SCOTT: Hello, everybody! This is the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I am Scott, this is Martin, he happens to be on the West coast of Canada, well, very close to the West coast of Canada, and I happen to be very close to the West coast of Morocco in North Africa! So we are really excited to be able to stream from around the world!

MARTIN: Yes, and of course, we have followers from all places, Australia, South Africa, UK, Canada, United States, North coast, South coast, West coast, East coast…

SCOTT: Awesome! So what we want to do today is talk about magnesium. I guess the first question is why is magnesium important to our health?

MARTIN: There are essentially seven major minerals, elements that constitute what we would know as the electrolytes. And they are calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, and then phosphorus, sulfur, and iron. Those are essentially the major ones. To understand why they are important to us, we have to talk about our nervous system first. There is a part of it called the Autonomic nervous system. Things that you don’t control yourself, the ones that control things that you can forget about such as your breathing, your blood pressure, your heart beating, or your digestion happening, and things like that, that is called the autonomic nervous system.

And the autonomic nervous system has two branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic is also known as fight or flight. The parasympathetic is also known as the rest, digest and repair. One of them is always in dominance. So when you are in the fight or flight mode, the sympathetic, you are essentially trying to preserve your existence. You are worried about getting out of danger, or as the classic example in literature says, run away from a saber tooth tiger. You need to get away from him otherwise you are his lunch.

The parasympathetic on the other hand is the side that looks after the long term existence, the repair of damage, memory storage, feeding of cells. So when the parasympathetic has the upper hand, you are going to be digesting, your blood pressure drops, you calm down, your cells will start to eliminate toxins, and so on. When the sympathetic kicks in, your blood pressure goes up, your pupils dilate, so you can see better, your heart rate goes up, and so on.

SCOTT: So in other words, when you are in that fight or flight state, you are ready to fight or run away. And we are in that state pretty much all the time because of many factors, which means our body never repairs. If we have a problem and it is causing us pain, it is not going to get better because our body hasn’t gone into a state where it can actually start repairing itself.

MARTIN: Right. If you are not sleeping well, that means you are staying sympathetic, and the parasympathetic is not getting enough time to repair. And so you are aging faster. you are breaking down, you are tearing down, and you are not restoring. We are supposed to have an active time, and then fix and repair time, and if it is not balanced, it is shown as aging. Well, you can look at my face, I’ve had more time in sympathetic than parasympathetic over the years. If I was able to keep it in perfect balance, I’d be still looking 27 and I would be tireless, I wouldn’t forget words, and I would have zero pain anywhere and so on. In the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic part is accelerated by calcium and decelerated by magnesium. The parasympathetic side is accelerated by sodium and decelerated by potassium.

So if you are lacking in magnesium, you will not be able to relax, lengthen, open, and so on. Visualize a heartbeat. Every contraction is triggered by calcium, every lengthening, or opening, is triggered by magnesium. So for instance, when I move my arm like that, this muscle here has contracted, but the opposing muscle, this one here on the bottom, has to lengthen. So biceps shortens, triceps lengthens. A professional athlete, when he’s running, his quad is always stronger than the hamstring, and with too much calcium and not enough magnesium, he will overpower the hamstring, the hamstring will not be able to relax fast enough in response to the power of the quad, and he will pull a muscle. That is the most common injury in professional athletes, a torn hamstring. Why? Actually for a lack of magnesium, if you can believe it.

I would like to explain what is affected by magnesium. When you don’t have enough magnesium, you are experiencing things such as anxiety, fatigue, tightness of muscles, twitches of muscles, cramps of muscles, poor memory, seizures, vertigo, intestinal problems, constipation, insomnia, poor coordination, faintness as in falling over, and in extreme cases depression, confusion, ADD, and so on. And when this continues and you are chronically deficient in magnesium, you end up with a chronic illness. We try to approach things from the functional perspective, we focus on problems at the cellular level, we are looking for a cause. Modern medicine sees mostly symptoms and tries to cover up symptoms, instead of addressing the cause. They focus on the organ level. The problem will be something like angina, anorexia, arrhythmia, asthma, atherosclerosis, diabetes, eclampsia, emphysema, fibromyalgia, gallbladder issues, migraines, kidney stones, intermittent claudication, interstitial cystitis, viral infection, PMS, panic attack, osteoporosis, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, stroke, of course, and the major ones like chronic fatigue, cancer, cirrhosis, depression. Those are all the names of the conditions that have been created by the deficiency at the functional level.

Here’s how we got here. Magnesium is actually normally acquired through food. There is supposed to be a good balance between calcium and magnesium in our food intake, but our soils, where the foods are grown, are fairly rich in calcium, but not so much in magnesium. There are in fact areas on the planet where the magnesium deficiency is really significant. Australia is one of them. So depending on where the food is grown, it will be deficient in minerals. And the industrial method of growing food with fertilizers, the NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), it doesn’t have Ca and Mg in there, so the food will be deficient in magnesium. The food that is grown in the industrial style is not balanced well enough, you will most likely have to supplement. Now it will depend on your metabolic type, whether you need to supplement a little bit of magnesium, or a whole lot of magnesium. When you are deficient in magnesium, you are functionally staying too much in the sympathetic, not enough in the parasympathetic, state meaning you are always tearing down, not building up enough.

What happens in the body is this: the body will defend the blood at the expense of all peripheral organs. So the functional margins for the electrolytes in the blood will be this much calcium, this much magnesium, this much sodium, this much potassium, that will be tightly managed to be just right, but this will happen at the expense of the peripheral organs. So when your doctor takes your blood and tells you: “well, everything’s normal,” yeah, in the blood, it is. But if you are coming into the emergency room with a stroke or heart attack, they will mainline straight into your vein a bag of magnesium, because that is what opens it up. Calcium will hold things tight, magnesium will open things up.

The only way that you can find your long term balances reliably, that I know, is to do hair analysis. In your hair, if we take an inch of your hair, you end up knowing what happened in the last month or so, you are growing about an inch of hair a month. So when we take this piece close to the skull, we can analyze that and see just how the balances are. So you can do a hair analysis, and you can start interpreting it as to what’s going on in the body. It is not 100% reliable, because, of course, this is only showing what the body is pushing into the hair, but still, compared to other methods, we can get some understanding of all that.

SCOTT: What can we do? How can we get more magnesium, if it is not in our foods? I know that often when we take a magnesium supplement, we basically flush it right through the body.

MARTIN: What happens, of course, is that the body has to defend the balance in the blood very carefully, so when you ingest things, you take it through the mouth, the stomach, it hits the intestines, and pretty quickly it is going into the digestive system. If you ingest large amounts of these minerals, all at once, it just upsets the balance, so the body has to get rid of it, and the kidneys will filter it out. And if it is a really large amount, it can cause diarrhea, because the body is trying to get rid of it as fast as possible. Magnesium is actually famously effective to induce diarrhea. If you are constipated, you take magnesium to the level of comfort. But if you want to just clean out, you can take two or three teaspoons of magnesium chloride, and everything comes out within 10 minutes, it is fairly quick.

SCOTT: Is it dangerous if you do like that, Martin? Not that we are recommending that you do this, but if you accidentally took a little too much magnesium, would it cause damage?

MARTIN: No, just discomfort. I have played with it myself, so when you take too much magnesium, well, don’t get in your car, wait at home until this whole thing is resolved, you will need about a half an hour, maybe an hour, because when it comes, it comes with an intensity that is not negotiable, it is coming out.

SCOTT: Okay. So what’s the best way to get more magnesium without discomfort, so we are no longer deficient in it.

MARTIN: When you are taking it in small amounts, like in food, that is just fine. But if you know you have a deficiency, you need to try and supplement to make up the difference. Taking it by capsules is very slow, and it can affect the digestive system. But there is an option that is faster, more effective, and does bypass the digestive system, and that is topical application. You can actually create foot soaks or full-body baths or rub it on your skin. We have made available bath crystals, and we also have it in special preparation that you can actually rub on your skin. So here comes an interesting bit: the most common, or the easiest available supplement, is Epsom salts, which is magnesium sulfate, and you can use it in a bath, you can use it in a foot soak, you can even use it orally, you can swallow it. We have opted for using magnesium chloride. Magnesium chloride is more powerful, stronger, it has about twice as much magnesium, compared to the sulfate, the Epsom salt, and it is also more compatible with a human body. Chloride is used in the digestive system, in hydrochloric acid in your stomach.

SCOTT: So if I am in a magnesium salt bath, and I am absorbing all this magnesium chloride, basically the magnesium then gets absorbed into the skin, and it gets transported to wherever it is needed.

MARTIN: Yes. What we have on our Life Enthusiast website is the magnesium oil or magnesium gel, that has also been treated energetically, the water in the product has been treated energetically, so it is actually even more penetrable through the skin. We have reduced the surface tension of the fluids. When you reduce surface tension, it makes it easier to go through barriers. We also reduced the cluster size, when you reduce clustering, it is actually easier for the material to get into the cells, so it is way more efficient. Where a teaspoon of this magnesium chloride oil is sufficient, you would need to use close to a cup of the Epsom salts to get a similar effect.

SCOTT: I really love doing the magnesium salt bath, you run the nice hot water, you put the salt in it, and you just lay down, I just find it very, very relaxing. But if someone has got, say fibromyalgia or they’ve got chronic pain, what are some of the things that they could experience? Obviously, everybody is different…

MARTIN: Well, the most common comment I hear is: “I took half a cup of the magnesium crystals, put it in the bath, and I slept like a baby. I didn’t need to take my ‘fill the blanks’ pills that I have been depending on to go to sleep or have decent sleep.” Because now that there is magnesium in the system, the parasympathetic gets the upper hand, rest, repair, digest. And the body’s stress response is shut off. You have a peaceful all-night sleep, it is shocking to some people. And of course, the other things that happen are when you are having this peaceful sleep, you are actually repairing, you are restoring. So you are going to wake up more refreshed because if you have a stressed, fitful, shallow sleep, you don’t repair as much, so you wake up less refreshed or even more tired in the morning. And of course, people who suffer from all-out insomnia, they roll around in their bed all night long but don’t feel any better in the morning.

SCOTT: What we’ve talked about basically is there is not enough magnesium in your diet, so you are deficient in it, particularly if you have white flour and white sugar in your diet. And as a result of chronic, ongoing stress in our lives, we are constantly in this fight or flight mode, so our body cannot repair itself. So if we have enough magnesium, we are able to get into the rest and digest mode, relaxation, the rebuilding stage. Okay. What is the price point for these magnesium supplements we are talking about?

MARTIN: The magnesium oil that we sell is $20 for a smaller bottle, and that contains 96 servings. If you want to buy it by the gallon, that is probably 800 servings for $80. So it is very, very inexpensive, which is why nobody wants to talk about it, you don’t make much money by selling this to people, well, nobody in the medical system. What a typical pharmaceutical representative, also known as MD, will recommend is calcium channel beta-blocker. Well, why would you use a calcium channel blocker, when all you need is the natural antagonist, which is natural magnesium, right? Imagine the seesaw, calcium up, magnesium down. Instead of trying to push down on the calcium, you could just try and raise the magnesium, simple as that. So instead of a 20 cent solution in the form of magnesium supplement, you end up with a $20 solution with the pills, and with a natural downside of toxic drugs, rather than something natural that your body knows how to process without any damage or penalty.

MARTIN: Blood pressure, for instance, is one of the inflammatory symptoms, and you can reduce or normalize blood pressure by adjusting the calcium-magnesium imbalance. The other balance, of course, is the sodium-potassium, which we didn’t want to focus on here today, but doctors will naturally tell you that you should reduce your sodium intake, without telling you that you could also fix it by increasing your potassium intake, which is naturally present in apple cider vinegar, or bananas, all fruits, really.

SCOTT: So if somebody, for example, has fibromyalgia, and they find that getting in and out of the bath is too painful, what do they do?

MARTIN: Well, if you want to use the crystals, you can use them in a foot soak, or if that is not convenient, get the magnesium oil, just take a teaspoon and rub it on your skin, on your belly or legs, somewhere, anywhere on the skin, it will absorb over the next hour or so. Compared to Epsom salt, as I mentioned earlier, you will need a lot less of this to accomplish the same effect.

SCOTT: So if you have pain, if you have any problems at all, and then particularly if you are stressed out, a hot magnesium bath is going to change you from being all stressed, to being all relaxed, then your body can actually start to heal itself. Imagine if you had a cut on your arm, and it never healed. And then you got a second cut a couple of weeks later on your arm, and it ever healed either. You need to be able to put yourself in a state where you can relax, where you can rest, where your body can recharge itself, repair itself, where it can start healing itself.

MARTIN: I also want to answer the question of when to use it. Whenever you would like the parasympathetic to get the upper hand. So typically that could be after lunch, so you can have a little siesta, especially after dinner, when you want to go digest and then have a nice sleep, but you could also use some just before any strenuous events, like if you are going, for instance, to play soccer, or play hockey, or before any athletic event, you would want to take some magnesium, because that is going to help balance your body. If you watch a cat like a cheetah running, I remember vividly the fact that these animals are running so elegantly and relaxed, like there is no stress, even when they are running at full tilt. Whereas you watch the sports events, where athletes compete through clenching and doing stuff like that, just forcing it. If they had sufficient magnesium on board, they would be more like the cheetah, because they would not be fighting themselves. They would have peak performance without stress. And that is why you want to use the magnesium before strenuous activity. And then of course, whenever you want to shut down, relax, repair, and restore.

SCOTT: How often should you do a bath? You can do it once a day, you can do it more often if you want. I would say a 20-minute bath on average would be about what people would want to do every few days. Every day, if you are in bad shape, and you have a lot of pain, or you are really stressed out and you know that you need a lot of repair being done. I found out that once or twice a week works great for me, and go to bed after the bath. And the magnesium chloride is better than the magnesium sulfate, is that right?

MARTIN: Yes. And the dosage for the bath? You would probably want to have about 600 milligrams of elemental magnesium at a time, which is about a teaspoon of the fully saturated magnesium oil as we sell it, or a handful of the Bath Crystals, 1/3 cup for a bathtub.

SCOTT: Thank you, Martin! I really appreciate you sharing that information! This is the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! Thanks for joining us, everybody! See you next time!