, because you mentioned that magnesium isn't necessarily a one-size-fits-all cure-all. So how does magnesium interact with some of the other minerals in terms of micronutrients?

Speaker 2: 33:30

Right, all the minerals are important. After I put Remag on the shelf, I usually don't mention my product names. Excuse me, on the shelf I usually don't mention my product names. Excuse me, the FDA doesn't like me saying that my minerals or my dietary formulas can help people. Seriously, chris, I have had that call. After I did my magnesium, I said I have to get a multiple mineral, because what am I going to tell people? Oh, take this selenium and that zinc and that copper on and on, or that calcium. So he was able to stabilize the mineral ions of 12 different minerals and in my research I was looking for various things and what I found was nine of those 12 minerals help make thyroid hormones and this is huge because there's an epidemic of thyroid deficiency, hypothyroidism. I myself you know family history of low thyroid I was on an armor thyroid 60 milligrams. Six weeks after testing this multiple mineral on myself, my hands were warm again, my feet were warm and I haven't looked back. I went off the Armour Thyroid and with the way the hormones work thyroid hormones let's start there.

Speaker 2: 34:54

Allopathic medicine waits until your thyroid is completely punked out and then they say, well, we'll give you thyroid hormone replacement. And they use synthetic thyroid hormone, which doesn't really help a person a hundred percent. Even in naturopathic medicine they say, like my armor thyroid, oh well, we'll use a natural thyroid replacement. You shouldn't have to wait for replacement, you should use the minerals that will make your thyroid hormones. And a number of years ago they started to say, yeah, we need a lot of iodine. Yes, iodine is part of the thyroid hormone molecule, but then you need selenium. So people say, oh well, we'll take both. But there's seven more minerals. You need copper, molybdenum, manganese, zinc. All these minerals are necessary. So for me that showed the incredible complexity and interaction of the minerals and how important they are. I mean, that's a mineral that got a lot of play. When I was doing the AIDS study in New York, a lot of people were talking about selenium and how in certain states in Africa, if there was high selenium in the water, then their incidence of AIDS and cancer was low. So selenium is very important. Zinc is important for the prostate. You've got all these minerals. Sodium not the sodium in table salt, but the sodium in sea salt is necessary for the adrenal glands If your adrenals are starting to get fatigued and you're having adrenal insufficiency which is not recognized by allopathic medicine until your adrenals are totally shot and then that's called Addison's disease. But there is a weakness in the adrenals that will respond to sea salt, magnesium and the B vitamins and vitamin C.

Speaker 2: 36:55

So what I'm kind of uncovering here is the undercurrent of health, are the nutrient building blocks that people are forgetting. I'm a medical doctor and a naturopath, so I see both sides. In the naturopathic world, yes, we do talk about nutrients, but it's almost like as if they were drugs. Oh, you have this condition, you need this vitamin or this mineral and you need a lot of it, and I'm sorry it's synthetic, but that's just the way it is. So we've lost sight of the need for natural building blocks. If we could get them all in our food, that would be awesome, but I know we can't. I've got a farm experiment that disproves it. So that's why my focus and it started with my own heart palpitations was to get something that would be fully absorbed in the mineral world and then in the vitamin world. It's food-based, organic, with the B vitamins low-potency, methylated.

Speaker 2: 38:04

What happened back in the 70s when I did my internship in 1979, and in the 80s I was studying naturopathic medicine and all the supplements back in the day were food-based and people were benefiting.

Speaker 2: 38:23

It was amazing. And then maybe it was more. The drug companies, the chemists, got involved and said, oh, we can make this vitamin synthetically and it's going to be much cheaper than squeezing up a bunch of oranges and putting it into a pill. So what happened is, over the years people realized as the supplements became more synthetic, they had to use more of them. The B vitamins that used to be like five milligrams in the food-based became 50 milligrams and then a hundred. And then we had to do intramuscular injections of them, because the more synthetic they were, the harder it was for them to get through the receptor sites. They had to bash their way, in which they did, and then people would see some benefit. We had the situation with the high B6, pyridoxine that people were starting to get numbness and nerve problems with this high dose B because it was synthetic. So anyway, tmi, too much information.

Speaker 1: 39:33

Well, so then, in terms of looking at magnesium, is there a target range that you would recommend that you between 500,. I don't know if 500 is the upper limit or 500 is the base, but is there a point at which you get too much can become toxic? Or is there a target range that you would recommend, or is?

Speaker 2: 39:59

there a target range that you would recommend. Well, what's amazing about magnesium and why I feel blessed to have had magnesium deficiency and then be able to bring forth the treatment for it, is that even a non-laxative magnesium, if your cells have enough, you will get the laxative effect from it, because the body it's like. The default of magnesium is when you have enough, the body gets rid of it. Calcium is the opposite, and that can be from historically. Humans grew up around the seashore because they got a lot of food from the sea and seawater has three times the magnesium as it does calcium. So calcium at that time was relatively deficient. So the way the body developed was it held on to calcium? It made vitamin D a hormone nutrient that helped absorb calcium. So there were these factors to keep our bones strong, with calcium and magnesium. I guess there was a balance there the vitamin D and whatever calcium they could get in the ocean or with plant life. Balanced out magnesium, and I think it's equal. Balanced out magnesium, and I think it's equal.

Speaker 2: 41:24

What happens in our society is we think with women and their bones we had to give more calcium. We fortified even orange juice. We make women take calcium supplements as soon as they hit 40, and on and on and on. But the research on calcium supplementation is that women who take calcium pills are at a higher risk for heart disease, bone spurs, gallstones, even DCIS. It's ductal cell carcinoma, which is just calcium buildup in the breast cells, and it's called a pre-cancer condition, which scares the heck out of women and leads to unnecessary surgeries. It's calcification of breast tissue. Women are taking too much calcium.

Speaker 2: 42:10

What's the dosage now? Well, when I started working with my magnesium, I couldn't take more than 50 milligrams of a store-bought magnesium. But I was able to take 1,200 milligrams of my magnesium because I needed it, and I needed it for over a year till I got rid of my 20 different magnesium deficiency symptoms. During all that time I didn't take any calcium supplements and I think, on and off, I would eat some dairy. So what I say to people is, if you're eating dairy and fish with bones and your deep green leafy vegetables and your nuts and seeds, you can go to something called a chronometer I have it on my website A chronometer to see, well, is my diet sufficient in calcium? The amount of calcium I recommend 600 milligrams, not 1,200, not 1,500. The UK and WHO recommends 500 to 700 milligrams, so I go for 600, and I say 600 magnesium.

Speaker 2: 43:22

Now what happened to me after a year, year and a half of 1200 milligrams? I started my symptoms were gone and I started to get a bit of laxative effect. So I cut back and cut back to presently I'm only on 450 milligrams of magnesium because that's all my body needs. So everybody's different with dosages depending on how deficient a person is, and actually how I deal with that, Chris is.

Speaker 2: 43:49

I have an incredible customer service staff who will talk people through how much or whatever, and on our label we say just start with a quarter teaspoon, it's a liquid. So people who are very sensitive and we do see them they can start with a few drops of magnesium in their water and that's enough to sort of wake up the 80% of known metabolic functions that require magnesium, and these functions are detoxification, they're energy production, they're activating our antioxidant systems like glutathione. There's so much that magnesium is doing that it's almost like every year there's new research that shows how much more magnesium is doing than we ever thought. You'll read about magnesium and most sources will say, oh, there's 325 different enzyme processes that require magnesium. It's up to 800 now and that's not really being reported, but this is where the research is at.

Speaker 1: 45:02

So it's pretty much involved in every bodily function that we have or system that we have in our body. Then, and the magnesium that you have on your website, that's going to be different than some of the ones that are commercially available. And if someone just went to one of the drugstores, Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 45:19

But see the way I say it, chris, is everybody's probably got magnesium in their cupboard and you know, look at what you have. If it's a capsule, take the powder out and put it in some water and sip it through the day. If it's a liquid, even better. If it's a pill, it's a little harder. You know, maybe cut the pill up but take your magnesium throughout the day, because some people it'll be that well, I'll take my two pills of magnesium right now and then they'll get the laxative effect and then they'll turn themselves off to taking it. So I tell people, look, don't wait, don't waste anything. I'm Scottish background and you know, take it through the day and then see how you feel. And if the next magnesium that you buy you can try mine and then compare it and see how you feel as you're able to saturate the body with more. But let me I should throw in about when you put it in your water.

Speaker 2: 46:18

What I say about hydration is that we need a lot of water. Most people aren't drinking enough, but what we've done with water is we've filtered out so much of the toxins and drugs and heavy metals. We've also filtered out any minerals. So I tell people. I tell people take your body weight in pounds, cut that in half and drink that many ounces of water a day. If you're 200 pounds, then you need 100 ounces of water a day.

Speaker 2: 46:50

It sounds like a lot, but then in every quarter liter of water put a quarter teaspoon of a good, colorful sea salt. If it's a white sea salt, it's been refined and the minerals have been removed. Quarter teaspoon in a quart of water and body weight. Take half of it and drink that many ounces and what happens is you start hydrating yourself and the water will pull minerals in and the minerals in the set inside the cell will pull water in. People find that they have less ankle edema when they're drinking sea salt water. They actually don't even get up as much at night and to prevent getting up at night I drink most of my water before like 3 pm and then I'll sip some before I go to bed at 8 or 9.

Speaker 1: 47:48

Okay, Now how about you mentioned sea salt? I've seen a lot of advertisements for the pink Himalayans or the Himalayan pink salt. Is that different than the sea?

Speaker 2: 47:57

salt. No, that's one of them. No, that is good. I'm using pink Himalayan right now. I'll use Celtic sea salt as well, just something with some color in it.

Speaker 1: 48:09

Okay, is there any taste? You mentioned that you put it in water. Is it tasteless or is it? Something that people might say well, I don't really like the taste of this, so I'm not going to take it.

Speaker 2: 48:25

Right, good point, thank you. What you start with is just put a little pinch in. Put a pinch in and stir it up. You won't taste that Next day. Two pinches and work yourself up to a quarter teaspoon. Pinches and work yourself up to a quarter teaspoon and you'll find that if you don't have sea salt in your water, the water tastes really bland and boring. So sea salt really lightens up the experience.

Speaker 1: 48:49

Okay, so there's no real, necessarily there's no taste effect with the magnesium then in the water.

Speaker 2: 48:58

The magnesium, yeah, yeah, but our magnesium is strong and with that we're starting, usually just with a quarter and a half teaspoon again until the person gets used to it. But because I'm so keen on vitamin C and how important that is for the heart for so many things vitamin C makes collagen which keeps your blood vessels strong. If you don't have strong blood vessels what they call bifurcate they can develop little tears if your collagen is weak. They can develop little tears if your collagen is weak and that's what starts atherosclerosis, because at these tear points the cholesterol will come in and act like a bandaid. It's trying to help and we think it's the bad guy, but it's helping with these tears. And then if you've got calcium in your blood without being neutralized by the magnesium, that calcium will build up on the cholesterol and there's your atherosclerotic plaque that can break off and cause strokes or it can close blood vessels and cause death of tissue, including heart attack. So where were we going with this, chris? I've lost track.

Speaker 1: 50:19

So where were we going with this, Chris? I've lost track. Oh we were just talking about the taste, and people are going to like it Right.

Speaker 2: 50:25

So what I did is I made a berry powder vitamin C, so that you have a nice berry powder taste. So you put a scoop of vitamin C powder in your drinking water and you sip that through the day and sipping is important. I said it a couple times If you take all your magnesium once, you could give yourself the laxative effect.

Speaker 1: 50:52

Okay, that was another question I had, because I'm sure a lot of people are thinking is there any other side effects to taking magnesium supplementation besides the laxative effect?

Speaker 2: 51:05

There are four contraindications that I talk about in my books. What are they? Myasthenia gravis, heart block, bowel blockage and very low heart rate and very low heart rate. So there are four contraindications, and usually people with those conditions are under medical supervision and are being told not to take magnesium. So I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 1: 51:31

Okay, and then to get your magnesium, they would go to your website, the rnaresetcom.

Speaker 2: 51:39

That's right. That's where my store is and you're not going to read any testimonials there because the FDA said, as I mentioned earlier, that I couldn't say that my products help people. My educational site is at drcarolyndeancom and part of it's a membership site where you can get free eBooks and more in depth information. I have to make it a member site, so people say I don't know if we make them sign something that says I'm not an FDA official so that I can, I can. It's about making claims. They don't want dietary supplement companies to make a claim that can be misinterpreted as a health claim. Only drugs are allowed to make health claims, which is crazy because it's only drugs that are causing the side effects. But anyway, so on my drcarolyndeancom site you'll see my interview with Chris. That'll get posted so that people can rewatch this incredible interview, right, chris?

Speaker 1: 52:44

Now you have a couple of books that I was looking at that I would recommend to people listening, and you talked about the one that was the Magnesium Miracle. You also have the Magnesium, the Missing Link to Total Health, which you shared, and then the Complete Guide to Mental Health was another one. That's a new book, right, that just came out in January.

Speaker 2: 53:03

Yeah, that's an e-book. I stopped doing print books for the most part because it saves the trees, but thank you for that. But let me just say one more thing about books and resources and resources. The conflict basis of Parkinson's, according to another modality that I study no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 53:32

Now.

Speaker 2: 53:33

German New Medicine. It's Dr Hammer started it. He said you know there was conflict laced into disease. As the body is trying to deal with the conflict, the disease state presents itself. Not that the body is trying to attack itself, but it's just the representation of the conflict. They say of Parkinson's is you want to reach for something but you've been either punished for reaching for something overreaching. It can be represented in many ways, not even just physical, but you want to attain something and you've been held back and you're demanding that I want this and part of you is pulling back creates the tremors. It's quite fascinating and what I do is I refer to Danny Carroll D-A-N-N-Y little hyphen in between C-A-R-R-O-L-L dannycarrollcom and he has free books describing this information in such an incredible way. His latest book is Breast Cancer is a Misdiagnosis, which is kind of shocking, and in the first few chapters he describes the whole German new medicine conflict approach. That I mean it'll blow your mind. It is very important information and it's information that will never reach our allopathic medical system.

Speaker 1: 55:12

That's fascinating. I'll have to check that out. In addition to nutrients like magnesium, that's fascinating.

Speaker 2: 55:30

I have to check that out, in addition to nutrients like magnesium. In terms of other alternative therapies, I know one of the things getting the energy flowing in the body. But I'll tell you straight out, chris, any energy medicine laying on of hands, massage, acupuncture, anything that you can come up with it doesn't work as well if your minerals aren't in balance. The whole electrical conductivity of the body depends on minerals and if you don't have them, then that's why they can't say that acupuncture always works. You know, once I started getting into the whole mineral world, I realized I don't really have to look at or, you know, discuss anything. You get to the point where, oh, I have this, you know, neck pain, let me, let me go get some acupuncture. And I say the same about I mean, there's methylene blue. Apparently, bobby Kendi was using methylene blue, the liquid toxic antioxidant, and everybody oh, I have to take this Methylene blue cold shock bath bags.

Speaker 2: 56:40

All these things are trying to treat the symptoms of mineral and vitamin deficiencies. In my opinion, when I do any of those things like yeah, I mean methylene blue, it's been around a long time, I've tried it, I tried it again recently Doesn't do a thing for me. I don't feel anything because I'm pretty balanced as it is. So I guess my final statement would be so many of us are magnesium deficient and we don't know it and we just think magnesium is a laxative. So we just go looking around for something else that will help us.

Speaker 2: 57:23

But if we could be centered and focused on doing enough vitamins and minerals in the form that is absorbed, our bodies will respond and then we'll know what's left over. Is there a genetic something? Are we being poisoned by something? Are we living in a toxic, moldy house? Then those things have to be dealt with separately. But we're just going down so many avenues. There's so much commercialism in nutrients now, and the drug companies are starting to take over the supplement companies, that we're really not sure who to trust or what to trust. You trust yourself. You try something and see if it works. If it doesn't make a difference, you move on.

Speaker 1: 58:14

Great. So the key takeaways, then are make sure you get magnesium and because that's going to help address a lot of the issues that that we have and you would take take it and as you start to feel better, you could reduce the level based on what you said, because you said you started out at what I think 1200 milligrams and now you're down to 450 milligrams. So it's making sure that you get the magnesium and then try to eat, you know, make sure you get vitamin C and some of the other, make sure you get your other vitamins and minerals as well, because they're all going to work synergistically together, I guess and then just continue to try to eat a healthy diet, live a positive lifestyle and make sure magnesium is a big part of that. It's, I guess, another key thing.

Speaker 2: 58:59

That's right. That's right Because you've been saying all these things, even with the sugar podcast you did, to which I'd say just yeah, add a good magnesium, and you know, mine is the good magnesium.

Speaker 1: 59:13

All right, and they can go to your website and get that at bernaresetcom correct.

Speaker 1: 59:18

And you have a bunch available there. So I'd like to thank you for joining me today. This has been great. I've learned a lot and, in addition, I'd like to just as a final call to action is, just have people visit my website as well, liveparkinsonscom. They can subscribe to the free monthly newsletter. But I really appreciate the time and you're helping a lot of people with the message that you're putting out there. So thanks again for being part of the program and I look forward to reading some of your books and getting a little more information. So thanks again.

Speaker 2: 59:50

Thank you, chris, oh, and you are helping so many people and I appreciate your work, thank you.

Speaker 1: 59:57

Well, thank you very much and have a wonderful day, and thanks everybody for listening.