Does Magnesium Help Muscle Cramps and Workout Recovery?

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

I know so many listeners, and I can resonate with this too, get a muscle spasm or a cramp or something along those lines after exercise. Or even just midway through the day, I've heard people say their feet cramp, their calves cramp. And from the world of macronutrients, I'm like, oh, you need to eat a banana. You need to get some potassium in there.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show. Today, we are very, very honored to have Dr. Carolyn Dean here with us, a leading expert on magnesium. I'm so excited for this podcast and just to pick her brain on all of the things she knows about magnesium, with her wealth of knowledge and passion for this specific mineral. Dr. Dean will enlighten us on the importance of magnesium and its impact on our health and all of the good things. So everybody listening and tuning in, get ready for an eye-opening conversation that just might change the way you view this essential mineral. Dr. Dean, Carolyn Dean, welcome to the show.

Carolyn: Thank you, Nikkiey. I'm really happy to be here because, as I see it and as I've said to you, you're the macro girl. I'm the micro girl. And I think we should get together.

Nikkiey: Oh, I love it. Let's go. Jive on all the things.

Carolyn: Yep.

Nikkiey: Macronutrients. I'm excited to pick your brain on this essential micronutrient. So tell us first and foremost, what is magnesium?

Carolyn: Magnesium is a mineral that is ignored, for one thing. 80% of the known metabolic functions of the body require magnesium. Now that's huge. That can end up being about 1,000 metabolic enzymes that have to have magnesium in order to process. We need magnesium to process our macronutrients, our protein, carbs, and fats. So that's why I say you're macro, I'm micro. They work together.

And I think my overall theme and message today would be that we know the importance of macronutrients. When I get an injury, and I recently had an elbow injury, immediately my need for protein went up. When I was in practice, vegetarians who got hepatitis had to increase their protein and go to animal protein in order to heal. So we know all that. And we also know people doing macros are probably taking some supplements. But they probably turned away from supplements because they didn't seem to help. So what I've been doing, because I was so magnesium deficient, is I created absorbable micronutrients so that they could work along with the macros.

So I've got the micronutrient picture clarified and solidified, because I've been at this since I was in my late teens. We're talking about 55 years ago that I started reading about nutrition. Magnesium came to me when I was working in Manhattan in the early 90s on an AIDS and chronic fatigue project, alternative medicine for AIDS. Random House approached me to write a book on magnesium because I'd written some small books before then. And I said, what can I do with one mineral in 300 pages? But I immediately found out that my headaches and my neck tension and my eye twitching and my heart palpitations and leg cramps were all related to magnesium deficiency. But when I tried to take magnesium, I got the laxative effect.

So after my first magnesium book got published, it's called The Magnesium Miracle, I searched for a manufacturing company that could make a non-laxative magnesium. Because that's the clue, the cue, to micronutrients: they have to be absorbable. The body takes them in at a cellular level. They have to be bioavailable.

Because what happened in the beginning of the supplement industry, and I was there because I was in med school in the mid-70s. In my city, Halifax, Nova Scotia, they didn't even have a health food store back then. We didn't have a naturopathic college. So as I came along, I did my medicine and then I did my naturopathic degree. The supplement industry came along. They started with food-based supplements and they worked. But then the biochemical industry, big pharma, got hold of it: oh, this is the chemical structure of vitamin C, let's make it synthetic. And everything became synthetic.

And I watched that happen, where doctors at the various alternative medicine conferences I would go to would say, well, we tried these B vitamins. They didn't work. So we had to give them intramuscularly or intravenously. And we just kept pumping them, and then they worked. So they were using synthetics that the body didn't really appreciate.

And actually, Nikkiey, that's why the whole supplement industry is sort of sketchy right now, because the studies sometimes say vitamins don't work, or they're actually worse for you. Well, that could be because they're studying synthetic supplements, or they're not studying supplements in their groupings. For example, you can't absorb vitamin D unless you have enough magnesium, because magnesium activates vitamin D. And who knows that? So through my 55 years of studying all this, I put together the right way of taking micronutrients so that they could work in a macronutrient environment.

Nikkiey: Well, love that. And thank you for sharing a little bit about that and opening up about magnesium. And it sounds like your background, not only in the medical field but also your own personal story, the deficiency you were experiencing, led you down this path of finding the answers and creating what you've created. So that's incredible.

I believe you talk about this in your books. Talk about the top 12 reasons why magnesium is so foundational to women's and even men's health and overall well-being.

Carolyn: Well, I think it probably starts with energy. Magnesium is necessary in the glycolysis cycle to make something called pyruvate lactate to put into the Krebs cycle. And then the Krebs cycle needs a couple of cofactor magnesium bumps to get to the endpoint of ATP energy. So magnesium is right in there.

Nikkiey: I don't mean to interrupt you, but in layman's terms, I understand that, I get the science of all of that, but in layman's terms, it's basically a factor for energy.

Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, WarriorBabe is here for you. At WarriorBabe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle, and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results, and results that last. Look, don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply. All right, let's get back to the show.

Carolyn: So what happens, especially when women go to the doctor and say, oh, I'm so exhausted, I can't take it anymore? Well, that's misinterpreted as, you're depressed or you're anxious, let's give you a pill. Doctors aren't going to say, well, maybe you need magnesium, because it's necessary for your energy. So there's your energy.

And then you come to muscles and nerves. In order for a muscle or a nerve to fire or create an action, you have to have calcium inside the cell. And the gatekeeper for letting calcium into a cell is magnesium. So the gate opens, the calcium is pushed in, and boom, it does its activity. And then the gate opens again and magnesium pulls out the calcium. If you don't have magnesium, the gate sort of stays wobbly and the cells can fill up with calcium. And in muscles, that creates spasms and twitchings and cramps.

I used to have such big charley horse leg cramps. I'd stretch in bed and I'd get this humongous calf cramp and have to jump out of bed and stand straight and stretch it out. But muscles, what have we got? 600 muscles in the body. So any one of those muscles can be cramping. People get toe cramps, and back cramps that aren't a backache or anything to do with the spine. It's just the muscle spasm.

Nerves, same thing. Open up, calcium in, boom, you get your nerve action potential. And if that cell is filled up with calcium, the nerve cell just excites itself to death, they say. How many miles of nerves do we have in the body? 45. So we'll get numbness and tingling and burning pain and itchy pains. And some people can even be misdiagnosed with something horrible like multiple sclerosis, and it could be a magnesium deficiency. So we've got energy, nerves, and muscles. That covers so much.

And then you look at the biologic processes. You've got how magnesium balances the cholesterol in the body. The HMG-CoA reductase that makes cholesterol is what statins kill. And magnesium works on that enzyme and either makes it work more or work less depending on how much cholesterol is in the body. Everybody now is looking at cholesterol not being the cause of heart disease. But we're still on this terrible merry-go-round of telling people that if their cholesterol is even a tiny bit above normal they have to take a statin.

And the most common statin drug has fluoride attached to it. In the lab, in the test tube, the drug company says that drug's not going to break down and release the fluoride. But in the microbiome, in the intestine, that's the job of bacteria. They break down anything that comes along. And many of the common drugs, including anesthetics that are used in surgery, have fluoride to help the drug get across the fatty membrane of the cells. So the fluoride running around in the body will latch onto magnesium and create a magnesium fluoride compound called sellaite. It's a brittle compound that binds into tendons and ligaments and joints. So you've got a black box warning by the FDA for ciprofloxacin, a really common antibiotic, that it can cause tendon rupture. They don't say why, but because I look at it through the lens of magnesium, I say, well, that could be the problem.

So what else have we got? We've got glucose. In the allopathic medicine drug books, under diabetes, they say one of the signs is magnesium deficiency. Nobody talks about that. And we'll probably get to how doctors don't even do blood testing for magnesium. So you've got diabetics who could benefit from a properly absorbed magnesium that doesn't cause a laxative effect. So that covers a fair number of things. Were there other specifics you wanted me to get into, Nikkiey?

Nikkiey: No, I know that you had the top 12 reasons why magnesium is foundational to women's and men's health, so I was just super curious. But you touched on a lot of things there. Muscle, tendons, nerves, pretty much how the whole skeletal muscle system works, but also how they all connect to organs and the systems that make up our whole internal operating mechanics. So it's pretty interesting.

I want to unpack a couple of things that you said. First and foremost was the cramping. I know so many listeners, and I can resonate with this too, get a muscle spasm or a cramp or something along those lines after exercise, or even just midway through the day. I've heard people say their feet cramped or their calves cramped. And from the world of macronutrients, I'm like, oh, you need to eat a banana. You need to get some potassium in there.

Carolyn: Right. Yeah. Well, potassium and magnesium are kissing cousins.

Nikkiey: Ah.

Carolyn: They are so close. If you look up what magnesium does on a certain level, potassium does much the same thing. But it's got to do with the blood testing. They do good blood tests for potassium and they'll find out your levels. But the blood test for magnesium is very inaccurate. They test the serum magnesium, and only 1% of the body's magnesium is in the blood serum.

Because magnesium is so vital for heart function, it's one of the electrolytes that creates the electrical rhythm of the heart. And if there's not enough magnesium, the body will immediately pull magnesium out of the bones and muscles to keep the heart going and maintain this very tight little level of serum magnesium. It's like 3.2 to 4.8, very narrow. And doctors began to say, well, the blood test always looks normal for magnesium, so let's not bother taking it. And as you know, as a former nurse, there is no magnesium on an electrolyte panel. And that is just crazy. What did I say in the beginning? 80% of known metabolic functions require magnesium. I've got scientific references for that.

Nikkiey: Why is that? Why isn't magnesium being talked about a little bit more? You're kind of blowing my mind, because I have the background, as I shared with you, and I've been in this world and this space. But it's not an electrolyte on a panel. Why isn't it being talked about more?

Carolyn: Well, it starts in med school. We learn nothing about vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids in med school. Nothing. Med school is funded by drug companies, and they don't want to even do research on dietary supplements unless it's to put them down. So doctors don't know anything about them from med school. And med school and residency and specialties are so grueling. You figure if you put all that energy into your medical education, you learned everything you needed to learn. And vitamins and minerals never came up, so they can't be important. It is that cut and dry. It's not until doctors get sick themselves and realize that drugs aren't helping them that they maybe go into the light.

I was different. I went into med school already having Prevention magazine and every available health book back then. There were like five. And I did not get brainwashed out of my beliefs. They almost rejected me for med school because the third-year student who interviewed applicants said I was a Pollyanna and thought I could help people.

Nikkiey: Oh, my goodness.

Carolyn: And anyway, I did get in and I kept being a Pollyanna. And really, Nikkiey, back then, because of what I knew about nutrition and lifestyle and diet from Adelle Davis, and she was one of the only ones, I thought that within 10 or 15 years all doctors would be taking naturopathic courses and incorporating that. Because even in my med school, our clinical teachers would say to us, use a drug for as short a time as possible and then get rid of it, because the person's health will be kicking back and they won't need it.

But as you know, what's happened in the past 15, 20 years is lifetime drugs. You have to take your cholesterol drug for life. You have to take your blood pressure drug for life. You have to take your diabetes drug for life. And what those three drugs do is deplete magnesium and make you sicker and make those conditions worse.

Now, I'm not even allowed to say all that and mention my magnesium product name. So I'm not mentioning any product names here, because the FDA told me personally, oh, by the way, Dr. Dean, if you say that your products help disease, then you're calling your product a drug, and you have to do the billion-dollar drug trial in order to make that claim. So that's why doctors and the public are being kept away from the benefits of good, well-absorbed nutrients.

And actually, the pharmaceutical industry has gotten into the supplement industry too, because you'll see these websites with, here's our top 100 supplements that you absolutely need. And they make people crazy, because most of these combination supplements, say for heart, don't even include magnesium. So these people don't have a clue about what they're formulating. They're just selling widgets to the public.

Nikkiey: So circling back to what you said at the beginning, to answer my question about why, the fact that minerals and vitamins aren't really taught in medical school blows my mind. First and foremost. Second, pairing micronutrients with macronutrients, like you said at the beginning, doctors get, depending on where they're educated, very minimal hours on nutrition as well. And both of these things combined, which blows my mind in the conversation we're having right now, is that nutrition, eating right and fueling the body and all the internal processes, and then micronutrients, minerals and vitamins, literally can be the catalyst together. So what you're sharing is that the drugs are there to help the symptoms rather than getting down to the root causes.

And that was something Dr. Cabral and I talked about on the podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Cabral. He's in functional medicine and is a naturopathic doctor, and we dove deep into this topic. That stuff blows my mind. So continue to keep being a Pollyanna, because you are being a Pollyanna in this race.

Carolyn: When you were saying that, I remembered a conversation I had with my clinical advisor. He was a gastroenterologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada. Big guy, overweight, sitting there drinking a Coke and eating a bag of potato chips. And I said to him, well, do you think diet has anything to do with gut health? He was a gastroenterologist. Oh, no, no. There's no way. So, boom, I was gone. He was no longer a mentor to me because he didn't have a clue.

So there's that aspect. But there's also the aspect that if you look at nutritional research, they've gone down the dark side. They're looking at how to make ultra-processed foods more healthy for people. Seriously. That's why I tell people to read the ingredient list. If the ingredient list is a book long, do not put that into your body. Where is that coming from? They might be getting their funding from the food industry to make ultra-processed foods or processed foods look good. They're certainly not getting any funding from organic farmers.

Over here in Maui, I run my dietary supplement company, but I also run an organic biodynamic farm, because it's all about food. I want to know what people are eating. And I want to know that it's not GMO and it's not fertilized with glyphosate and all that. So I'm looking at it from both sides.

And what I know about the nutrition research is that they will never say you have to eat organic and whole foods. They seem to imply all the time that it's too expensive, we have to give people cheap food that's also healthy. And they don't have a clue that when you eat ultra-processed foods, you don't get any nutrients, and therefore your body keeps craving foods and keeps wanting to eat.

There was a crazy 10-year study that this doctor did, and I think it was just on 30 people. He fed them standard processed foods or ultra-processed foods. And he was amazed that the ultra-processed food people ate 500 calories more a day than the other group. He couldn't figure it out. And at a conference where that was reported, I said, well, that's because they're not getting nutrients and they keep eating. Oh, well, I haven't seen any research that corroborates that. Next question, please.

So we cannot depend on the nutrition industry to give us answers. And that's precisely why people depend on folks like you, Nikkiey, to give this information and encouragement and handholding. You've got to grip people by both hands to really wake them up to the fact that nobody is going to come along, pat you on the head, and give you the pill or the diet, or eat the diet for you, to make you as healthy as you want to be. It's up to us to do that.

Nikkiey: Yes. Yes, totally. Amen to that. I want to come back to the traditional diagnoses, how many of those are masks, being prescribed or diagnosed when there's really a magnesium deficiency going on. I want to put a pin there. But I want to bring it to what you mentioned earlier about energy, and how women feel fatigued and tired, or men are tired and fatigued.

A big thing that we talk about here, second to macronutrients, is strength training. And I know you can share a little bit about how magnesium is a central factor for mitochondria and energy production, because when it comes to strength training, we look at the mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cells. They give the power to do the strength training. But for the mitochondria to be there, they need to be fueled by nutrition. So can you share a little bit about how magnesium plays an essential factor in that as well?

Carolyn: I already mentioned magnesium is very active in the mitochondrial cycle, the glycolysis cycle and the Krebs cycle. It's very necessary. But also when you look at the whole lactic acid and lactate balance, magnesium helps that transition back and forth. So if you build up too much lactic acid, magnesium will help to break that down. And as we know, that's probably going into lactate, which we're now finding out is one of the good guys. And it's a good guy because it's in the Krebs cycle to make energy. So magnesium is right in the middle of that.

Nikkiey: Interesting. So if it's involved like that, I'm thinking from my experience, and I know women have probably experienced it too. I was hospitalized for rhabdomyolysis and I had to get about seven liters of fluid at that point. And I know once a woman is diagnosed with rhabdo, you're more likely to fall back into that state sometimes. But I'm curious, because you just spoke to lactic acid and how magnesium can play a factor in supporting that.

Carolyn: So from heavy exercise or something?

Nikkiey: Oh, my God. Yeah, it was not fun.

Carolyn: No, no. That's a muscle cramp that just won't even budge. And rhabdo is a side effect of statins, and statins block a certain enzyme that magnesium works on. So I don't know if there's a relationship there. But yes, if you can't break down your lactic acid, you have an acidic chemical in your muscles, and especially if you're magnesium deficient, that would trigger the spasm.

Nikkiey: Was I magnesium deficient at that time?

Carolyn: Maybe. Yes. And you wouldn't know, because they're not going to do the blood test on you. Some of them.

Some of the university research that I'm doing now is all based on ionized magnesium testing. That gives us an idea of the actual ion of magnesium that's in your blood that is available to go into your cells, because your cells don't need a magnesium compound.

And what's happening now in the magnesium commercial world is, oh, we've made this magnesium supplement that has 12 different magnesium compounds, it's really going to do the job for you. Well, you don't want the compound, because what you'll get with, say, 500 milligrams of a magnesium glycinate is 50 to 75 milligrams of magnesium. The rest of it is glycine. If you're trying to treat magnesium deficiency, you want magnesium. You don't want the glycine. The glycine may do some things for you. But if you're listening to what I'm saying, that 80% of your known metabolic functions require magnesium, then that's the deficiency you want to treat.

You've got magnesium L-threonate, which they say is the only one that gets into your brain. There's a huge book online at the University of Auckland in New Zealand called Magnesium and the Central Nervous System. It was written way before magnesium L-threonate came around, and it's all about the central nervous system being supported by magnesium. Many of the studies were done with magnesium oxide, which is 4% absorbed. And as long as a little bit of that magnesium ionizes out, it'll get into the brain. All magnesium studies are positive.

But the way I finally had to do a magnesium product on my own was to create a stabilized ion of magnesium that rides around in the blood as an ion and jumps into the cells. It won't get bound back up to another substance, because magnesium is very reactive. In the blood, if you have magnesium glycinate, it can separate for a split second. There's this ion of magnesium, and it could go into a cell in that split second. But in the next split second, it joins back up to the glycine or something else because it's so reactive. So you don't want a magnesium compound. You want the stabilized ion of magnesium. I call it a picometer magnesium.

So you see what I'm getting at. If you're treating magnesium deficiency, you want a magnesium ion, not a magnesium compound. And there's no medical backup for magnesium. Well, I shouldn't say that, Nikkiey, because if you go into PubMed and just type in magnesium, there'll be a couple hundred thousand articles, studies, clinical research, animal and human. But it's not translating into clinical application because people don't understand what the body really needs.

Nikkiey: Interesting. Thank you for sharing all of that. I'm thinking back, if you have the deficiency, you want to treat it full on with magnesium. I use magnesium for sleep. I use magnesium glycinate for sleep. Would you recommend that to people, maybe if someone has high cortisol or cortisol spikes at night and they're trying to unwind? Would you recommend magnesium for sleep?

Hey, I just want to drop a huge appreciation to you guys listening to the show. It means a lot. I hope you guys are enjoying it, and there's so much more to come. If you are enjoying it, hit the subscribe button. I'd appreciate that tons. It would also help this podcast reach others who need to hear these messages too. Thanks so much, guys. Let's get back to the show.

Carolyn: Any magnesium will have a positive effect. So I'll recommend any magnesium, not one over the other, except mine, of course, which is fully absorbed. But I think the people that come to me, and I've got over 100,000 customers, approach me because I'm a medical doctor and a naturopath. And they come with the most horrendous stories of illnesses and being on 10 to 20 drugs. They really want to know what to do with their health. And to slowly build up magnesium and then watch as they're able to diminish their drug intake is just incredible. So it's a different world. But I'm reaching people probably in their 50s, 60s, 70s. I'm in my 70s, so people in my age group.

Nikkiey: You fooled me there. I had no idea.

Carolyn: Thank you. Well, that's because I take my simple remedies. I have a few others as well. But anyway, I really love speaking to the younger audience, because if we can get you on your basic micronutrients as well as your macronutrients early, you will not end up knocking on my door in your 60s and 70s with atrial fibrillation, high cholesterol, even heart failure, arthritis. In this book and my previous book, I've got over 65 conditions that can be mistaken for magnesium deficiency conditions. 65. And that's crazy, but it's true.

Nikkiey: That is so crazy. So you mentioned just a few there. But for listeners, and selfishly for myself, how can someone determine if they have a magnesium deficiency?

Carolyn: Well, the way I look at it, about 80% of the population is likely magnesium deficient. Second, magnesium is the safest dietary supplement you can take. If you take, quote, too much, you'll get the laxative effect. Now, in my case, I could not take more than 50 milligrams of magnesium without getting the laxative effect. So I had to save myself. That's what got me on to trying to find a non-laxative. When I found my non-laxative magnesium, I was able to take 1,200 milligrams without the laxative effect.

And then over a year and a half, and I appreciate what you say, Nikkiey, that if you want to tone your body you've got to give yourself one to three years, we cannot offer people weekend miracles. So at the end of a year, year and a half, I could cut back. And presently, I'm only on 450 milligrams a day. If I take more, I could get the laxative effect. But if I'm eating a lot of dairy or I'm under more stress or start doing more exercise, I will need more magnesium.

Now, in terms of how you know if you need it, I think on one of my websites I should have a magnesium deficiency questionnaire. And it's simple things like, do you get leg cramps? Do you have heart palpitations? Do you have insomnia? Do you get headaches? It's really simple questions. And as a sidebar, a lot of people, when they start taking medications, will start getting magnesium deficiency symptoms. The drug is using up their magnesium to detoxify it. So I just say to people, just start taking some magnesium and see how you feel. Really get used to how your body feels and what it needs. And that's what you do with your clients as well.

Nikkiey: Yeah. And just normal magnesium? So not the compound, the regular magnesium.

Carolyn: Well, there are only compounds available. The only one that's a stabilized ion is my formula.

Nikkiey: And you can't share that on here? Or can you?

Carolyn: I can't give the name, but you'll give people my website and they can research it.

Nikkiey: Okay. Sounds good. So with all the people that you help, and you've said you've had tons and tons of people, are there certain populations that you notice are more at risk for magnesium deficiency? Or is it just that 80% of the world is magnesium deficient?

Carolyn: I think athletes are really susceptible because they sweat out their minerals. And that is so scary, when you think of an athlete who really wants to be healthy and train hard. Here in Maui, I'm doing my two-hour walk. I swim, I stretch. I should do even more. I only carry a three-pound weight when I walk. You have to do all that to keep your body, because we're in a situation now where we're sitting down all the time. We're not like 100 years ago, when we were out using our bodies. So we have to mimic that. But anyway, where were we?

Nikkiey: I was just asking which populations may be more at risk.

Carolyn: Yeah. I think I tweaked onto that years ago from a veterinarian who was using magnesium for his animals. One day he said something like, veterans, especially in the Middle East where they sweat buckets, will take off their undershirt at the end of the day, hang it up, and it will dry hard with all the minerals. And then they pound it out and then they wash it. So one of the horrible things about veterans is they come back with PTSD. They've been given a lot of shots as well, perhaps with mercury in them. They've been exposed to all kinds of horrible gases and things in their training and in the Middle East. So they've got a lot of reason to be toxic, but I think part of it is mineral deficiencies.

Nikkiey: Interesting. Okay. A couple more questions were popping into my brain as you were talking. You mentioned earlier that your specific magnesium can be fully absorbed. How can one maximize absorption of magnesium, maybe just through food?

Carolyn: Well, the research I've seen on that is the U.S. Department of Agriculture saying that 100 years ago, we were getting 500 milligrams of magnesium in our ordinary daily diet. Now we're lucky to get 200 milligrams. And we need 600. The soil is farmed out. We have such high-tech mega farming that doesn't replace the magnesium. They'll just put down potash and nitrogen and phosphorus to make the plants look good. But there's no label on fresh produce to say what minerals are in there. So the foods are very mineral deficient.

And even on my farm here, when I tried to eat just from the farm, I'll never be able to be a vegan or a vegetarian. I tried that. I even tried to do a macrobiotic diet many years ago. I'm the original biohacker, Nikkiey. I've been biohacking longer than most of you have been alive.

Nikkiey: Before it was even cool, Carolyn.

Carolyn: Exactly. Exactly. So when I did macrobiotic, I tried everything. Within a few weeks, I had phlegm on my lungs. I put my stethoscope on. I felt okay, but I had phlegm on my lungs. So I ate some organic chicken, and within a day the phlegm was diminishing, because I didn't have enough protein to take up the albumin or whatever was building up in my lungs. So some people can't be vegan and vegetarian. And it drives me crazy that less than 5% of the American population is vegan or vegetarian, yet they make us all think we're criminals because we're not vegan or vegetarian. Whereas most people really need the protein, and they can't do without it.

Nikkiey: Amen to that. I know there are so many women who come into our community and start WarriorBabe eating like 60 grams of protein a day. And we're like, oh my goodness. It's just from not knowing. And they're here to learn how important protein is.

Okay, so I want to circle back. You mentioned about 65 traditional diagnoses that very well could be disguised, where someone could be diagnosed with this, but really they have a magnesium deficiency.

Carolyn: Right. Right.

Nikkiey: I know. You mentioned high cortisol. You mentioned MS. You mentioned heart palpitations. You mentioned a couple there. And I'm just blown away that those things are being disguised, when really magnesium deficiency is what's happening.

Carolyn: Right. Yeah. I have the list here. Acid reflux. At the bottom of your esophagus and the top of your stomach, the diaphragm is separating them. If the diaphragm is in spasm, it can open up that gastroesophageal opening and you can have reflux heartburn. If you take magnesium, the diaphragm no longer spasms. So there's acid reflux.

There's adrenal fatigue, which allopathic medicine says doesn't even exist. But we're in a constant state of PTSD. We've been living in shock for the past three, four years with the craziness that happened to us all.

Nikkiey: Yeah. Which we will not even name.

Carolyn: So adrenal fatigue. Alzheimer's disease.

Nikkiey: Oh, wow.

Carolyn: You get Alzheimer's from what? Maybe mercury in the brain, aluminum in the brain, calcium in the brain, and magnesium detoxes.

What I've seen that will be important to women is that after about two, three months of taking just my magnesium and getting that going, the immune system will kick in to the point that the body will start getting rid of yeast overgrowth. Seriously, Nikkiey, the two things I work with are magnesium deficiency, which nobody recognizes, and yeast overgrowth, which everybody ignores. And I think they're both so important because of antibiotics, the birth control pill, stress cortisol, and sugar in the diet. Our large intestinal yeast grows up into the small intestine, creating a leaky gut and all the irritation of the gut. And then 78 different yeast toxins are absorbed into the body, causing everything from brain fog to joint pain, because the toxins get into the joints. Yeast toxins will block thyroid hormone production.

In Alzheimer's, when you take a well-absorbed magnesium, you start dumping heavy metals. Seriously. Heavy metals will try to take up receptor sites or storage sites that magnesium uses. So if you have enough magnesium in those storage sites, the heavy metals just don't attach. And that is huge.

You've got angina. The heart is one big muscle. And as we said in the beginning about the muscle spasms caused by magnesium deficiency, the heart goes into a spasm and that causes angina and heart attacks. You take these athletes that have sudden cardiac arrest. Besides other causes, we have magnesium deficiency.

So we've got anxiety and panic attacks. That relates to the adrenal gland as well. You've got people whose throat will sort of clutch up and they'll start panicking. You give them a magnesium drink and it relaxes them.

I describe all of these. Arthritis, asthma. As a former nurse, you know that asthma is treated with corticosteroids over and over and over again. But the smooth muscle lining of the bronchial tubes can go into spasm and clutch up the bronchial tubes and cause wheezing. You take magnesium and your bronchial tubes open up just like that.

You've got atherosclerosis. They talk about atherosclerosis as the cause of blood pressure and maybe heart attacks. It's where cholesterol jams up your arteries and causes blockage. Well, in my scenario, two things happen. Nitric oxide is deficient because of lack of magnesium. Nitric oxide helps dilate blood vessels. Without it, your blood vessels kind of collapse. And second, when you have a vitamin C deficiency, you don't make the proper amount of collagen. And collagen is really necessary to make all the soft tissue structures in the body, even the bone.

So say you've got a blood vessel bifurcation: two big blood vessels coming down to a Y, and then they make a tinier blood vessel. That's a stretch point that can be weakened by collagen deficiency, and it can split a little bit. Into that split, cholesterol will put itself like a piece of gum, a bandaid, to try to heal the area. And if you have a lot of calcium in your blood, because magnesium and calcium are enemies, it bumps out magnesium. But if you have much more magnesium, you will drive calcium into the bones and teeth where it belongs. Magnesium does that and vitamin K2 does that. But in your blood vessels, if you have too much calcium, it'll just jam onto that cholesterol and cause the atherosclerotic plaque, which will be blamed on cholesterol and not on calcium and vitamin C deficiency. Isn't that cool?

Nikkiey: Yeah. A lot of cool stuff. A lot of good stuff. Definitely a lot of education being shared here, and I appreciate it. Everybody needs to go pick up that book and read about magnesium, and I'll link all of your links in the description below this podcast.

One more question I'm curious about, because you just talked about it there, which was super interesting, with calcium and magnesium. You mentioned earlier that magnesium is a partner to potassium, kissing cousins, I think you said. What's the importance of magnesium as a partner with other essential vitamins and minerals, like vitamin D, like calcium?

Carolyn: Yeah. Those are the main ones. They say for magnesium compounds, maybe vitamin B6 is helpful for absorption. But what's fun to look at, and maybe you've done it, is something called a mineral wheel. It's a big round wheel with a few dozen minerals around the outside, and then lines that join up or don't join up with other minerals. So you can see what interacts with magnesium on that.

And that brings me to say that there are so many minerals we really don't even talk about. That's why when I recommend a program to people, I start with hydration. I hydrate people with purified water of some sort, but with sea salt in the water. So you take your body weight in pounds and divide that in half, and that half amount is the number of ounces of water you drink a day. And in each liter of water, you put at least a quarter teaspoon of a good sea salt. A good sea salt means a sea salt that has some color to it, because if it's a white sea salt, it means it's been refined and the minerals have been removed.

So you do your water. And then in my protocol, I get people taking my magnesium and my multiple mineral and maybe my silver in that water, along with a vitamin C powder that has a berry flavor so the taste of the minerals doesn't choke you. But the multiple mineral you would love, because it's 12 minerals, nine of which support thyroid hormone production.

Thyroid hormones are killed by yeast toxins and pregnancy. If you've had even one pregnancy, I don't think the thyroid hormones have been drained, but it's like your minerals have been drained and you're not making your thyroid hormone properly. And the postpartum depression business can be related to low thyroid as well as low zinc, and the fact that you're not getting any sleep.

Nikkiey: Wow. So one question about that water. Would you recommend it to people who are strength training and working out and highly active, where you take your body weight divided by two, and you said that's how many ounces you should have a day?

Carolyn: That's right. Well, you would need more if you're sweating. You really do. That's your baseline minimum. Look at sauna therapy. People sit in the sauna and sweat a lot. You have to replace that with sea salt water. I've had people come to me who've done sauna therapies and they feel worse, because they haven't been given mineral replacement.

It's the same with heat shock or cold shock treatment. They make people feel good because they're making your body think that it's dying. And it puts out growth hormone and adrenaline and all these things, and they're measured. Oh my gosh, look at all these good things that are happening when we try to kill our body. And you may feel good for a while, but then you will tank if you're not replacing your minerals.

Nikkiey: Yeah. Okay, cool. I was just curious about that because I love to tell our community to drink the water. They need to drink water. I recommend getting at least around 100 up to 120 ounces, depending on the person. And I know that's important because in our world we do a lot of exercise and strength training and building skeletal muscle. So I just needed that clarification there.

Amazing stuff here. We covered and talked about a lot of things. Interesting stuff in the world of magnesium. So I appreciate you and your time and sharing your knowledge here on this podcast. And everybody listening, I'm going to go search your website and try to find your magnesium. Anybody who wants to follow Dr. Carolyn Dean, all the links will be below this podcast, and you can get links to her books and everything as well. So thank you again for being here. I appreciate your time.

Carolyn: Thank you, Nikkiey. It was fun. It went like a flash.

Nikkiey: I know, right? 55 minutes recording, hanging out. Time flies when we're having fun.

Carolyn: So I appreciate what you're doing for your community. It is so important that we marry the kissing cousins of macro and micro.

Nikkiey: Heck yeah. Macronutrients and micronutrients. Very important, people. Don't forget about the micros. Well, thank you, Dr. Carolyn Dean. I appreciate your time being here.

Hey, guys, real quick. If you're interested in taking your body to the next level, losing body fat, building more muscle, and feeling more confident, do it alongside one of our 30-plus professional coaches. Work one-on-one with her to eliminate all of the guesswork you may have. All you need to do is the work she tells you to do to get to those goals of yours. To learn more, click the link below this podcast and apply to our VIP program right now.