Recently, a healthy 18-year-old basketball player and health-conscious jogger died suddenly. The initial diagnosis was death from coronary artery disease due to high blood cholesterol. But the cause of death eventually proved to be magnesium deficiency.
Magnesium has never been a superstar nutrient like calcium. But it's still crucial in keeping the doctor away and in fighting several common chronic diseases. Are you getting enough of this mineral?
Magnesium is nature's natural antispasmodic. It's amazing that this fact hasn't triggered more attention from the medical community. In 1979 Dr. J.R. Chipperfield reported in the British journal The Lancet that patients who suffered from angina often had low blood levels of magnesium, and that this nutrient could ease spasm and pain.
More importantly, magnesium can prevent sudden death. Regular beating of the heart is controlled by an extremely complex electrical mechanism. Low magnesium levels toss a monkey wrench into this process, which can cause an abnormal rhythm called ventricular fibrillation. Death often results.
Magnesium also helps to prevent sudden death in another way. Adequate amounts of magnesium decrease the risk that blood platelets will stick together and form a fatal blood clot. This is especially important for those with risk factors for heart attack, such as obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis and hypertension. The lack of magnesium helps explain why 50 percent of people who die of a heart attack have normal blood cholesterol.
Now researchers have discovered that magnesium assists in the fight against one of this nation's biggest killers—diabetes. Today 95 percent of diabetes is due to obesity. The exhausted pancreas fails to produce sufficient amounts of insulin to control the amount of sugar (glucose) in the blood. To make matters worse for obese patients, "insulin resistance" develops. Then insulin becomes less effective in clearing the blood of glucose.
Dr. Jerry Nadler, Chief of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of Virginia, reports that a low dietary intake of magnesium can also encourage insulin resistance.
In his study, Nadler placed patients on a magnesium deficient diet for a mere three weeks. This showed that their cells not only became deficient in magnesium, but also that insulin became less capable of transporting glucose from the blood into cells.
Dr. Nadler's message was quite clear: "You can cause insulin resistance in people who do not have diabetes. Just deprive them of magnesium."
Another huge study has demonstrated the importance of magnesium. Since 1976 Harvard University has followed the health of 85,000 nurses; since 1986, it has tracked the health of another 43,000 men. Both studies concluded that that there was a significant relationship between magnesium intake and the risk of developing diabetes.
For instance, in the Nurses Health Study, researchers found that women consuming 220 milligrams (mg) of magnesium were one-third more likely to develop diabetes during the next six years than those consuming 340 mg of magnesium daily. The message? The greater the intake of magnesium the less likelihood of developing diabetes.
Dr. Lawrence Resnick, Professor of Medicine and Director of Hypertension at Wayne State University, studied the blood pressure of patients who were both diabetic and non-diabetic. He found that all patients with hypertension, whether diabetic or non-diabetic, had lower magnesium levels than people with normal blood pressure.
Resnick says he has treated patients who were hypertensive in spite of taking one or two medications to treat the disease. By adding magnesium their pressure returned to normal.
Are you getting 350 milligrams (mg) of magnesium a day? A few good sources are a cup of the following cooked vegetables: Swiss chard 150 mg; boiled spinach 156 mg; summer squash 43 mg; collards 32 mg; turnip greens 31 mg; mustard greens 21 mg; and broccoli 39 mg. Four ounces of baked or broiled halibut contains 121 mg of magnesium; four ounces of baked salmon has 138 mg. Four ounces of cooked tempeh has 87 mg and a cup of brown rice has 83 mg.
Reference: The World's Healthiest Foods http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=75
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