More praise for The Magnesium Miracle “Every doctor and patient should read this comprehensive book on the many roles of magnesium.… I loved this book. Clearly written and packed with information, it offers a compendium on natural medicine and is an invaluable resource for both practitioner and public alike. It is the most comprehensive and well-referenced guide to the myriad benefits of magnesium published to date.” —CAROLYN DEMARCO, M.D., author of Take Charge of Your Body: Women’s Health Advisor “Throughout this volume and with utmost clarity, Carolyn Dean presents invaluable recommendations—based on the latest magnesium research. Virtually every American can benefit.” —PAUL PITCHFORD, author of Healing with Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition “Physicians and therapists have paid scant attention to this very important element, which is also involved in maintaining our good health. The massive evidence is here in this important book on magnesium. I am pleased to have been taking magnesium for so many years.” —ABRAM HOFFER, M.D., author of Putting It All Together: The New Orthomolecular Nutrition “Excellent research together with valuable inspiration to empower the doctor within each of us.” —JOSHUA ROSENTHAL, director of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, author of The Energy Balance Diet “An enlightening and practical book. Dr. Dean supplies powerful information for people while trumpeting a reminder to doctors about this essential and often overlooked mineral elixir. The Magnesium Miracle should be required reading for living a rich, healthy life.” —EUGENE CHARLES, D.C., DIBAK, author of Physician Heal Thy Patient and Becoming Healthy, Wealthy and Wise “I have been in complementary medicine for thirty years and I believed I knew all there was to know about magnesium—until I [read] the latest book by Dr. Carolyn Dean. This book is the most comprehensive review on the subject I have ever read. As one can expect from a physician with such vast and diversified knowledge, The Magnesium Miracle contains information on allied fields of medicine that makes this book an incredible resource for doctors and patients alike. The Magnesium Miracle is a book that is going to be of great service to humanity since, as the author points out, there is so much information on magnesium that has failed to be included in the medical curriculum.” —SERAFINA CORSELLO, M.D., Wellness Medical Center for Integrative Medicine, author of Ageless Healing 2007 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition Copyright © 2003, 2007 by Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. Foreword copyright © 2003 by Dr. Bella Altura and Dr. Burton Altura All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Originally published in hardcover in different form as The Miracle of Magnesium by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2003. eISBN: 978-0-307-55769-8 www.ballantinebooks.com v3.1 To the Miracle Women in my life: my mum, Rena; my three sisters, Chris (who labored with me on the first drafts of “the wee maggie”), Anne, and Evelyn; and my agent, Beth. Thank you all. FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION “Clearly there is more to life than magnesium” is one of the remarks from Dr. Dean’s remarkable, almost encyclopedic, but very readable book. Her book is long overdue, for it gives the lay reader a chance to discover for him- or herself the many needs for this mineral in a healthy diet, and the reasons why this has not been emphasized in the everyday literature. The requirement for magnesium in our diet is indeed a much neglected topic, and this book by Dr. Dean brings the message home by her carefully written repetitive emphasis on the subject. That does not mean that there are not many other nutrients necessary in our daily food intake, as stated above, but the point she so clearly makes is that the public in general has not been notified to look for the proper amount of this mineral in the daily diet and of the many reasons magnesium is needed in our bodies. After a cursory overview of the material, the book should be read as one would read an encyclopedia, that is, pick out the parts one is particularly interested in, and then go back and try to read it all. This way the reader will get the gist of how important magnesium really is and how little he or she has been informed, be it from newspapers, magazines, or the rest of the news media. As the old adage says, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and so it is with balanced nutrition, which includes this all-important mineral in adequate amounts. (As to the other interesting parts of the book, our qualifications allow us to comment only on the material pertaining to the scientific basis for the need of magnesium.) DR. BELLA T. ALTURA Research Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology SUNY Downstate Medical Center Brooklyn, New York DR. BURTON M. ALTURA Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Medicine SUNY Downstate Medical Center Brooklyn, New York CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Foreword to the First Edition Author’s Note to the Revised Edition Introduction PART ONE: THE HISTORY OF MAGNESIUM 1 The Case for Magnesium 2 Magnesium: The Missing Mineral PART TWO: MAGNESIUM-DEFICIENT CONDITIONS 3 Anxiety and Depression 4 Migraines and Pain 5 Strokes, Head Injury, and Brain Surgery 6 Cholesterol and Hypertension 7 Magnesium and Heart Disease 8 Obesity, Syndrome X, and Diabetes 9 PMS, Dysmenorrhea, and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome 10 Infertility, Pregnancy, Preeclampsia, and Cerebral Palsy 11 Osteoporosis and Kidney Stones PART THREE: THE RESEARCH CONTINUES 12 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia 13 Environmental Illness 14 Asthma 15 Health and Longevity PART FOUR: TESTING AND SUPPLEMENTS 16 Magnesium Requirements and Testing 17 A Magnesium Eating Plan 18 Magnesium Supplementation and Homeopathic Magnesium Appendix Magnesium Content of Common Foods Calcium Content of Common Foods Resources References About the Author AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE REVISED EDITION It is gratifying to know that since the first edition of The Magnesium Miracle was published in 2003, thousands of people have benefited from increasing the magnesium in their lives. Many people from around the world have sought me out through my Web site at www.carolyndean.com to share their magnesium success stories and for nutritional and wellness consultations with me by phone. Many of the miraculous magnesium stories that I hear involve heart symptoms, severe cramping, PMS, anxiety, and depression. One woman rushed her husband to the hospital with chest pain, sweating, and shortness of breath—all the symptoms of a heart attack. After two days and many tests, the doctors could find nothing abnormal and released him. During her own research, this woman found the first edition of The Magnesium Miracle and realized her husband’s chest pain might well be due to coronary artery spasms. She told his doctor about her research, and he agreed that magnesium should be tried. The miraculous result was that her husband had no more chest pain. Seeing her own symptoms in the pages of The Magnesium Miracle, she took magnesium to reverse her moody PMS. Most people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia improve about 50 percent when they begin to use magnesium. People who take magnesium for muscle spasms have shared that their mild depression and irritability disappear as a wonderful side benefit. One benefit of magnesium, which is difficult to prove scientifically, is a greater enjoyment of sexual activity, reported by many women. I’ve written about magnesium oil in this edition of The Magnesium Miracle, but already my clients are remarking on its many benefits. You can rub it into the gums to help treat inflammation and prevent bad breath and gum bleeding. Applied as a spray, it makes the skin smooth and soft. Invariably, people who take magnesium for one symptom find that it improves many others, and they immediately begin telling their family and friends about it. One woman said that she has given away fifteen books; another gentleman ordered a case to give out to friends. This word-of-mouth spread of information about magnesium is truly improving health and changing lives. Magnesium education received a boost in March 2005 when the George and Patsy Eby Foundation provided a grant that purchased 1,000 books each of The Magnesium Miracle and The Magnesium Factor by Mildred Seelig, M.D., and Andrea Rosanoff, Ph.D., to be given to members of Congress. Dr. Rosanoff and I hosted a reception on Capitol Hill to which members of Congress and their staff were invited and presented with our magnesium books. Magnesium research continues to show the enormous benefits of this mineral, as you will see, and yet magnesium deficiency is still widespread. Large commercial farms have not seen fit to add magnesium-rich fertilizer to depleted soil, and people continue to eat magnesium-deficient foods made even more deficient by processing and cooking. One bright light on the horizon was a 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) symposium, held in Baltimore, called “Calcium and Magnesium in Drinking Water.” The WHO’s acknowledgment of the importance of magnesium in health brings us closer to solving the magnesium deficiency problem we face. Paul Mason, of the Healthy Water Association, summarized the conference: 1. There is consensus that most of the world’s people are deficient in magnesium and calcium, resulting in vast numbers of deaths and debilitating illnesses worldwide. 2. There seemed to be agreement that there are only four ways of delivering adequate dietary magnesium to the global population: 1. Advising everyone on earth to take pills for magnesium and calcium. Nothing like this has ever been done, requiring behavior modification and decades of expensive advertising and promotion, which often fails. This route is very unlikely on a global level but practical on an individual level. 2. Advising everyone on earth to change their choices of foods to get more calcium and magnesium. This is another route that requires behavior modification and will likely fail on a global level but can be implemented on an individual level. 3. Adding calcium and magnesium to tap water. Most people feel this would be very wasteful since 99 percent of tap water is not used for drinking, and calcium especially can build up as scale in plumbing. Fortifying tap water is therefore very unlikely. 4. Requiring bottlers to add the optimal calcium and magnesium to bottled products might be our best option. WHO will study this problem and make a recommendation in 2008 and is likely to choose this alternative. When I asked Mason if any countries were supplementing their water supply with magnesium, he said there is one practice that is noteworthy and which could be expanded. It has to do with desalinating seawater to make it fit for human use as drinking water. “As I understand it, all the countries that use reverse osmosis of seawater add back 1 percent seawater to prevent pipe corrosion caused by excessive softness. This amount of seawater will yield about 15 mg/L magnesium and 25 mg/L calcium. It varies around the world. I think Singapore and numerous Arab countries use reverse osmosis, and the list is steadily growing.” It may be decades before we see magnesium supplied in our drinking water; however, the WHO may encourage bottled water manufacturers to add this nutrient to their product. In the meantime, we can assess our own requirements and make sure we are doing all we can to keep our bodies supplied with the magnesium we need. To help in this regard, this expanded edition of The Magnesium Miracle offers specific recommendations on the best-absorbed forms of magnesium and a magnesium eating plan to help you obtain optimal levels of magnesium you need for your health. INTRODUCTION Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance? The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us—no matter how much of them we eat. The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them aren’t worth eating as food. Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume. Laboratory tests prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, and even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago. No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his stomach with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health, because his stomach isn’t big enough to hold them! And we are turning into a nation of big stomachs. —From the 74th Congress, 2nd session, Senate document no. 264, 1936 It is hard to believe that this Senate document about mineral deficiency was written as long ago as 1936. Today farmlands are even more mineral-deficient and fertilizers still don’t fully replace those minerals. You only have to look at the Journal of the American College of Nutrition’s December 2004 issue to see our current dietary dilemma. A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the nutritional status of forty-three garden crops assessed the level of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and ascorbic acid. Researchers compared nutrient levels from 1950 with present values. Remember, 1950 is fourteen years after the Senate document that claimed there were already significant deficiencies in our food supply. However, from 1950 to 2004, there was a further decline in nutrients in these crops, ranging from 6 percent for protein to 38 percent for riboflavin (a B vitamin). The researchers admitted that this study raised significant questions about how modern agriculture practices are affecting food crops. One researcher said, “Perhaps more worrisome would be declines in nutrients we could not study because they were not reported in 1950—magnesium, zinc, vitamin B , vitamin E and dietary fiber, not to mention phytochemicals.” The 6 lead author of the paper, Dr. Donald Davis, hoped that “our paper will encourage additional studies in which old and new crop varieties are studied side-by-side and measured by modern methods.” My hope is different: that people will acknowledge the continuing decline of both our soil and the nutrient content of our foods and do something to repair those losses—not merely do further studies! Magnesium is one of the most depleted minerals, yet one of the most important. We imagine that medicine has advanced to the stage of miracle cures, yet it’s not technology that we’re lacking but basic nutrients that power our bodies and give us our health. Quick-fix medical solutions are all around us via television, the Internet, radio, and infomercials. In a world of rapid change, our bodies are going through peaks and crashes every day. We rely on double cappuccinos in the morning, a Power Bar for lunch, and an acupuncture treatment after work before we go to the gym for our energy hits. We’re exhausting our natural physical stores of energy, straining our bodies’ capacity to function and heal. Although we often can’t change our workload, we can learn how to preserve and rebuild our energy levels naturally. Magnesium regulates more than 325 enzymes in the body, the most important of which produce, transport, store, and utilize energy. Many aspects of cell metabolism are regulated by magnesium, such as DNA and RNA synthesis, cell growth, and cell reproduction. Magnesium also orchestrates the electric current that sparks through the miles of nerves in our body. Magnesium has numerous physiological roles, among which are control of nerve action, the activity of the heart, neuromuscular transmission, muscular contraction, vascular tone, blood pressure, and peripheral blood flow. Magnesium modulates and controls the entry and release of calcium from the cell, which determines muscular activity. Without magnesium, muscle and nerve functions are compromised and energy is diminished. We are operating with the power turned off. Muscular weakness, soft bones, anxiety, heart attacks, arrhythmia, and even seizures and convulsions can result.1 More than seventy-five years ago, scientists declared magnesium to be an essential mineral. Each year since then, research has revealed more ways in which magnesium is indispensable to life.2 Yet it is continually being lost from the natural food supply. There has been a gradual decline of dietary magnesium in the United States, from a high of 500 mg/day at the turn of the century to barely 175–225 mg/day today.3 The National Academy of Sciences has determined that most American men obtain about 80 percent of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) and women average only 70 percent.4 In addition, most