Natural Hacks to Improve Sleep | Podcast #303
Everyone experiences occasional sleeping problems, so how can you tell whether your difficulty is just a minor, passing annoyance or a sign of a more serious sleep disorder or underlying medical condition?
As humans transition from the waking state to drowsiness and into sleep, parasympathetic vagal tone (responsible for downshifting) increases, and sympathetic tone (the go, go, go!) decreases. Many of us experience trouble sleeping at one time or another. Usually, it’s due to stress, travel, illness, or other temporary interruptions to your normal routine. But if sleep problems are a regular occurrence and interfere with your daily life, you may be suffering from a sleep disorder. Here are Dr. J and Evan taking us to another perspective of ways to help better our sleeping patterns.
Since electronics and the bulbs that we have to use artificial lights, some suggestions are the use of blue lights and dimmer lights. It helps lessen or prevent too much cortisol (steroid hormones formed in the adrenal glands) and assist our melatonin is kicking in and put as to sleep. Intake of magnesium, holy basil, and ashwagandha are also useful for bringing the body to a lower gear as well as regular exercise to keep our body in good shape. Watch the full podcast to know more ways to manage your sleep!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
2:31 Blue lights, Dimmer lights
09:15 Sleep Mechanism
18:04 Gut Inflammation
25:05 Sleeping Drugs
27:49 Supplements
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand, Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing well. I’ve got an article here. We’re gonna start the show off. This is all about sleep today, issues that affect sleep. How do we mitigate the effect of stress on sleep and gut and all of it. But first, Pepsi, good old Pepsi Co. They’re launching its newest beverage, the de stressing and relaxation promoting drift. Well, this is just all about, what’s my point of this, that becoming healthier is becoming mainstream. So anyway, they’ve created a sugar free non carbonated water flavored with a hint of blackberry and lavender with 200 milligrams of L theanine, which you and I’ve talked about for years and years and years and years and years, DNA being an amino acid that helps to increase GABA comes from green tea. But you can also take it in supplement form. Here’s the thing I don’t like about this thing, though. Number one, it’s seven and a half ounces, I don’t really want to drink seven and a half ounces right before I go to sleep, if I’m going to take theming, I would much rather just take a capsule of 200 to 400 milligrams at the end and go to sleep. And then the second thing is there’s they’re wanting to sell this thing for $18 for a 10 pack that’s $1 at a dose basically, versus you and I if we’re gonna get a professional grade theanine, we’re probably getting what maybe 100 or 200 capsules for 20 bucks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s definitely a little bit more on the expensive side, kind of per dose, but you’re definitely paying confer convenience. So like I’m all about if a company can create a product like this without the artificial sweeteners, dyes and colors, and it’s using a clean water, you know, reverse osmosis kind of water source, and it has some of these nutrients in there. And it makes it convenient, because it really comes down to can people do it right? If you don’t do it, if you don’t apply it, you don’t get the benefit. So that’s a really good first step in the right direction. I mean, I’ll still take the supplements, you know, from a raw material standpoint, like you mentioned, but if we can get some non healthy minded people to jump on board that train, that’s great.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah, I mean, imagine if we could get people to switch over from, I don’t know, doing a nightly beer. You know, let’s say they do beer at night. But instead, they could just do this, you know, themed drink, that’d be a hell of a lot better for their gut and their brain. And you know, theanine has benefits for the brain to it’s not just the sleep, they’re kind of promoting it as a relaxation drink. But I take theanine daily, and it definitely helps to buffer stress. It’s just something that it’s not like a sedative. I mean, it’s not a chill pill. It’s not like a passionflower would do for your sleep. But it, it definitely just kind of settles the mind a little bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I agree. I mean, my nightly routine is typically some magnesium and some vitamin C. And then if I if I’m going to do any alcohol or any like cheating, kind of things, food wise, I’m going to be doing some load of iron ore and acetylcysteine and maybe some charcoal as well. And then if you have any issues ping before bed, just try to drink that an hour or two before bed. And that kind of sets in. And then you know, one of the nice thing people are doing today, a lot of the glasses have a blue light filter. So I have I upgraded my glasses that I typically use when I watch TV to a blue light filter. So nice blue light, really nice. And then, of course, one easy investment we all can make is just get dimmer switches on all your main lights that you’re going to have on at nighttime. Just kind of get those dimmers down 80% or so that’s going to help a ton. If you were reading glass or a glass for reading or TV, get a blue light filter in there, or just get like one of those nice blue light glasses that you can put over on anyway without a prescription on there. And that’s very helpful to kind of get your body in that parasympathetic state that we talked about so much.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I use Iris you can check it out, get Iris if you just search that you’ll find it. Iris tech is a company who their competitor to flux it’s better because it does have some supposedly has some anti flicker built in so it can help reduce the flicker rate of your screen. So smartphones, Windows computers, Macs, you can use Iris, I’ll leave it running 24 seven I have it on right now. So what I’m looking at Justin on the screen here, he’s a nice tan golden color to me, which looks good and it definitely reduces eye strain my eyes at the end of the day. You know, we’re looking at labs all day. So you know what we do is hard on the eyes and my eyes would just be exhausted. But once I run it at a more warm color, I definitely have less fatigue at the end of the day mentally.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’ll put the link to some of the things that I do. I use the viewsonic monitors that have a low flicker and low blue light naturally in there. And you can still run an iris in the background as well but I highly recommend I noticed my prescription. The last year two is actually gotten better. It’s actually improved my stigmatism which is the shape of the eyes also shifted as well. And I talked about it with my optometrist and he said you know it’s possible that just you doing the blue light at night and you shifting over the monitors last year or two could have helped with that so I mean outside of nutrition being stable lutein all of the vitamin A precursors, I think shifting over the monitors if you’re someone that’s on a computer all day, invest in really good blue light protecting technology and or good blue light monitor. Yeah, well blue light, low flicker very important.
Evan Brand: That’s good advice. Yeah. So nighttime we talked about that a little bit. You mentioned dimmer switches, blue light glasses, I’m using just salt lamps at night we have probably six or seven salt lamps. We have some that are just salt lamp night lights that are plugged into the bathrooms. That’s pretty convenient. Brush your teeth with just a salt lamp, it’s just a nice, pretty warm glow. I haven’t actually used a color, you know, like a color device to check if there’s blue light coming off of it, but it’s a pretty darn warm color. And it’s a little like couple watt incandescent bulb incandescence are going to have less blue in them naturally. So we like to use a lot of the Edison bulbs, a lot of the Edison bulbs now I’ve turned into LEDs though, they’ll look like Edison shape with the filament inside, but it’s led, which is so annoying. So make sure you’re actually getting the true Edison bulb, I use a company called Hudson, Hudson lighting, they make great Edison bulbs, and they’re going to be around 2700 Kelvin, which is a really nice amber color. When you get up to the 456 thousand Kelvin. Those are like your fancy car, ah ID headlights that are going to be really really blue kind of whitish, bluish color. That’s not what you want at nighttime. It’s amazing. You know, I’m rarely out at night. But if we’re out on the road, we’ll drive past someone’s home. And we’ll just see, like science lab lights on at nine o’clock at night. It’s like, No, those people aren’t sleeping good tonight. Some people will argue with me like even my grandparents, I tried to get them off of the TV in the evening or to wear blue blockers. And they’ll say, Oh, I sleep fine. And it’s like, Yeah, but what’s the quality of sleep? You’re saying you’re waking up three to four times a night to go pee. You’re not well rested in the morning when you wake up. So yeah, you may say, quote, you sleep fine. But what’s the quality? What’s your energy level? Like? What’s, you know, are you crashing out by 11am? Because that would tell me your sleep is not so good after all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yeah, I 100% agree. So I think it’s a good investment where if you wear glasses or contacts, look at getting a night per night glasses to have the blue light filter in there. And some brands don’t have a good blue light filter. So you know, you can get a blue light where it tests the actual wavelength going through. I’ve seen some of these glasses really only filter out the violet, which is interesting. So they’re kind of having a marketing ploy on it. So you’d want to go look at some of the reviews online, make sure you find a review where someone actually test those glasses, and sees if the blue light is blocked. But if you can get a significant amount of blue light blocked, you know, even if it’s 50% or so. And you get the dimmers on Well, that’s a good first step for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And people listening may say, you know, any kind of skeptics listening, which most of those weed themselves out, so most people that listen to us love listening to us. But any skeptics may say, Well, why our ancestors, they didn’t have blue light blocking glasses. Yeah, but they didn’t have LED lights, they didn’t have electricity. In general, there was no artificial light at night. So when the sun goes down, and up, and the moon Yeah, when the sun goes down, and the sky is turning red and orange, the sun, the blue light can’t get through, when the sun’s at a low angle, the blue light doesn’t come through as much. And you naturally have a blue light filter, it’s the atmosphere. And so at nighttime, when you have a fire, which is the only source of light you would have had at night, look at a fire. I mean, you may have a tiny bit of blue if you’ve got a really, really hot fire, but it’s nothing. It’s it’s not going to impair melatonin production at all. And that’s the issue here is the artificial light at night is elevating cortisol, which is down regulating melatonin. And of course Melatonin is not just your sleep hormone. It’s very important as an antioxidant too, Melatonin is something that’s been shown in several studies to have some cancer protective benefits.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and I’ll put up I’ll put a couple of links in here for people that are listening. Regarding my favorite monitors, I use the eye care monitors, and I think those have really been super helpful for me. So I’ll put a link down below people can access that. Okay, that’s good. We talked about some of the blue light glasses, there’s the the Swanwick glasses, there’s the true dark glasses. Those are some good ones off the bat, you can jump on Amazon and look for some ones that have good reviews on there. I think those are great. There’s some blue light glasses that that go over glasses. So if you wear glasses, you can look for a pair of blue lights that go over that that’s on top of that. But if you want extra protection, you’ll have that there. That’s a good kind of first step in the right direction. Why don’t we talk about mechanism? I think this is important. So we talked about like the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. This is important. So the sympathetic nervous system is kind of controlled by the adrenal gland. So the sympathetic is the gas. It’s the Go, go, go go go Stress, Stress, Stress, Stress, Stress, and the adrenals kind of are the gateway between the nervous system and the sympathetic response because of the cortisol response and the adrenaline response. So typically, when there’s some kind of a stress, adrenaline is the first thing that comes to the table. And then cortisol comes a little bit later. So think of think of adrenaline as the primary it Prime’s the pump and then once the engine is going, now cortisol is flooding the zone afterwards. And so when you have a lot of these stress hormones going, you’re number one going to be shunting blood flow to the arms and the legs to fight and flee, you’re going to be making less enzymes and acids and digestive juices so your digestion won’t be as good. So if you’re eating healthy, you’re more likely to get bloated and gassy and have indigestion. And you’re less likely to absorb a lot of those nutrients. So if you’re eating lots of good amino acids and minerals, you won’t be able to ionize them and absorb them properly. And so we want to do natural strategies that decrease that sympathetic nervous system response which is going to help modulate adrenaline and modulate cortisol. And part of how we do that is we have to stimulate the parasympathetic side. So for instance, this new Pepsi product you mentioned, we don’t I’m not supporting Pepsi, but I’m supporting the mechanism. l theanine is a good precursor that Evan mentioned to Gabba, gamma amino butyric acid, and that’s a inhibitory neurotransmitter, think of it as the brake, it’s the stop the slow down. So think of the sympathetic nervous system response is it’s the shifting gear going from first, a second, third to fourth, fourth to fifth, it’s going faster, faster, faster, the parasympathetics. And the inhibitory response is down shifting, it’s going from 5 to 442-332-2221. And then park in that car. And so things like GABA can be helpful. passionflower, magnesium are excellent things. There’s different adaptogens that we use, like holy basil and ashwagandha that really helped decrease and help down shift that stressed out engine and bring it to a lower gear where you can slow down and relax.
Evan Brand: Oh, speaking of ashwagandha This is funny to man, a lot of the things we’ve been talking about for a very long time are becoming more mainstream. I never have the radio on because I’ve got streaming radio in the car, so we never have the real radio on. And so the this advertisement comes on, and it’s you know, the typical radio announcer voice, it’s this lady. And it’s this. It’s just talking about sleep and stress and all that and the lady’s like introducing ashwagandha gummies, an Ayurvedic herb that’s been used for thousands of years, it can really help you relax, and I thought, wow, a radio commercial for ashwagandha. This is hilarious times are changing. So it’s funny. This is something that you and I use all the time clinically And personally, and it really does help you can take ashwagandha during the day to help blunt stress but you can also use it in the evening, take a dose before bed, Stephen buehner, the herbalist I really love because of his books online, he talks about ashwagandha being very, very helpful in terms of calming down like brain inflammation, which can impair sleep associated with Lyme, so people that have that sleep, or if you’re waking up at two or 3am and you’re kind of bolting awake or having nightmares. You know, ashwagandha may be something to help. I’m a big fan of Magnolia Magnolia is a bark that can be very helpful. You and I’ve talked about relora. In the past relora is actually a blend of two different plants. I believe it’s two barks that are combined to create the patented relora. That’s something clinically shown to help modulate cortisol at night. You mentioned the passion flower, I like to mix passion flower with motherwort, especially if it’s a monkey brain situation. motherwort can really help calm the the racing thoughts, the racing mind motherwort, something that Rosemary gladstar and many other famous herbalist, they recommend keeping it in your first aid kit or in the car. So if you get in a car wreck, or if you have a traumatic experience, you could take a dose and mother would never really settle you down, you know, with all the shutdowns and a lot of our clients that are running small businesses and other things that I’ve had massive amount of reports of stress issues happening over the last six months. And so I really think the time that you and I are putting this out is important. It’s always important, but it’s more important now. Because once your sleep quality goes out the window, what happens then well, you have a shorter fuse, you are going to be more irritable, you could be more anxious, you could be more depressed, you may have cognitive issues. So you may not be making good decisions as a parent or as a boss or as a CEO. So I mean, this affects every aspect of your life, you really cannot ignore this and just go pound the coffee. First thing in the morning, you can do the coffee, but you’ve got to be making sure you’re doing all the nighttime strategies as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% I love it really, really good points off the bat. Also a couple other strategies I want to highlight is exercising too close to bed. So exercise, it’s a stress it does activate the sympathetic nervous system because that’s how you get blood flow to the arms and legs into the extremities. And then of course cortisol and immobilize glucose in the muscles and such. And so that is part of the stress response. So you got to make sure the more your parasympathetics are stressed right your rest digest part of the nervous system. The less strenuous the less sympathetic stimulating exercise you should be doing. And of course, you need to allow more buffer time to transition back into the parasympathetics at bedtime. So if you’re working out like at six or seven o’clock and then you’re trying to wind down At nine or 10, asleep by 11, that may not be enough time. So the more stressed you are you want to look at doing exercise first thing in the morning, and you always want to answer my three questions appropriately. Alright, you want to answer positively to these three things? Number one is do I feel better after the workout than when I started? Number two is, can I emotionally repeat the workout? Do you feel so depleted afterwards? Where you just you couldn’t emotionally do it, like, you may like have that high where you’re like, Oh, I feel good. And then like, you catch your breath, like 10 minutes, and you’re like, Oh, thank God, that’s done. You want to feel that sense of like, no, I could do that. Again, like I could do it again, you want to feel that kind of a sense of accomplishment. And then number three is you want to feel not excessively sore or beaten up afterwards. So that next morning, you wake up, you know, barring the fact that you slept good and all that’s okay, you didn’t drink alcohol, you want to feel not excessively sore with the exception. If you throw in maybe a new exercise you haven’t done in a while maybe some lunges or a deadlift, outside of something that’s a full body movement, you shouldn’t feel overly beaten up.
Evan Brand: Yep, good points, good points. And it’s possible, you could use some of those herbs to try to calm down that response. Right? If your work schedule just doesn’t allow it and you have to do a six 7pm workout. Like you said, maybe it’s not too intense. So you still could settle down, but maybe you, you do take a dose of some type of an adrenal cocktail, after the after the workout, I think that could be really smart. And then let’s go into a couple other mechanisms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just to highlight one thing before we move on topic. So if that’s the case, that’s the only window there’s three major levers with exercise frequency, intensity, duration. So frequency is how often you work out. Is it every day, you taking a day off in between Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday kind of thing. And then of course, that’s frequency intensity is how hard Are you working out as well as the rest in between? So like, a compound lift like a a deadlift or a front squat, right? Isn’t it be a lot harder than like a bicep curl or military press right, the more you activate, the more joints you activate, the harder it is. So you could shift away from multi joint stuff. Or you do multi joint stuff with less weight, okay, and provide more rest time between sets. And then duration, of course, is going to be how long the workout is right? Instead of a 45 minute workout, you go to a 30 or a 20. So you just keep on frequency, adjust the frequency, how many days intensity kind of workout lifts, you’re doing the weight as well as the rest time. And then the duration is the overall length of the workout cutting that down so you can move the lever on those. And I always recommend the easiest first thing is allowing a day off in between to recover. And then keeping the workout shorter, right, Charles poliquin did research on this finding that the cortisol response starts to significantly elevate once you go longer than 45 minutes. So keeping the workout under 45 minutes. And if you’re really stressed probably 20 to 30. And just rely on more circuit type of workouts to get the exercise done. So do three movements in a row, upper lower upper or front back front, however you want to pair it. That way you can get a lot more volume and and exercise accomplished in a shorter amount of time.
Evan Brand: Yep, that’s good advice. I wanted to talk about the gut. And we could probably mention blood sugar, too. I know that when I had gut infections, my sleep was terrible. Now the mechanism of it. I mean, that’s debatable, you and I could try to tease this apart together. I think ultimately the answer is getting rid of gut infections is going to improve sleep in many ways. But I think one of the mechanisms is probably some of the gut bugs possibly affecting blood sugar because the gut bugs are eating and they’re feeding on your nutrition. So I definitely had more hypoglycemia issues. And hypoglycemia, if that blood sugar’s crashing, blood sugar gets too low, you and I’ve talked about this, the adrenals have to pinch hit, basically, and try to help out to get that glucose regulated. So if blood sugar is crashing, maybe you’re not eating enough with meals, maybe you didn’t have enough fat or protein with dinner, or maybe you ate too early. If you ate at five and you’re going to bed at 10 that’s already five hours and the blood sugar may be dropping to a level that’s too low. And then if you compound that with having gut infections, then you really could get into trouble.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and like you mentioned earlier, the stress and the inflammation from a gut infection. We see it when we do adrenal cortisol rhythm testing, is we’ll start to see a premature elevation of cortisol in the morning. Now what does that mean for you? Well, we have this natural cortisol rather than people watching on video, I’m going to do some demonstrations. But cortisol comes up in the morning, and then it comes up in the morning but it really increases that first hour of waking isn’t a double from when you woke up to one hour later. So it starts to here’s waking, here’s one hour later and then it gently curves, here’s bedtime and then as you sleep it’s kind of flat and then gently starts to go up like this. So when you have gut infections and inflammation in the gut, and a lot of most infections are on an opposite sleep and wake cycle then we are so the more active they are means more inflammation. More inflammation means Is what more of a cortisol response so that cortisol prematurely starts to rise in the middle of the night. And then that can start to take you out of deeper sleep and cause you to wake up earlier. So, by addressing gut infections, you’re naturally supporting that healthy circadian rhythm. And of course, if we can support natural and influence, natural anti inflammatory support, that also takes stress off the adrenals because the adrenals are one of your number one, anti inflammatory mechanisms, right? cortisol, aka cortisone, and then pharmaceutical, prednisone, are all anti inflammatory mediums that conventional medicine uses for topical skin or asthma inhaled are injections in the joints, right for inflammation. So we have our natural anti inflammatories that we want to work on supporting and utilizing.
Evan Brand: Yep, and we’ve mentioned this, but just to repeat, so the cortisol is downregulating melatonin, that’s the mechanism. So people that just go take melatonin, that may help but I would argue that it’s not necessarily root cause. And so that’s why we’re going to be running these panels to look at the hormones, we’re going to be running testing to look at the stool, we’re going to be running panels to look at the urine and try to confirm what’s going on. Just to be clear for people listening or that are not aware, we’re clinicians, we deal with this stuff every day all day clinically. And so we have thousands and thousands of, you know, case studies that we can report back from and tell you what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. If you go to your conventional doctor in you talk about sleep issues, just to quickly compare and contrast. It’s going to be something like possibly a Lorazepam if it’s an anxiety based sleep issue,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -like a benzodiazepine that works on gaba.
Evan Brand: Yeah, exactly. So you’re going to get a benzo which are highly, highly addictive and habit forming, or possibly, you’re going to get something like an Ambien, which in terms of pharmaceuticals, I will tell you some of the hardest drugs for people to get off of are the benzos and the Ambien, which I don’t even know what category Ambien is in, but man, people really, really struggle to get off of that one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so you’re going to have Ambien, right, you’re going to have Lunesta, you’re going to have your benzos They may even be using some SSRIs to increase serotonin, which then increases melatonin. There’s, I think it’s rozerem rwhich is a gaba kind of in that gaba benzo family. So rozerem. You mentioned I mentioned Lunesta, and Ambien, what else is there, I think there’s trazadone is another one that I think is used sometimes for sleep as well. So those are a lot of the common sleep medications. And they don’t really address a root cause. And that’s the problem. And a lot of the sleep medications, like we mentioned, the Ambien or Lunesta, they don’t allow deeper restoration of sleep. So you kind of have like your four phases of sleep, right phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. And then you go from phase four to three, two ones. This is like once, one cycle is 1234, phase 24321. And you don’t really get to go into these deeper three and four levels, where REM sleep and deep restoration happen. So we want to avoid medications that prevent us from getting into deep sleep. So that being said, we want to make sure we sleep. So we want to utilize every natural mechanism possible. So with sleep 10pm to 2am is that deep physical restoration, where you have good physiological repair, and that’s where growth hormone increases. That’s where we repair structural tissue, and such and bones and joints and ligaments, Hair, Skin nails. And then we have the psychological emotional repair, typically between two and 6am, where a lot of our neurotransmitters and hormones kind of turnover that help us with mood and energy and emotional stuff. And supposedly, a lot of our dreams are us processing a lot of our emotional stress throughout the day, right? So we want to make sure we get to sleep on time, that’s really important, right, the hours before midnight are really important. And we want to make sure that we’re getting the good time of sleep, we want to make sure that we’re decreasing light exposure, which it takes away from our melatonin. And then we want to make sure that we are just having good nutrients on board. So when we’re sleeping, we have the raw materials, amino acids and fatty acids to provide the building blocks to assist in the repair process. Yeah, vegetarians, vegans, they have a lot of sleep issues historically. And I would argue it’s due to the lack of these amino acids that you need to really help fuel some of these neurotransmitters. So back to the I want to just hit that because you hit something really important. And then when vegetarians and vegans get a lot of the amino acids, they’re not really bioavailable. So if you go look at the bioavailability of amino acids in vegetarian vegan foods, they’re not very bioavailable. Now, vegans and vegetarians can get by with free form amino acid supplementation, a high quality pea protein, maybe a rice protein, so they can get by with amino acid supplements, but it’s very hard from a raw standpoint, meaning you’re just relying on Whole Foods to get those amino acids and when you typically do combine them appropriately. You get a ton of carbohydrates. So if you’re more insulin sent or resistant or more Carbohydrates sensitive if you don’t do well with carbs that could cause more blood sugar issues and more sleep issues with that.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep. So back to the drug. The drug name is zolpidem sold under the brand name Ambien anyway, we talked about alcohol A while ago, we talked about like, some of the date rape drugs and some of the bad stuff that people do. Apparently this GOP. Yeah, apparently this drug actually was used or has been used as a date rape drug as well. And so it is a non benzodiazepine. But guess what, it’s a GABA receptor agonist. So it works by increasing GABA binds to the same location as benzos. So tricky little varmints. It’s a non bidco but it binds to the same GABA receptor as a benzo. So to me, it’s a frickin benzo, you know, not not technically but in terms of the addiction potential and the withdrawal and the adverse effects and the dependency it’s it’s no good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So yeah, same thing with Lunesta here, I’m looking at some of the the mechanism of action on the nessa same kind of thing. It has a coupling interaction with the GABA receptor sites. So kind of it’s coupled with like a benzo. So it’s kind of very similar to a benzo and then the rozerem. It works on some of the m two receptor sites, I think some of the same receptor sites that work on melatonin, so I’m pretty sure it’s like a melatonin kind of agonist, if you will. And yeah, right here. rosarium is a highly selective melatonin receptor site type one type two agonist. So what does that mean? agonist means it helps the melatonin in those synapses to be it increases it stimulates it with a little bit and kind of gets a little bit more into gear, if you will. Now, my whole I’d much rather be using melatonin as a whole as I rather just provide more of that building block or more of that raw material to help right and gets more natural than just being an agonist and upregulating the receptor sites to it. And of course, even before that, I’d much rather use a lot more of the amino acids like five HTP, and B six, and providing more of the building blocks. So we don’t disrupt too many feedback loops, or the herbs just to help regulate the adrenals. And then you stay away from this crap completely. But why is how bad it is. So we kind of always start low and then work our way up. So there’s always kind of like a, an algorithm and how we are applying things and even natural we want to do the least invasive to the most invasive if we need it. But of course sleeps is such a huge tenant in our body’s ability to heal.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And why is this not on the nightly news? Well, I mean, Big Pharma is highly involved in the media companies, right? So they’re, they’re not interested in melatonin, which is what maybe a quarter or maybe 50 cents per dose, they want pharmaceuticals, because there’s a lot more money involved. And you can’t patent it, you and I’ve discussed this patent issue many, many times. So they can’t patent anything.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When you just look at the mechanisms, right, like, look what they’re doing, like with rozerem, it’s just it’s an agonist on the receptor site. So what they do is they kind of skate the surf, they kind of tiptoe around it and try to figure out, Okay, this is this mechanism is important, how can we monkey around with the receptor site and adjust that and make it better or over, you know, stimulate the receptor site to be more sensitive. So they’re kind of looking at what the the actual mechanism is, and then they try to just skirt the the periphery on it to make it work better, right, which a lot of times have side effects, because that’s what typical drugs, do they have side effects? That’s right. That’s right. So I mentioned the I got into the nutrition piece a little bit talked about kind of the the fat and then just one thing, sorry. And they have to do that. So people thinking, well, I don’t understand like, what’s the point of that? Well, you can’t patent a natural compounds. So when you have things like melatonin or natural amino acid compounds, you can’t patent it. So they know these mechanisms are already helpful. So you hire a whole bunch of chemists to go in there and biochem people to go in there and figure out okay, this is the mechanism, what can we do to create a synthetic compound, maybe we just create like an isomer, or something that looks very similar, that buffers or adjusts receptor sites, but is synthetic enough where they can patent it. So that’s why they they can’t patent natural things. That’s why they they look at already known mechanisms, and they try to adjust it and author it just a little bit. So they can patent it. And it never works as good as the natural stuff. And never will because of the fact that you can’t. You can’t improve upon Mother Nature. You just can’t.
Evan Brand: Yep, I know. I love the herbs. I love them. So I hit on the whole, like, not enough fat and protein piece. And I see that a lot. Like I mentioned the vegetarian vegans. I mean, typically these people are depressed, they’re anxious and their sleep is crap. Now, the one happy vegan listening, good for you, but talk to me in five years, and I’ll be curious to see what happens. But back to the blood sugar piece. So there are some things that you may need to do to help with the blood sugar. That could just be something as simple as eating like a little fat bomb before you go to bed. I mean, it could be like a little piece of some coconut oil or some coconut butter or maybe grass fed butter or maybe I don’t know a couple macadamias are pecans are something that can help just kind of throw a little bit of fat on the fire before you go to bed. Now it can do a huge, huge thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Some also do better do really good with a little bit of fat and maybe a tiny bit of carbohydrate, whether it’s a handful of berries, or a little bit of like, honey. And sometimes that can be helpful because the little bit of glucose can help those with the amino acids cross the blood brain barrier. So if you go so low carb at night, sometimes those amino acids can’t cross. And so I kind of go both ways. Try with less sugar. And if you need a little bit of sugar with a little bit of fat and protein, and you can always add a little bit of sugar just to help the amino acids cross that blood brain barrier.
Evan Brand: That’s smart. You know, I’ve tried that like doing a chamomile tea, which is another easy good strategy. I’ve tried chamomile just by itself, and then chamomile with honey. And I will report with a little bit of honey, delicious, but it does help a little bit with the sleep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and just kind of just try it on both sides. Because too much sugar can also create blood sugar swings and cortisol spikes when your blood sugar drops. And that can cause problems. So it’s all about finding that right balance. So I always recommend start with none. And then add just a little bit in incrementally.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and we through a lot of people. So where do you start with all this? Well, I think the blue light, the lifestyle stuff, not exercising too close or too intensely before bed. I think all those things are great, getting your bowels regulated, making sure that you’re testing yourself for gut infections and getting those things addressed. And then reaching out to a practitioner like Dr. Justin or myself, because we deal with this stuff. Personally, we deal with this stuff clinically. We’ve done it countless times. And it’s incredibly rewarding what we do, because we’re showing you on paper, where is this issue coming from? You know, some people blame it on their genetics, like oh, my mother, she never slept good. Or my dad Oh, he had terrible insomnia. He’s on antidepressants that are okay, genetics are not your destiny. So I don’t care how your parents sleep or not sleep. That is not your destiny. There are root causes that we can identify. And we can address these we can get them on paper, and we can retest and show you look, your basics is back up great because you needed that because you were also low in serotonin, which you needed more of because both of those ingredients, boom, make melatonin, you didn’t have that recipe. And now on paper, you’re reporting improve sleep, hooray. But look at the labs, we can confirm you fix the mechanism of these neurotransmitter issues and these nutrient deficiencies. And that is just why we do what we do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. The other thing I would say is going to be female hormones. female hormones play a big role, especially progesterone, because progesterone is a natural gaba chloride channel opener opens those gaba chloride helps flood gaba into the zone, which helps you relax. So female hormone issues, especially for menopausal women can be a big ones, we got to look at estrogen, estradiol and progesterone that’s really important. I would also they’re also kind of like their modulating supplements that can be helpful that may not plug into the root cause. So when I’m with the patient, I’m working them up. I’m trying to figure out what’s the underlying mechanism? Or is it multiple systems meaning is there poor digestion, indigestion, poor gut issues, and then autoimmune stuff with adrenals and thyroid, and maybe some detoxification issues, we try to focus on each of those systems, work on the diet like nutrient dense anti inflammatory, low toxin, get digestion, good, stabilize blood sugar, flood nutrients into the zone. And then we’re going to run organic acids and we’re going to see neurotransmitters, we’re going to see be six amino acid status, we’re going to look at serotonin and dopamine, adrenaline, that can help on the amino acid side. We mentioned things like melatonin, that’s always a later stage always want to do the amino acids first. But then there are things like California Poppy, or like you mentioned lemon balm, or Valerian or CBD as other like natural compounds that are out there that can be helpful, that may help either kind of attenuate that sympathetic response, and may help just kind of upregulate GABA a little bit. It may just have a very kind of sedative kind of relaxing effect, usually working as a natural kind of benzo right and flooding with gaba. So if you plug one of these natural things in, don’t just think that that’s it. Always try to trace it back to the mechanism that drove the issue. To begin with. You really always want to think root cause and then expand out. And if you find a supplement that helps try to always trace it back to what the original mechanism was. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Yeah, does man you just like opened up a whole new can of words here. So I’m going to take a few minutes on packet. You mentioned thyroid you mentioned autoimmunity. So hashimotos it’s really common to have sleep issues, because if that immune system is attacking the thyroid, all of a sudden you’ve got some of this hormone leaking out into the bloodstream. So some of the things that you and I will do, yes, we can use the herbs. But one could argue that even the herbs are not root cause because if the antibodies are attacking the thyroid, yeah, it’s great to go and use mother work to calm the heart down. But the tachycardia that’s causing the insomnia is coming from the thyroid and this person is eating gluten. They’re doing sandwiches for lunch, so We got to work backwards on getting those thyroid antibodies down. So that- not so. So that’s my comment there. But then you opened up a whole nother can of worms, make sure I circle back to mold and Lyme and co infections real quick, but go ahead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So just to highlight one thing, when we’re working with patients, we’re always thinking that way, we’re always thinking, Okay, we’re going to try this, try this, we’re going to connect it back to the mechanism of action. But I know a lot of people are going to be listening, they’ll be like, Oh, I’m going to try this supplement or that and they’re writing their list down and what things are going to try, that’s cool. But just you know, if you don’t have that clinicians mindset, you may ignore the root cause. So if you have an issue where you’re trying a couple of things, and you’re not quite getting the results, or it’s a steady issue that’s continuing to happen over the years, make sure you reach out to a good functional medicine doctor, like myself, or Evan, the we can kind of work you through that. But at least try a couple things on your own. But don’t ignore that root issue and get a good functional medicine person to help you. If that issue is more chronic.
Evan Brand: Yeah, because it’s not a deficiency of passionflower. Right, right. So it’s not just like we joke on drugs, it’s not a deficiency of those either. Now, let’s just briefly open up a whole nother can of worms here Lyme mold, co infections, mast cell issues, these things very, very, very much affected my sleep. And so Lyme really affects sleep. So make sure if you have a history of tick bites, or if your partner has it, because it can be sexually transmitted, that you address it, you either test for it, or you just try to go after it using herbs and see if you have a positive or negative reaction. I can tell you with confidence just using Japanese knotweed, for me improves my sleep quality. What’s the mechanism? Well, Japanese knotweed is anti inflammatory because of the resveratrol, but it does help to kill the spire Riki borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme. So so that’s that, and then mold. Mold really, really affects the nervous system. And it will down regulate melatonin, Dr. Shoemaker. He’s kind of like the main medical doc that’s talked about mold for many years, he discusses all the hormones that get affected, your testosterone can go low, you can have issues with Msh. So then you start to burn easily and you can’t get a good tan, and you can get your antidiuretic hormone is messed up. So now you’re up in the middle of the night to go pee three, four or five times a night and people report Well, I sleep fine. But if I didn’t have to pee, I’d sleep better. It’s like, well, what’s the mechanism of the peeing? Is it a prostate? Is it a mold thing? Is it a toxin thing? metals? Yeah, adrenals heavy metal dosterone.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You can’t hold on to your fluids. So you’re dumping your minerals all the time.
Evan Brand: So if you’re supporting adrenals, and aldosterone can come back up, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s Yeah, it’s very possible. So supporting the minerals will help because you’re just not going to have the loss of the minerals. So the minerals are really important for your cells to work well, sodium, potassium, and for your electrolytes and for your heart. So those are really important things to kind of keep in, keep in mind, for sure.
Evan Brand: Babesia bartonella, co infections, any can any kind of CO infection, those can affect it. Chronic pain, of course can affect sleep. So if you’ve got some type of an issue like mycoplasma that’s affecting the joints, or maybe you’ve got prepatellar, some kind of bacterial infection attacking the joints that causes pain that causes sleep issues, this is why you need help. You can’t just go by passionflower and assume all your problems are going to go away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, a couple other questions are coming in here live on the chat as we go. Yes, low thyroid hormone can cause sleep issues I’ve seen reports of and some patients who have low thyroid will even add one of their thyroid doses a little bit before bed. And that can help as well. So it just depends if you actually have low tea, you want to take it during the day, but then also sometimes at night, it can be helpful, sometimes just supporting it during the day is enough to spill into night and help asleep. And yeah, things like pregnenolone right before bed can be a little bit stimulating. So anyone that has sleep issues will try to do their last dose of pregnenolone like around 3pm da ga less stimulating, but if you’re on the fence, you know, always do it really early, just to rule that variable out and see if that’s a problem or not.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, progesterone, I experimented with a little bit of that before bed. Wow. You can tell it hits the GABA receptors. I mean, well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Progesterone is great, like a lot of my female patients that need it will do that, you know, an hour or two before bed, and it really opens up the gaba. And if we need we can throw in some extra l theanine along with it, or some gaba itself. And that can be very helpful and really promote a lot of relaxation.
Evan Brand: Yep. So the toxic thing is just the toxin piece. You know, I think it’s something that we didn’t get into much till the end here. But it is something that would be in our standard workup where we’d be looking for these these kind of hidden, more nuanced root causes. And, you know, just to restate, you could go from referral to referral in the conventional medical world, and you’re never even going to get close to the conversations or information that we just provided you today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, I mean, it’s hard. The conventional medical model is a three to five minute visit. They’re just trying to collect just enough symptoms to figure out what drug they’re going to prescribe whether it’s a rosarium or a benzo or an SSRI or what whatever other kind of mini me new drugs that are out there many meaning it’s very similar to an old drug, just the new name, new Patent so they can re up that seven year patents. And that’s kind of how a lot of conventional medicine works. They’re not really diving in deep, they’re not even really thinking about deep root cause mechanisms. They’re just trying to get you to sleep. And it’s sad, but it’s system that we’re in. And I’m glad that we have information like this. It’s out there at your fingertips so you guys can be more informed and take some action to get to the root cause.
Evan Brand: Yeah absolutely. If you need any help please reach out to Justin or myself, his website is JustinHealth.com, my website, EvanBrand.com. And we love that you guys are here with us so more to come.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And put your comments down below. We really appreciate you guys listening, and I want to get some interaction about what you think works for you. I read the comments. So when I get feedback, like oh, this worked or that work, it really helps me because, you know, when you see thousands of patients like myself and Evan have, that’s really how you get good. Like when you start off in this field, you get a really good base of physiology and biochem and nutrition, you apply it with yourself and your family and then patients around you. And then you grow as you get more patients and you get more data points. So it’s very helpful. And then if you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave us a review, we’ll put a link down below where you can click and you can leave us a review on iTunes, we really, really appreciate it.
Evan Brand: Yeah, share this with all your friends and family on sleep drugs, we can’t legally tell them to get off of it, but we’ll show them a different path.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and if you’re on benzos really important, that’s a very, very, very slow taper. So if your doctor decides to take them off fast, be very careful. Sometimes these things have to be tapered over the course of a year. So just be very careful. If you’re on drugs and very dependent. You want to do it responsibly and very slowly with the prescriber as you kind of taper down and as you fix the root underlying issues.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said I mean you’ll listen to this podcast you’d be like well screw those drugs I’m stopping! Bad idea don’t do that same thing with like hypertension medications. I mean, we’ve done podcasts on naturally regulating you know blood pressure and some people, Oh my god, these drugs are terrible. I’m getting off of them. You can you could get rebound hypertension Same thing with the sleep drugs, you know, you can have a lot of issues with the GABA receptor I mean being so saturated with the drug and then you just going cold turkey, these are not cold turkey drugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, my general recommendation is get a good foundation, diet, lifestyle, sleep, movement hydration, get that there. Before you go in and ask that prescribed or start dropping the dose slow. So get the foundation right before you make any changes.
Evan Brand: Yeah I mean look, we want people to be healthy, we want them to be drug-free, if possible. And if that’s our goal ang long term plan, we love it but there’s a time and a place. So just hang in there, i know it sucks, people get so mad. I dont wanna be on this drug! They say that so often but they have to. That’s okay, i’m not judging you, it’s okay if you need it know. Let’s get you healthy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Every now and then I find 1% of people having a hard time getting off of it or just can’t get their sleep right, but I would say 99% people are gonna be able to address significantly and improve their sleep. So stick at it, you have a really high percent, so keep it up and goodluck for everyone listening.
Evan Brand: Yep, absolutely. Well let’s wrap this up. JustinHealth.com for consults around the world, and EvanBrand.com. We look forward to helping you. Take care we’ll talk to you later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have a good one ya’ll. Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-hacks-to-improve-sleep-podcast-303
Nutrition is Science-Backed Medicine
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Nutrient: “a substance that provides nourishment
essential for growth and the maintenance of life.”
You Are What You Eat
Why do people change their diet? While popular answers are to lose weight (fat), or to get in better shape (adding muscle), good nutrition is in fact about so much more than changing your physical appearance. Proper nutrition–diet and supplementation–is a science-backed way to improve your health. “You are what you eat,” and everyday you have the power to decide how the foods you consume will serve you. Let food be thy medicine: heal your gut, balance your hormones, improve your mood, boost your energy, and more.
Nutrition as Medicine
As kids, many of us were told to eat our vegetables–why? ”Because they’re good for you.”
As adults, we are told to eat our vegetables–why? “To shed some weight.”
Neither of these answers demonstrates the true healing nature of what we put in our bodies, so, without further ado, here are some of the most powerful science-backed healing properties of a healthy diet!
Click here for a personalized health plan from a functional medicine doctor!
Physical Appearance
We all know that changing our diet can help us lose weight, but did you know that a healthy diet can improve the appearance of your skin and hair too? B-vitamins, like biotin, have been shown to improve the appearance of skin and nails. Collagen also supports healthy hair, skin, and joints!
Increased Energy
A poor diet lacking in healthy macro and micronutrients–paired with a diet high in sugar, alcohol, and processed foods–can lead to headaches, brain fog, and fatigue. On the other hand, eating grass fed meat, healthy fats, and lots of fresh vegetables will give your body the fuel it needs to function optimally.
The Standard American Diet (“SAD” – a fitting acronym) is full of inflammatory processed foods and refined carbs & sugar which deplete the immune system, increase the rate of cancer, and increase the risk of developing autoimmune disease.
Inflammation is the root cause of most diseases: but a diet rich in anti-inflammatory foods is the best gift you can give yourself to feel and function at your best!
Better Sleep
Poor sleep–whether you’re lacking hours, or your sleep quality is not that good– can increase your risk of diabetes, decrease your immune system, and accelerate aging.
Alcohol and caffeine both impair sleep quality. Caffeine has a half-life of around 6 hours, so ideally you want to have your last cup by 2pm. Alcohol robs you of restorative REM sleep, which in addition to its dehydrating effects, lead to the next day’s dreaded hangover.
Food that positively affect sleep include veggies, grass-fed beef, chia seeds, sweet potato, wild-caught salmon, and those rich in magnesium. On the other hand, simple carbs and sugar negatively affect blood sugar and sleep–especially if consumed in the evening.
Balanced Hormones
Your body *needs* fat! Fat is required for your body to produce various hormones and keep inflammation low. Carbs, especially simple carbs, can actually increase inflammation and disrupt the delicate balance of your hormones.
If you suffer from leaky gut or other gut issues, you may be deficient in gut bacteria. Probiotics, like those from fermented foods–like sauerkraut, kimchi, and kombucha– provide your gut with beneficial bacteria which can help keep your hormones in balance.
Improved Mood
Did you know that dairy, sugar, and gluten are linked to depression? While the Mediterranean diet, rich in saturated fat, fish, and vegetables is associated with both decreased rates of depression *and* a longer lifespan!
Ready to Take Charge?
By now, you should have all the motivation you need to make a change for the healthier. Here are some resources to help you get started:
- The JustInHealth Eating Plan
- How to Eat, What to Eat, and the Healthy Meal Matrix
- Nutrient Support
- If you or your diet is deficient in certain nutrients, supplementing with high quality supplements shouldn’t be overlooked!
- Iron Supreme: Hypothyroidism, anemia, and iron deficiency are all linked. Many women are iron-deficient, which can be remedied by eating red meat and supplementing with a high-quality iron supplement, like Iron Supreme.
- Magnesium Supreme: Magnesium is essential for proper function of over 300 enzymatic reactions and for the performance of many vital physiological functions. A magnesium deficiency can lead to osteoporosis, blood sugar problems, poor sleep, muscle cramps, and more.
- Multi-Nutrient Supreme: Your daily all-in-one for general nutrient support! Vitamins A, B, C, D, E and so much more!
- If you or your diet is deficient in certain nutrients, supplementing with high quality supplements shouldn’t be overlooked!
Questions? Click here if you are ready for help learning how to take your health back into your own hands!
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24939238
Jun S Lai, Sarah Hiles, Alessandra Bisquera, Alexis J Hure, Mark McEvoy, John Attia; A systematic review and meta-analysis of dietary patterns and depression in community-dwelling adults, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2014;99(1):181–197
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532289/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5637834/
Types of Magnesium and Their Benefits | Podcast #236
Magnesium is an essential vitamin that our body needs, especially when we are stressed or if our body needs help in absorbing more nutrients.
In this episode, learn more about the amazing benefits of taking Magnesium supplements, deficiency symptoms, and how it can help in our inner health. Know more about how much Magnesium you need, and the different superfoods that give off this wonderful mineral.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:51 Magnesium Deficiency
4:20 Magnesium Benefits
9:25 Medications and Magnesium
19:58 RDA (Rat Drugs and Assumptions)
23:44 Diets, Magnesium consumption, etc.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Today, we are gonna be chatting about magnesium, types of magnesium benefits, deficiency symptoms and what you can do about it. So, really excited to have today’s talk going on here. Evan, how are we doing today?
Evan Brand: Hey man, I’m doing well. I got inspired to talk about magnesium because last night I put on some magnesium oil that I purchased, you know cause I have a lot of clients today ‘oh I put magnesium oil on my legs and it really helps me sleep’ and I’m like ‘oh really?’ you know how, how was like six sprays of topical magnesium really gonna do that much but I did it and I really slept much better. So is it placebo? Did it truly do that much? I mean, I think, we know the literature shows transdermal magnesium as possible so maybe it was that magnesium.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We do know that there’s some data showing that magnesium can help with cortisol levels at night then it can improve deeper sleep at night, and we also know as a large percent of the population is deficient and we can go into a lot of these things why. So why don’t we just dive in? So off the bat– there’s data showing that 50% of the population is deficient in magnesium. Now, why is that? Couple things we know that the soils are becoming more and more depleted based on just lots of pesticides in the soil and roundup. That’s kind of their base roundups like a mineral key later so it hugs the minerals, pulls them away from the plant, and that’s kind of their mechanism of killing. Now, when you dump a whole bunch in the soil over time, it’s gonna really deplete a lot of those minerals in the soil and if those minerals are hugged or chelated away from the plant, that plant cannot take it up it’s Michael Reiser root system. So then you start to have deficiencies in these minerals in the plants because you know, you know if you can’t access, it could it’s being chelated away by glyphosate or roundup. It can’t go on the plant and we know the minerals get, um, uptake by the root system. And minerals also help with the expression of nutrition in the plant. So for instance with manganese, deficient manganese soil tends to cause a significant deficiencies in vitamin C in the plants as well. So it’s not just the mineral deficiency. That mineral deficiency spirals out when the other nutrient deficiencies in the plants main mechanism is microbiome of the soil is being affected, and the number two is just processed refined carbohydrates tend to not have magnesium, and when they go into your body, the Krebs cycle tends to need magnesium to metabolize a lot of this sugar. So it’s like using a credit card with a really high transaction fee that you already can’t pay to begin with. So you have a really high transaction fee, meaning you’re using magnesium to burn up that sugar and that sugar doesn’t even have magnesium in it to begin with, so you’re creating more deficiencies– One, by the soil. Two by the food, and then three in general just with stress excess cortisol excess stress. We will use more magnesium to buffer and to relax and to make GABA and to chill your body out so more stress will be the other key mechanism that will be causing you to burn out magnesium. Thoughts, Evan?
Evan Brand: Great analogy! Yeah, I mean it really goes to show how many people are deficient in magnesium. The soil piece that just goes to show more benefits of why you should be eating as much as you possibly can organic, you know, that’s a question we always ask our clients. What percent of your diet is organic make that number is close to a hundred percent as you can at your house, and also you know this time of the year we’re talking in the summertime. You know, a lot of farmers markets are out now. And just because it’s a farmers market food, doesn’t mean it’s organic. Though a lot of farmers still spray, so if you do go the farmers market make sure it’s certified organic or speak with them about did you spray. But if you can go local and organic you’re going to get even more minerals because we know if you could go and buy organic broccoli at Whole Foods that traveled from California, and you’re on the east coast, I mean, that’s potentially 1 to 2 weeks a travel time now. Is it still better than no broccoli?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Evan Brand: But, if we’re talking, we want our people to be the top 100% of health. If you go down the street to the farmers market, you get broccoli, it was cut yesterday. I mean, you’re gonna have more bang for your buck.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, yeah 100%. So let’s talk about magnesium benefits, okay, so we know magnesium is a relaxer. It helps vasodilate. It relaxes a lot of our blood, so it’s an help with blood vessel and vasculature health. Number 2, it has some really good anti-inflammatory benefits. So we do a lot of organic acid testing and there’s just inflammatory metabolites that we look at call Quinolinate. Quinolinate acid tends to go up in regards to brain inflammation. Now, why is the brain inflamed? It could be from lipopolysaccharides, from bacterial overgrowth, it could be from gluten issues, it could be from pesticide or mold exposure, mycotoxins and we see more Quinolinate acid and that comes out in the urine, but that’s a sign of brain inflammation. Now, we know that magnesium can actually help decrease Quinolinate acid. It decreases brain inflammation. I just know even surgically Dr. Russell Blaylock, they missed neurosurgeons lectured on this topic many times. When he would give patients who he operated on that a craniotomy or whatever brain procedure was, he would give them magnesium, he would confer with his colleagues and these patients the head the Supplemental magnesium post-surgery actually healed much better. So we know magnesium really, really good for any neurological stress. So really good things there magnesium plugs into the Krebs cycle which we talked about for energy. That’s why when you’re eating a whole bunch of sugar without magnesium, you get more depletion. So magnesium is really important for the Krebs cycle and for the energy. I’ll let you hit a couple more, Evan. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: No, that’s huge. That’s exactly what I was gonna hit on is that you, you wouldn’t think of magnesium increasing energy but it can there was one study that I had pulled up here, that was looking at magnesium deficient women and when they exercised, they needed more oxygen to complete low-level activities and they had a higher heart rate compared to when their magnesium levels were higher. So when you look at an athlete, if an athlete has adequate magnesium, hopefully that resting heart rate and then the heart rate under activity doesn’t have to go as high because you’ve got more minerals pumping. And you’re mentioning the nerves, you’re mentioning the muscles, everything worked– working much better. That’s crazy about the surgery there was also vitamin C. I want to say I read something about vitamin C and magnesium being used in an IV either pre or post surgery and that also being a game-changer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, 100%. And, and we also know magnesium is really really important for muscle relaxation. So if you’re exercising a lot and your muscles are tighter or more more more more tonic or tight it’s gonna really help relax the muscles. We also know magnesium is a natural laxative. Now, I always draw a line because we have to figure out is the reason why your bowels aren’t moving. Is it because of SIBO or low stomach acid, or could part of that be just from not having enough magnesium in your system. The magnesium is really, really, really important for that migrating motor complex. It could be that as well, so light, you know having good luck noting magnesium is important
Evan Brand: Yeah, we’ll give people different forms of magnesium to help move the needle with the bowels, but you still got to work backwards, right. You can’t just live on magnesium citrate for example every day, because there’s probably a root cause that’s it’s causing that constipation is really really common. You know, of course we know adrenals are tied into the gut and thyroid tied into the gut and hypothyroidism may slow the bowels down. So there may be 3, 4, 5, 6 factors that we’re looking at to make sure the bowels are moving, but magnesium is definitely a part of the picture.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yeah, 100%. Alright, so in general, let’s just kind of dive in any other things magnesium can be helpful for. So we also know I highlighted the big three, right? We talked about what causes these deficiencies, we talked about pesticide, and slash around up and efficiency of the soil, we talked about stress, talked about sugar and guess one more we should highlight, Evan. I think that would be in general and maybe two more, so just having poor digestion. So if we have got permeability issues aka leaky gut and we have low hydrochloric acid and enzyme levels, that could be partly caused by SIBO or H pylori or some type of gut infection. That could easily be driving a lot of deficiency because we know we need good hydrochloric acid levels to be able to ionize our magnesium so we can absorb it. Ionized minerals that basically are making the minerals more absorbable so we can break them down.
Evan Brand: Well, how about just age, I mean by the time you’re age 50, age 60, you look at Dr. Wright’s book on stomach acid. I mean, you’re making hardly any stomach acid by that age so we could just say, ‘hey if you’re above age 50, you’re probably magnesium deficient unless you’re supplementing a couple other benefits,I would say headaches’ You know, headaches, even migraine headaches, you can really really improve your symptoms with, with magnesium and then we did mention the sleep I would just say the — what do you call those charley horses in your gaffes? Yeah like cramp or B niculae shoes. Yep, I remember being a kid having those charley horses in my calves. I wish I would have had magnesium oil back then I’m sure it would have helped.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah absolutely! So we kind of hit the big major causes and the last cause I had– Oh last one and don’t yet is medications. Medications are a big big driving factor of magnesium deficiency. So one of the big ones, I call it the vicious cycle and you see this happen when you are prescribed a medication, and that medication creates a certain nutrient deficiency and that nutrient actually helps with the symptoms– that the medication was prescribed with to begin with. So creates a vicious cycle so for instance a lot of diuretics and beta blockers they cause you to excrete out magnesium but magnesium is also really important for relaxing the blood vessels and relaxing the heart. So then you excrete more of that nutrient that actually helps with the heart helps with the blood pressure and the vasculature so it’s actually perpetuating the more need for that medication longer and longer and longer, so it really creates a vicious cycle not the best business model if you’re trying to actually get to the root cause.
Evan Brand: Yeah, blood pressure drugs – you mentioned diuretics. You could basically consider blood pressure drugs diuretic, right? That’s kind of the mechanism of them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’ll you get a couple right there’s like ace inhibitors which are the.. it’s blocking the angiotensin converting enzyme that helps raise blood pressure. There’s gonna be just like water pills like lisinopril hydrochlorothiazide diuretics, that flush things out. Those are the two big ones they’re arms I think, ARBs– those are the other ones and then there’s beta blockers which basically there’s just calcium ion thing that has to happen in the heart at the sinoatrial and atrial ventricular node where the heart beats and it basically blocks that calcium there which decreases the heart from pumping as hard. But the thing is magnesium actually does that naturally. So you have natural beta blockers in the form of magnesium, but you can see these medications can decrease your internal levels of magnesium and then you need more of the medication to have that physiological effect.
Evan Brand: God, yeah. If you’re in the business of making money, create a drug that depletes the nutrient that the heart actually needs to do. A job do its job so then they’re dependent on the heart drug. I mean, it’s just insanity. All right. Let’s get into symptoms a bit so it’s basically the opposite of all the benefits. Right, so we’ve mentioned benefits like relaxation.. okay so lead so the symptom or side effect of magnesium deficiency, could be anxiety, it could be trouble sleeping, it could be leg cramps or restless leg, it could be a blood pressure like we just talked about, you know. Blood pressure issues that are uncontrolled just hypertension in general.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: What else? What else is on the, the bad things, the symptoms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean tremors vertigo which is hard time swallowing nausea, tired, fatigue, anxiety, depression — I mean these are all things that potentially can be there. Sleep issues, epilepsy, asthma, depression, cardiac issues, cardiac pain, PMS, I mean, I see it a lot women that have magnesium deficiency a lot of women that are going into premenstrual symptoms. Guess what they start to crave. They start to crave dark chocolate. Why? Because dark chocolates very high in magnesium, so a lot of women intuitively crave dark chocolate ‘cuz their body knows that there’s certain nutrients in there that will actually help a lot of that cramping. So magnesium is really important for cramping and we can actually increase it during right before a woman starts to menstruate and or during and after to help relax the muscles.
Evan Brand: Yeah, just because it’s common to have PMS and cramping doesn’t mean it’s normal. So you like to say, you know, a woman’s menstrual cycle it really just kind of sneak up on you. It should just come and all the sudden. Oh, you’re bleeding there we go as opposed to a week of misery irritability anger, I mean–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. I want to just highlight one thing before we move on. Let’s just go over the family of medications, the tend to deplete magnesium. So we have the acid blocking medications, right? Your prilosec, your nexium, your santa, we already talked about the mechanism, why? Because we need enough acid to essentially ionize those minerals so we can absorb it. We have the blood pressure medications, we talked about that whether it’s the water pills or whether it’s the beta blockers or the ACE inhibitors or the ARB medication, we talked about those. So lasix, a lot of people get put on lasix, not good yet. Lasix, that’s a diuretic of digoxin. It’s another one that’s a heart medication that will deplete magnesium certain hormones can, as well birth control pills are known to and this is another vicious cycle. So a lot of women, they’re on birth control pills, maybe an antidepressant, maybe they’re on an acid blocker, you can see how if you’re on a combination of those medications. You are in trouble so various hormones did whether it’s estradiol or estrogen creams. The various oral contraceptives like the ethanol estradiol, those are like a lot of the birth control pills, like the Yasmin or etc, various ethanol estradiol compounds, ADHD medications methylphenidate medication, this is like ritalin concerta medidate adderall and then also various antibiotics. Antibiotics, whether it’s amoxicillin or z-pak levaquin minocycline, these antibiotics can deplete magnesium and then also corticosteroids and corticosteroids have a major effect they increased blood sugar as well. So when you increase blood sugar, that’s gonna also affect the metabolism of magnesium. So with various corticosteroids, whether it’s hydrocortisone cream or prednisone or methaprednisone, these are all gonna be big ones there, and I think it’s a pre.. pretty pretty good way to start. So antacids acid blocking blood pressure medications, hormones, oral contraceptives, ADHD medications, antibiotics and corticosteroids.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s take Johnny who can’t pay attention in school. Let’s put him on a t-888 medication, so now he focuses and then used to put it in magnesium. So now, he’s anxious and now the doctor says, ‘well now we need to calm him down, so let’s get him on a benzodiazepine to calm him down in the evening and then we’ll stimulate him in the morning with the ADHD medication’.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah crazy. I mean you can.
Evan Brand: Yeah. It doesn’t have to happen this way. I mean, in our case you know we could come in we see something like ADHD, we could throw more magnesium in, we could throw in chlorella and detox nutrients, help deliver help the gut, I mean, we work with so many kids that the teacher is like blown away at the progress. They see and this is all relatively simple stuff, I mean, once you get the root causes, you get the clinical data, you get the proper lab testing, you can see what the heck’s going on. Then you can fix it you don’t have to get the kids on drugs it’s just ridiculous.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, especially boys. Boys tend to have the harder time sitting you know, still for six hours as you get into grade school. So boys tend to get prescribed a lot of these medications. Just you know, it’s easier for them because they tend to have a harder time sitting still and focusing. So be careful if you have a boy, you know you really got to watch out because these medications tend to be what’s prescribed. If they don’t comply, so if you’re in that kind of public school type of apparatus and your child’s not conforming, you got to be careful because this is the the vicious medication cycle that may be prescribed to get your your kid on track. Now obviously, girls are gonna be there too but you’re gonna see just more boys being prescribed these medications. So in general, what are things that we can do so we can obviously make sure we’re consuming nutrient-rich magnesium foods? Now of course, this is gonna be like your leafy green. So of course leafy greens, celery juice in the morning is great, good potassium, good magnesium, you can do seeds, pumpkin seeds are amazing, spinach, Swiss chard, sesame seeds, cashews — so good seeds. Packing your kid a snack with Goods nuts and seeds to go to school is amazing. If we’re gonna give some carbohydrates, you know, we can do squash, we can do sweet potato, these are all great we can do. Various greens, turnip greens, beet grains, these are amazing ways to get extra nutrition in your kid. Also getting a good magnesium supplement. So if we’re on a good stuff that we want to be on, like a magnesium alloy or a magnesium glycinate, so really good way to go and there are other sources like natural calm, which is more of a magnesium citrate. It’s a little bit more cost effective. I’ll use that more for motility purposes, but if we’re trying to enhance mitochondrial function and get mitochondrial levels up or magnesium levels up, we’ll do like a magnesium dimalate or magnesium glycinate or even a magnesium 3 and a 3 and 8 tends to be really good to cross the brain barren. We have a lot of inflammation and brain thought magnesium 3 and it can be great if we’re trying to improve mitochondrial levels and energy and improve mitochondrial levels for magnesium, you know using magnesium to do that we’ll do a diet malate, and then glycinate is really good as well. Just because we’re, but it’s really well absorb glycine and malli are very well absorbed compounds or amino acid. Do the cheaper ones are gonna be citrate, the most cheap is going to be oxide, typically only for bowel motility citrate more for bowel motility, but some absorption and then maximal absorption will be dimalate 3 and 8 and glycinate.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I love the 3 and 8. It’s huge. The oxide is garbage if you go to Walmart, you by magnesium it’s probably gonna be oxide, it’s around 4% absorption rate. So let’s say you go to take 100 milligrams, you may give 4 milligrams assuming you even digest it. If it’s a tablet filled with fillers, and corn, and gluten and other garbage, you may not even absorb 4 milligrams, you know. So you’re probably doing more harm than good, if you’re taking just a consumer grade product, you always want to go professional-grade with this stuff because there’s a huge difference. It may say magnesium on the label, but what you’re actually getting is you know far different in a professional grade formula.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100 percent, 100 percent.
Evan Brand: If you’re not working with a practitioner, you know, seek one out. If you want to work with Justin or me, we’d be happy to help you but if you are working with the practitioner, make sure they’re giving you professional magnesium. I’m a huge fan of supplementing magnesium and not just depending on the diet alone, because it’s tough. I mean, if you look at like pumpkin seeds for example, I want to say it was around like a hundred milligrams for 1/4 of a cup, I mean, and how many pumpkin seeds are you really gonna eat in a day, right? So if you’re doing that and then a sweet potato I think was around like 40 milligrams for an average size sweet potato, so let’s say you’re at 140, you’re still nowhere close to getting that four or five hundred milligrams, right? So I think it’s important to just throw a little extra in the hatch even if you’re just supplementing in, like 1 2 3 400 milligrams a day, to me that’s a good insurance policy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, and I would just say let’s kind of go through kind of the RDA. Now, the RDA, I’ve heard it said many times before. RDA stands for rat drugs and assumptions, meaning a lot of the studies are done on rats or animals, or and they’re kind of like a minimum assumptive value. So kind of like take the RDA with the grain of salt and you probably want to have a couple of hundred milligrams of buffer room in there because we want to have enough nutrition for optimal health, not just to prevent symptoms. So in general, explain what party a is people like when do what is he saying, the RDA already has recommended dietary allowances, so this is based off of the data that’s available. Hey, this is how much you need as a, you know, this is how much magnesium he’s taking a day. Okay that’s the general gist now for your typical adult anywhere between 19 to 30 years old male is gonna need 400 milligrams. A female’s underneath 310 milligrams, it goes up slightly as you go above the age of 30, it goes to 424 men, 324 women, and it kind of stays there. You’re actually gonna see a decreased amount during pregnancy, I’m not sure if and when they say that Evan, if the pregnancy is in addition to a typical amount, I’m not sure if they’re meaning an additional. I would always typically go up, so they’re saying during pregnancy and lactation 350 to 310, that’s a drop in what the typical woman would need, so I’m gonna guess that that’s gonna be, you know, we’re gonna do on top of that. We’re gonna do more on top of that or maybe, maybe they just said that to try to be conservative, but I would think to even more important during pregnancy. Yeah I guess there’s an increase if you’re a adult female from 310 to 350 during pregnancy but only forward at 40 milligrams. I don’t know so in general, about you’re looking at 400 I typically recommend 500 milligrams a day of supplemental or at least getting that amount of magnesium, typically we’ll cut that in half and we’ll set them at about 2 to 250 so I like getting about half of it supplemented. That way, it takes a lot of the stress off your back. So if you get 4 to 5 servings of vegetables a day, maybe, maybe a little bit of nuts or seeds you’re good. Some people have allergy issues, right? They have oxalate issues or they have allergies to nuts and seeds, and then supplements are gonna be even more important, but typically, if you’re getting your five or six servings of green today, maybe a handful of nuts, you’re gonna be pretty darn good and again it cuts in half if you’re younger. You’re looking at anywhere between a baby at 75 to a teenager at 250 and it jumps up from age 13 to 14 from 250 to 400, so is a big increase in the amount of magnesium, when as you go from a kid to teenage years and then teenage to adult so big big increases, and I think part of the reason you see ADHD issues or hyperactivity or attention deficit issues is because you have this big metabolic demand increase at age 8 to 9– it doubles and then it doubles again at 13-14, so that’s perfect years for the elementary school and a middle school those magnesium demands go up a lot, so if we don’t have enough supplemental magnesium your kid could be in, you know, deficient and that could drive more of these ADHD medications, you know, obviously sugar gluten dyes preservatives artificial sweeteners. These are all gonna be other mechanisms that are gonna add to that stress bucket, so to speak.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. That’s a really interesting thought that we see the change these kids, it’s like, ‘oh when they got the middle school all the sudden they couldn’t pay attention anymore so huh’, well the man went up if diet didn’t change or didn’t improve or supplements weren’t added, now all of a sudden you’re even more deficient and then the symptoms manifest more than they would have before. Super super interesting point man and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve noticed kids diets tend to get worse, right, when, when the kids are at home more and they have they’re more under their parents thumb and they haven’t been exposed to a whole bunch of marketing, they’re eating better as they start hanging out with kids that have eat junky food. They want to be part of the in-crowd, they’re eating worse, they’re also exposed more to commercials and being out and about and being just being promoted and propagandized to buy the junk food, food history then you get to more of the junk which we already know creates more functional deficiencies.
Evan Brand: Yep, so if you got a teenager and they just got their license, and they’re running around going to all the fast-food joints with their friends, have them listen to this, you know, we work with a lot of teenagers it’s really fun for me because I’m like ‘hey, look if you can get this diet thing figured out now when you’re 16 as opposed to waiting till you’re 46 and miserable like you’re gonna be in way better shape, way more successful, well your brain is gonna work better, you’ll be smarter than your peers, you’ll get better grades’, I mean, when you when you frame it like that usually they’re more compliant as opposed to mom says you need to eat your vegetables.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, and it becomes really tough because I get a lot of kids may feel ostracized or they just see their other friends eating so much junk and it’s like they want to feel included, it’s just tough. We have a massive deficiency in education especially in and around the area of health and nutrition, so you have a lot of people that are just walking around clueless and they’re kind of just poisoning their self in a very, you know, kind of slow motion type of way, so it’s easy. The more educated you feel, the more ostracize you may feel, I get that so just do your best to get yourself feeling optimal, get the Kryptonite out of your system, right, kryptonite’s what makes Superman weak, so get the Kryptonite out and then do your best just to connect with people that are on a similar wavelength so you don’t feel like you’re the the high maintenance person. When you, when you want to eat some green vegetables or some some nuts of seeds or healthy dietary supplements, so just try to find people that resonate kind of where you’re at therefore you feel more supported and what you’re doing.
Evan Brand: Good advice! Yeah, I was always like the the black sheep, you know, when I was working in offices eating, can you know what I consider my conventional diet like a bison steak and peas, and buttered people would get pizza and sandwiches for lunch, you want to say what it is like, no I don’t so if you’re getting judged for your food choices, and you’re eating good stuff then you just need to change your circle. That’s good advice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Awesome, was there anything else you want to chat about here, Evan? I’m gonna put some of the references that we use for this article up with that RDA screenshot up there as well so everyone can see it and look at it. We’ll put it in the transcription page so if you guys are listening to this on our podcast or a YouTube channel, click below and look for that transcription then you guys can get more of this information there as well.
Evan Brand: I would just add, this is one, you know, we like to zoom out a lot and look at the big picture, but this is one example where I think it’s really important to zoom in and hyper focus on magnesium, because it does so many things. There’s so many enzymatic processes and react actions and things that are happening. Its magnesium is such a catalyst for brain chemistry and neurotransmitters as you mentioned, mitochondria, I mean there’s magnesium dabbles in every part of your body, so I think this is one example where you have to zoom in a bit. We often like that make fun of things when people who zoom too far in and they miss the big picture, but this is where you really need that microscope. You got to focus on this issue because it can change your life and you can measure this too, so you can look at the red blood cell magnesium levels on blood work and there’s other ways you can look at magnesium as well. If you want help, you’ve got issues, if it’s just anxiety it could be something as simple as magnesium, it could be gut infections, I mean, there could be mold issues. I mean, there’s a ton of other things going on, so if you do have some of the symptoms we discussed like blood pressure problems, you’re facing being put on medication, etc, you know reach out the just under me we’d love to help you. You can find Justin’s info in his calendar link, check his availability, that’s at his site, justinhealth.com and you can work online around in the world. And my site’s evanbrand.com. We love helping people we’re very honored and blessed to be in the position we are. So thank you all for tuning in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent! Also, we did a whole thing on flow therapy a few weeks ago, and we talked about the magnesium sulfate. Getting magnesium sulfate sulfate to the epsom salts that are gonna be in a flow tank or magnesium sulfate through epsom salts you put in your standard bath, that’s gonna be an amazing way to get more magnesium especially if you have gut issues. Because when you put it in the water like that, you just have your whole surface area to absorb it, right? So you’re gonna have a ton of absorption, some questions came in, how much? I’m not sure. There’s probably some studies on that but that’s probably gonna increase your absorption the most, and I think if you’re having a long hard stressful day at work instead of coming home and drinking that alcohol, just go take a salt bath or head over to your local flow tank business and get some exposure to magnesium via transdermal to the skin.
Evan Brand: It would be cool to do a, you know, but it’s… it’s hard, right, because there’s other variables like, you know, what if that person started doing like a green juice everyday, and they got more my knees in that way. But let’s just say if no other variables change, they’d be cool to take a pre blood sample for the intracellular magnesium. Have someone float, you know, once or twice a week for like six weeks and then retest and see what they did. I guarantee you’d see pretty significant improve minutes, I mean, you’re talking 800 pounds usually of Epsom salt. That’s insane.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, and then last thing is testing for magnesium so you have your typical magnesium serum which will be on like a comprehensive metabolic profile magnesium serum we went above – but magnesium serum that looks at like imagine your suit in a pool, right, and you’re in a little inner tube, right, right. And then you have the water, right, the water is the serum so think of magnesium serum is testing the magnesium in the water, right, and then magnesium red blood cell magnesium is actually looking what’s in the inner tube, right, so the cell is the inner tube, the serum is the blood, so serum, it’s okay, but we want to see what’s in the inner tube. So red blood cell magnesium’s ideal, we want that greater than 5, 5 or greater and we typically can also use other tests like a nutri eval, or a spectra cell, which is kind of a lymphocyte stimulation test where we can get another intracellular, intracellular window into what those nutrient levels are at, but those kind of your general gist in regards to magnesium and how to test for it. Anything else you want to say about testing, Evan?
Evan Brand: I think you covered it. Did, were there any other questions related, I didn’t have those pulled up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would just say most we kind of hid a lot of them already. I would say if you’re under more stress, you can’t go wrong taking more magnesium. Magnesium helps facilitate GABA, which helps kind of turn on the parasympathetic nervous system and relaxes you. Some people, if you get too relaxed with magnesium, taking it more at night can be better because then you’re it’s you know you’re gonna go to sleep. So it’s great. So if it’s too sedating for you, take it more at night after work kind of when you’re doing your wind-down routine. It’s a great way to do it, I think, we pretty much hit all on a maj, a lot of major things. B6 is another important cofactor we like with magnesium, because it helps with neurotransmitter synthesis so B6 is really good typically when people are stressed, B vitamins are equally depleted with magnesium because of just how stress works. Magnesium and B vitamins are part of the Krebs and they’re gonna get burnt up when you’re stressed so it’s very possible that you need to be taking a good B complex along with your magnesium just because the stress may be affecting all of those different parts of the metabolic system.
Evan Brand: Good call, good call. All right, I just wrap it up that would, I mean, I mentioned the website, so justinhealth.com, you want to reach out to Justin. Evanbrand.com is my website. And we’ll be back next Monday. I’m sure you’re gonna do something in between now and then, but I’ll be back Monday with you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. If you guys like it, thumbs up, hit the subscribe button, hit the bell, give us a share, we love it if you’re enjoying this. Think about friends or family that could benefit as well, and then also put your comments down below. Love to hear what your comments are. This helps guide us in choosing future topics that we want to chat about, so we really want your input. Thanks to everyone. Have a phenomenal day. Take care Evan. See you, bye bye.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/types-of-magnesium-and-their-benefits-podcast-236
Foundational Nutrients for Optimal Health – Dr. Justin Podcast # 155
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand dive into the topic of nutrients and their importance to our bodies. Listen to this podcast and learn how B vitamins, Magnesium, Vitamin C & D, Selenium, Zinc and Omegas contribute to achieving a healthy body. Understand how these vitamins and minerals support different bodily functions and gain an understanding on how their deficiencies affect our health and cause unfavorable symptoms.
Explore other topics related to nutrients as they answer questions about leaky gut, H.pylori and some blood pressure medications which contribute to nutritional deficiency. Know some of the best sources of supplements and product recommendations which have been proven effective based on their practice and professional experience.
In this episode, we cover:
09:00 B vitamins
11:25 Minerals + Magnesium
28:15 Vitamin C, Selenium
31:18 Zinc
33:10 Omegas
36:26 Vitamin D
Evan Brand: A happy Monday. If you’re watching in the future I guess the day doesn’t matter but for us it does.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I had a great weekend, man. I was doing a little waterskiing action today. It was phenomenal—actually yesterday, I’m sorry. Great, great day and back in the saddle for an awesome Monday. Got some patients coming up right after our live podcast. How about yourself man? Anything good happening for you?
Evan Brand: Uh—Actually, Yeah. I’m going to create a pretty cool piece of content as soon as you and I get off the call together, I’m gonna go eat some lunch and a I’m gonna drive about an hour away to a local hemp farm where there’s a guy who has a Kentucky hemp oil company that I’ve been seeing his products everywhere. His son was having a major seizure disorder. His son was having hundreds of seizures within a week. And he started to use cannabis extracts to help his son and now his son has not had seizures for years— several years. And so this guy he moved from Northern California where he was growing medical cannabis and now he’s just growing hemp in Kentucky and so I’m driving to the farm. I’ll probably end up doing a podcast with him coz I don’t think it’s gonna be easy to do it in the field, but I’m gonna try to take my camera and puts— maybe a 45 minute little video together, try to interview him, get a little bit his story and share his products coz I’ve been using the CBD with my clients. And as you and I talk about with inflammation and the anti-anxiety benefits, you can pretty much use it with anyone. And it’s going to help regardless of the case whether it’s like Lyme or Hashimoto’s or H. pylori. Whatever we’re dealing with our clients, I mean we can pretty much use CBD across the board and we might notice some beneficial changes and it’s definitely not gonna hurt somebody. So looking forward to going to meet that guy. And stay tuned because I have a video probably the next week that’s gonna be published on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Yeah. I think CBD has some really good benefits. I use on handful of patients for pain issues, for sleep issues, uh—for anxiety, just from immune balance. And I do fine. It’s— it’s very good. CBD or Cannabis Diol is the non-psychoactive component of marijuana or hamper cannabis, if you will. THC Tetrahydro Cannabis that’s gonna be the part of the marijuana that gets you high and kinda gives you the munchies. So you get some of those benefits with the CBD without the, you know, the higher the munchies afterwards. And I’ve seen it work very well with seizures like you mentioned, very well with autoimmune and pain stuff. I mean it can be very therapeutic. I don’t think it fixes the root cause but I do think it’s very, very therapeutic. It can help.
Evan Brand: Right. Well said. Yeah. Definitely not gonna fix the root cause but I’ve had some people too that are in California, other states where they can even get recreational cannabis and I tell people go for it if they asked me because if they’re doing a tincture or they’re doing a spray or sublingual, they’re not having to smoke, they’re not having to use a vaporizer if they just don’t want to get the high, there’s— there’s tons of different options where you can do a high CBD. And a very tiny amount of THC where people can help fix their sleep. I had a __ in California she’s had chronic pain. She’s had Lyme forever. She said if she does CBD by itself, does pretty much nothing; but when she adds just like a milligram, so do say, 10 to 50 mg CBD, 1 mg THC, all the sudden the synergistic effect happens and the pain goes away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. They can be very helpful. It’s a good tool in your functional medicine uh— pockets, so to speak.
Evan Brand: Yup. Hey, Robert, thanks for joining us. James, thanks for rejoining us. Our topic, well, we figure we’ll do a Q&A but our topic initially is about foundational nutrients kind of what the things that are actually worth your time and money because Justin and I were so many people come to us after they’ve been to other functional medicine practitioners. And we’ve got a kind of clean up the mess and there’s like 20 or 30 or 40 supplements that people are taking. And we like to try to whittle that down to just some of the foundations. And some things people are taking might help and can’t hurt, but if you’re spending a thousand bucks or something crazy amount on supplements, we really want to give you the stuff that just gonna move the needle coz why take something if it’s not gonna do stuff for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And again, kinda foundation before we go in is a Paleo template to start. And again, that’s macronutrient agnostic. It could be high-carb, low-carb, high-fat, moderate fat, high-protein, moderate protein, right? So we’re just focusing on the anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense, low toxin foods. That’s number one. And then from there, the next step above that is making sure we have the lifestyle stressors in order: sleep, hydration, uh—not eating when we’re really stressed, that’s number two. And number three is actually making sure we can digest the foods that we eat. We eat a really good diet but we can’t break it down. That’s the equivalent of going to the grocery store and leaving that food out on the counter, not putting it in the fridge for a week or two. It’s gonna rot. So the next step above that is HCL and enzymes and digestive nutrients so we can break those really good foods down. That’s our foundation. And once we have that, that’s where I think some of the nutrients come in. So with my patients, all of them, they’re on all either the Multi Nutrients Supreme or Multi support pack which has the extra, kinda stress handling nutrients that are gonna be in there which are gonna consist of high-quality B vitamins that are methylated or activated like P5P uhm—of course, like your B1, B2, right? Thiamine, riboflavin right? These are all—niacin—These are all important nutrients. Of course, activated LMTHF folate, of course, methylated B12 or some kind other adenosine hydroxy B12.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh—chelated minerals like calcium and magnesium and zinc and selenium, right? All chelated meaning they’re bound to specific amino acids, so that we can have better absorption. When we have an amino acid, kind of uhm—they’re next to it, it’s like an escort or a bodyguard for that nutrient to get where it needs to go in the body, if you will.
Evan Brand: Yup. Well said. A lot of these nutrients people are—I’m hearing feedback. What’s going on your end? Maybe your speakers are a bit loud.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m good on my end. I don’t hear anything here.
Evan Brand: You don’t? Okay. Leave us a comment in the YouTube if people hear the feedback at all, if you hear my voice echoing. A lot of people are so deficient in nutrients, even with an organic diet. And that is something that you and I see and measure on the stool test and then we see and measure that on the organic acids test, too. You know we’ve got a lot of people that come to us because they’ve heard us talking about like a ketogenic diet or some other high-fat diet. But then we can measure something called the steatocrit on the stool test. And so, if people wanna quantify, “Well how am I actually digesting”, “What can you guys teach me about my nutrients?” and “My diet’s perfect, I’m one of those guys, I want to try to fix everything with diet”, well, we can take a look and see if that’s actually working for you. So if we see steatocrit that’s high, that’s a fecal fat marker. You can look at your stool, of course, but it’s better to have a number. And if we see that your fecal fat marker’s high, well, we know we’ve got to give you some good fat digesting enzymes, help out the pancreas help out the gallbladder. And then also on the organic acids panel, we’re going to look at the amino acid markers, so we can see do you have the raw breakdown materials? Coz your proteins—like your animal proteins and pastured animal products—those are all made of amino acids. That’s like the breakdown products. Stuff like those and that’s what fuels your brain chemicals, your neurotransmitters and so, if we see you’re super low on amino acids, that’s a problem. So we have to fix it.
And like you mentioned, why is it happening? Well could be infections like Robert is uh— he’s a left us a comment here. He is talking about that he’s had Blasto, he’s had Klebsiella, he’s had Citrobacter—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: He’s resolved a lot of his infections through Dr. J’s uh—antimicrobials, which is awesome. I guarantee you are getting robbed for a long time of your—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. 100% So the first thing is, right, we have that kind of diet. So think of like your health is like running a business. So every year that you’re unhealthy is like a business, right, having more expenses than its profit, right? Where then its revenue— gross revenue, right? So you’re going a little bit more into debt, a little bit more into debt. The difference is you don’t go into bankruptcy court, right, and go bankrupt. You have symptoms. And those symptoms eventually may lead into a cluster of diseases or pathology whether it’s diabetes or it’s just obesity or maybe it’s cancer or heart disease or you’re just in this in between where you kinda have chronic fatigue, you don’t feel good, you’re kind of depressed. And then you’re in this in between where you go to the doctor and they’re just like, “Oh yeah, you’re just aging.” or “Here’s an antidepressant.” or “It’s all in your head.” And then you’re stuck with these kinda in between kind of diagnoses where you’re not— you don’t have a disease, but you sure don’t feel good and you’re not getting any answers, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So that’s kinda the big thing that we see. So we’re like, alright, so imagine that that’s the equivalent of business $1 million in debt. Well just because you start having good business practice and start pulling a profit, you gotta now make above and beyond that million before you start coming back in the black. So that’s where it’s really good for some of these supplements to come in because they kinda, you know, act like a mini bailout or a mini—a mini business loan to kind of bring you back in the balance. So things like B vitamins are great because you burn these up when you’re stressed. And if you have a lot of dysbiotic bacteria, these cre— the good bacteria produce healthy amounts of B vitamins. If you have a lot of bad bacteria, you’re not getting the B vitamins and you’re also getting a lot of toxins, too, which create leaky gut and create more stress and cause you to burn B vitamins and also creates a lot of lactic acid which eats a lot of your B vitamins. So B vitamins are really important first step. And we have B vitamins like B1, which is Thiamine or B2, which is Riboflavin or B3, which is Niacin and B6, which is Pyridoxine 5 Phosphate or Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, B9, which is Folate, uhm—B 12, which is amino, B12, right? Uhm—Methylcobalamin Hydroxyl Adenosyl Cobalamin, right? These are important B vitamins especially if you’re a vegetarian. B12 is gonna be one of those that you’re missing. So any comments, Evan, on the B vitamins and how important they are.
Evan Brand: Yes, sir. Absolutely. And I’m gonna address Robert’s question at the same time answering uh—or adding a comment. He said “Can these infections result in high homocysteine levels?” The answer is absolutely yes and there’s a journal that I’ll send over to Justin so we can put it in the show notes. It was American family physician was the literature but it was an article all about vitamin B12 deficiency and basically what happens is whether it’s H. pylori or like they even talk about in this article which is surprising coz most conventional medical people they kinda disregard parasites, but it’s talking about the link between parasites and B12 deficiency and then the link between B12 deficiency in elevated homocysteine levels. So, yes, we may give you some type of supplement, It’s gonna have the B12 like we always talked about. We’ve gotta get to the root cause, too. So we’ve got to fix those infections like I’ve had. We gotta fix those, too, at the same time while supplementing. So let me send it to you, Justin, so we can—we can share with the listeners.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That sounds great. I think B vitamins are really important just number one because of the stress component; number two because of the gut bacteria component; and then number three just to kind of—most people are still stressed so they need those B vitamins just to help kind of breakeven every day. So that’s the first component. Uh next let’s talk about minerals. So one of the first important minerals is gonna be magnesium because it’s a mineral that has over 100 or 1000 roles 1000 and enzymatic roles in the body, right? It has a major effect on dealing with enzymes. So with Krebs cycle, with energy, with blood pressure, with mood, with, sleep, with relaxation, with stress. Lots of different roles in the body and it’s one of those that are just incredibly deficient in our food supply. There’s lots of studies on magnesium deficiency and that’s it literally prevalent over 50% of the population. So this is important and if we’re not eating organic, then the magnesium in our food will be lower. So magnesium is one of these things that we wanna make sure is in a high quality supplement. I put it in my supplement via magnesium malate. So it’s bound to malic acid which is a Krebs cycle kinda intermediary nutrient. So it’s really important for the Krebs cycle and that way we can at least guarantee a couple hundred milligrams but because it’s chelated, we you know, it—more of it gets into where it needs to go which is really important. So magnesium is another one of those very important nutrients.
Evan Brand: Good. Well said. Yeah. And if you bought magnesium at Walgreens or CVS or Walmart or Target probably magnesium oxide, we talked about this before, but it’s about a 4% absorption rate. So if you’re taking 100 mg, you’re getting 4% of that; if you’re taking a 1000 mg, 4% of that. So take a look at your supplement bottle, flipped it around and look at the form of magnesium. If it’s oxide, you could use it for constipation that’s about the only benefit. But like Justin’s talking about the to help fuel the enzymatic processes and help Krebs cycle and promote energy and all that, it’s not going to do anything. You’ve got a look at the malate’s; you’ve got a look at the taurates; you’ve got the citrate’s; the—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Glycinate.
Evan Brand: Glycinate, the threonate. So there’s many, many good ones out there. And Mercola, I don’t know if he’s just saying this like anecdotally or if he’s got some literature on it, but Dr. Mercola’s recent talk about EMF and how he believes that the magnesium can help mitigate the EMF and he’s recommending like 2 g a day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhm.
Evan Brand: — of different forms of magnesium. It makes sense, but I don’t know the mechanism of how that would help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Well if we look at the big magnesium foods, right? Magnesium is gonna be lower in foods, but it’s gonna be highest in our green vegetables— spinach, swiss chard, uh— pumpkin seeds uhm—you know, kefirs, things like that, almonds, some legumes, avocado, figs, dark chocolate—dark chocolate’s a really good one, uh— banana. Again, you just have to be careful because if you’re kind of having autoimmune issue, more on autoimmune template to start, well, seeds are out, any dairies out, legumes out, uhm— some of these—half your foods are gone.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you have to be careful like the big things are gonna be high quality dark chocolate, uh—lots of good greens. And if you can do one of these nuts or seeds like the pumpkin seeds I mentioned, that’s a really good place. But if not, that’s were leaning on a good supplement is gonna be helpful, but the green veggie, I think will be the key uhm—to that. So we just gotta keep in in mind, you know, there may be some foods that are really good for us made nutrient profile but they may have an inflammatory profile that’s— let’s just say, kinda contradicts or kinda—the risk outweighs the benefit of getting that nutrient coz of the inflammation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I agree. So if you’re autoimmune protocol, if your digestion’s compromised, which it probably is if you’re on an autoimmune protocol coz you probably had an autoimmune illness and that’s what we’re recommending an AIP diet. Sounds like a magnesium supplement will be much— much, much more necessary and helpful. Uh— we had a question from Linda. She said, should she be concerned if every time she goes to the stool, so every time she poops uhm— there’s an oil slick.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I don’t know if I would say– I don’t know if I would say scared but concerned, oh, right, yeah. I mean I would be scared if there was blood in the stool.
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like you know decent bit of blood and it wasn’t just from a tiny bit of a hemorrhoid issue. But if I saw blood in the stool, I would be scared, for sure. I would definitely get that—some kind of a hem—some kind of an ulcer or cancer, make sure that’s ruled out. But with just the slick in the stool, I would be concerned because you’re not digesting your fat which means vitamin A, D, E, K your fat-soluble nutrients like your long chain fatty acids like EPA or DHEA or you know, coconut, good fats like that, you’re not absorbing those which means you’re gonna have blood sugar issues and you’re gonna have malabsorption, for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. So in that case, Linda, if you listen to us before, we’ll sound like a broken record, but if not, uh— you know, if you’re working with Justin or I, what we’re gonna end up doing with you would be looking at the stool test, we’ve gotta measure that fecal fat, the steatocrit marker, we’re gonna look for infections. So we’re gonna look for parasites; we’re gonna look for yeast; we’re gonna look for fungus; we’re gonna look for anything that’s gonna be stealing your nutrients or messing up that absorption. H. pylori if that’s suppressing the parietal cells that make hydrochloric acid in the gut. Now your whole digestive cascades is falling apart, we’re gonna look at medications. So if you’ve got a history or your currently taking some type of acid blocking drug we’ve got a factor that in coz that’s such a huge factor for fat digestion, too, if you’re just suppressing that. So we gotta look for those underlying causes but eventually, yes, we could fix the situation and probably add enzymes back in. Let’s address uh—Haley’s question, too, Justin, coz uh—it kinda ties into this. She said that she’s— her digestive enzymes can make your pancreas and gallbladder quote unquote lazy. What are your thoughts? We know that’s not true. With melatonin, yes, you can turn down the production of melatonin if you supplement. But with enzymes, my understanding is we’re only feeding the fire. Justin, can you comment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well even with melatonin I talked to Dr. Ron Rothenberg about that and he says long as the dose is relatively low that that won’t happen coz it’s a positive feedback loop with these things. But when it comes to hydrochloric acid and enzymes, one of the major feedback loops for HCl and enzymes is gastrin, right? And gastrin when you take supplemental HCl, enzyme levels are –or gastrin levels don’t drop. So it’s not like you get testosterone testicle shrink in size.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s not like that. So my bigger concern is that someone’s not making enough enzymes because they don’t have enough hydrochloric acid in the stomach and my concern is that’s— there’s not enough HCl on the stomach because of the sympathetic stress response, right? That fight or flight from food or from emotional stress or physical stress, so we, of course, we’re fixing that stuff upstream, right? Eating in a good, stress-free environment, not hydrating with food hydrating before, you know, we’re after biting after an hour or two but after, you know, 15 minutes before. And then we’re taking enough hydrochloric acid to lower the acidity so we can activate our own enzymes. But taking something is gonna be great coz I’m more concerned about that food sitting in your gut and not being digested and basically rotting and rancidifying and putrefying, creating stress by sitting in your gut.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s my bigger concern.
Evan Brand: I agree. So we hit the minerals. You talked about those you did great. We hit our magnesium which is gonna be probably number one. There’s a whole organization dedicated to magnesium deficiencies. If you type in gotmag, it think it’s gotmag.org. There’s like stage 2, 3 and 4 symptoms. You could even have insane symptoms, big issues, heart arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, all sorts of other like heart-related issues due to magnesium, if you’re deficient. So if you’ve got some heart flutters or some weird symptoms, the cardiologist, they’re not gonna know you’ve got a magnesium deficiency, they’re just gonna end up putting you on like a beta blocker or some type of heart rhythm drug like they’ve done to my grandmother. And they’re not addressing magnesium and these drugs they’re using are likely gonna deplete magnesium even more. So we could get into some really, really big serious health implications if we don’t address something that simple as magnesium.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, hundred percent. So again, big source of magnesium, in my line, I have one called Magnesium Supreme. That’s a magnesium malate. That malate’s are– the malic acid so that helps in the Krebs cycle, it helps with energy but also has a relaxation effect. So that’s one of the ones I formulated. I still even like a little bit of magnesium citrate at night. I think it’s great. It may not be the best absorbed, it’s cheaper but it’s still good. So I like my Magnesium Supreme and then we use the Malate— Magnesium Malate in all the multis. And the multi-nutrients Supreme, in the twice or in the Multisuper pack. So that’s kind of what we have. I like those. I use those daily. I think they’re great. And then for kids that may be uh—you know have serious gut issues, we may do like a magnesium threonate kinda gel to help or magnesium chloride kind of uhm—Epsom salt bath, too.
Evan Brand: Nice. And with the anxiety like PTSD, traumas, phobias, the supplement in my line is called Calm Clarity. And I’ve used that one with great success with people especially veterans who come back from war and they’ve just got a lot of emotional trauma or women who’ve been through some type of abuse threonate crosses the blood brain barrier. So that’s another form of magnesium and not any one form is perfect but you can use a combination of these. So like Justin mention, you wanna cycle. Maybe you’ve got some malate here, you’ve got some citrate here—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: You can add different forms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And then we’ll put show notes and links to some of these things. So if you guys want to support the show, we always appreciate that. We’re just trying to get you the best information possible. Now, I talked about the magnesium foods. Some of the B vitamin foods, okay? Again, you’re gonna have like if you go online and look you’re gonna see the fortified ones which are gonna be cereals and orange juices which is basically crappy, crappy B vitamins.
Evan Brand: Garbage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The worst quality. So do not count on any of the B vitamins from those foods. And number one, you shouldn’t be eating those foods, anyway coz they’re very high in sugar. With the orange juices and the grains are obviously gonna be the gluten thing which are gonna be inflammatory as well. So cut those out, nix those out. But you’re gonna do really with fish, with vegetables, with fruits, with meats, with leafy greens, egg yolks. So a lot of the Paleo versions of those are gonna have super, super high amount of B vitamins which is great.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Like Pop Tarts, like fortified with 12 vitamins and minerals. It’s like, “Oh yeah, let’s just eat pop tarts, high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified glyphosate sprayed wheat flour. We’re gonna be just fine.” Not true, not true, not true.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Remember, when you take in a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrate, all that refine carbohydrate converts to sugar and when you look at the Krebs cycle, how that Krebs cycle pumps around and it goes through all these kind of uhm—you know, reduction reactions where all these hydrogens kind of accumulate. It takes magnesium to run those cycles and if you’re basically—if it’s costing you more magnesium to run the cycle than you’re getting in, this is what we call nutrient debt, right? You’re not getting as much from it than you are— for the cost to run it, okay? So keep that in the back of your mind.
Evan Brand: Luckily the human body is resilient. I mean if that— if we we’re like a car, you and I use car analogies, if we we’re at such a nutrient debt like most people are, the car would be dead. But luckily our body will still survive. You just won’t thrive in these situations. You could have hair issues, skin issues, nail issues, like you said, autoimmune diseases, cancer, you’ve got bad skin, you’ve got acne, you’ve got poor sleep problems, you’ve got anxiety, depression, you’ve got chronic fatigue, you’ve got obesity. I mean, a lot of these diseases that have skyrocketed 10,000% over the last 20 years, there’s many, many factors that we can address in one podcast but like you mentioned, just a nutrient— the nutrient density of the soil has been reduced which is why—and I didn’t tell you this yet, but I uh—expanded my property. I bought the acre next door as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, cool.
Evan Brand: I’m gonna have a 1 acre farm and I’m gonna have as much of my food come from that as possible. Not the meats coz there’s a couple restrictions on having animals but my goal is to provide 50% is my goal. Uh— 50% of my own food. I’ve already grown stuff this year. I’ve had watermelons. Last year, I had bunch of sweet potatoes, I had strawberries, I had broccoli, carrots, all organic homegrown. There’s no more local—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great.
Evan Brand: ..that you can get than your backyard.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. And you can even team up with some farmers and make a deal and say, “Hey, you can use my land and I’ll give you half of what’s on there.”
Evan Brand: I know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Coz then you don’t have to worry about it at all. And you kinda make this deal, they get free land but they get half the food. Hey, there’s enough food for you and your family. The rest may go bad anyway, so you may end up giving it away, anyway. So that could be a good deal for you.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’m gonna try to do some pecan trees and I’ve got all sorts of ideas.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. Yeah. Very cool, man. I think it’s important that uhm— people have to understand that your body is like a business. When a business starts having low profits and starts— the revenue starts dropping, the business has to either get incredibly efficient or typically, more than likely, lays people off, right? It fires people, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it goes off, it fires people that are least essential to driving the profit. Well, the body does the same thing. It just starts allocating resources to other areas. Some dead skin, it’s okay, we’ll have some irritation, it will get wrinkly and creepy, it’s okay, no problem. Fingernails—weaker, more brittle; hormones will be a little bit lower that means you’ll have a lot of cycles, you know, symptoms with your cycle; you’ll have lower libido; you won’t be able to recover from strenuous work out; you won’t be able to put on muscle, that’s okay, no big deal. And uh—yeah, we won’t—we won’t put it– inflammation as much so you’ll be a little bit more achy, you know, you’ll be little bit more prone to osteopenia or osteoporosis. That’s how the body thinks. Uhm– that’s how it allocates. It’s all about survival. We are really about surviving. So those nutrients help run those systems. We really want to make sure that we have enough nutrients to run systems. There a lot of people they’re focused on calories and if you’re eating a real whole foods those calories will have nutrition, but today, it’s possible with the whole pop tart analogy or the junk food analogy, you can get a whole bunch of calories and not a lot of nutrition on the flipside. So you gotta keep that in mind.
Evan Brand: Agreed. You wanna hit a couple more questions or should we try to move the conversation into some more nutrients. I’ve had vitamin C just echoing in my brain that I have to just talk about vitamin C.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s hit that. I wanna hit one last thing on magnesium and we can tie it to vitamin C. There’s a lot of the medications that are out there will actually create nutrient deficiencies. And one of the biggest ones are the blood pressure medications, the water pills, the Hydrochlorothi—Hydrochlorothiazide, the Lisinopril, the ACE inhibitors, right, the beta blockers. These will actually create magnesium deficiency which magnesium is really important for regulating blood pressure, so that actually create more blood pressure, which creates more dependency on these medications. So you can see that vicious cycle. So keep in mind the nutrient deficiency aspect with these drugs. Same thing with birth control pills and B vitamins as well and magnesium. So those are couple of common medications. And then the granddaddy of them all is gonna be the acid blockers that will affect nutrients in many directions, B vitamins, minerals etc.
Evan Brand: Yup. The Omni— is it Omni with an “n” or is it “m”? Omne—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Omneprozol. O-M-N-E and then prozol.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: That’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Prilosec that’s the trade name of it. That’s the—Omneprozol is the generic. So yeah, these are the medications. These are the family of meds we got to be careful of. So, kinda tagging into your vitamin C. I’ll let you the ball with that Evan.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I just wanna—one more comment on the Prilosec.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And the thing that’s scary is these acid blockers used to be prescription and now they’re over-the-counter. So people just go to Target and they just go buy a 48 pack of these, six month supply and they throw that giant value pack 20% more pills into their shopping cart and they just go home, “Oh, yeah, Prilosec.” It’s like, “good God”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s really interesting because you know you get all the people that say, “Oh, you have to be such a super, super smart medical doctor to prescribe these drugs. They’re so dangerous. You need to have, you know, a medical Dr. kinda looking over you. And of course, that it—that is true with in a lot of cases, yeah, they contradict themselves coz then these drugs seven years later when the patent goes out, once they go generic and there’s no money behind them, they go over-the-counter.
Evan Brand: Oh my God.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Look at Ibuprofen, right? It kills 20,000 people a year and now it’s over-the-counter. It’s okay.
Evan Brand: Ugh. Insane isn’t it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So I mean, you kinda talk on both sides of the mouth and you know, we pointed out. Uhm so, yeah, in general, the medications that you’re gonna see that are gonna be out there, primarily are gonna be the patented ones. Once that seven-year patents off or if they can create a mini-me version of it, then it’s over-the-counter and anyone can buy it. It’s up for grabs now.
Evan Brand: Fortunately, beta-blockers and antidepressants are still prescription only. So, that’s good. We’re saving a lot of issues with that. But yeah, let me get back on subject. Vitamin C is huge. It’s gonna be stored in the adrenal glands, typically.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So Justin and I are gonna measure your nutritional markers when we run organic acids testing on you. We’re gonna look at a lot of nutrients. Nine times out of 10 vitamin C shows up low because people burn through it like jet fuel, just like B vitamins that Justin mention about stress, same thing with vitamin C. There is a reference range most people aren’t even on the map. I’m seeing people at like a point level, like a decimal point level when they should be hundreds of times higher. So I’m typically gonna be using about 2000 mg and I’ve had people say, “Oh Evan, I’ve taken vitamin C for years they still show up low because they were using some garbage they got at like a health food store. Even thought it’s a health food store could still have inferior quality or it’s a consumer break— consumer grade product they bought at Whole Foods or Amazon or somewhere else. And they’re not using professional grade or they’re just using ascorbic acid only, which is decent. But to really boost up the levels, you’ve got to have the antioxidants with it. The quercetin, the rutin, the bioflavonoids.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mixed ascorbate.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You gotta have the mixed ascorbates, too. You’ve got the magnesium ascorbate, the calcium ascorbate, the sodium ascorbates. If you just do—like what is it? emergency that garbage that they sell at the check out line at Walgreens or other places where it’s not only is it just rate ascorbic acid it’s got fructose in there, too, which is gonna destroy blood sugar. That’s not gonna do anything. You could buy a year supply of that and not move the needle. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent, man. So may—uh—Vitamin C is really important. I also say selenium is one of these things that are very important as well because it’s important for thyroid conversion. Uhm— it’s important for liver detoxification, it’s important precursor for glutathione, right? And we like to give that neither like a Selenium Glycinate or Selenium Methionine kinda bound to one of these sulfur amino acids.
Evan Brand: Let me ask you this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: What do you say to all these people, “Oh, Justin, I don’t need Selenium. I eat three Brazil nuts per day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well I mean I think that’s a really good source of selenium; the problem is the amount of selenium in those brazil nuts can vary tenfold. So you could either be getting 50 µg or 500 µg. So the problem is you just don’t know how much you’re getting in each of them. So I think it’s good if you wanna do a Brazil nut or two a day. Just make sure that the uhm—the multi you’re taking guarantees you at least 200 µg of selenium per day. And I think you’re in a really really, good place.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And we talked about the absorption issue. So if somebody has got some gut bugs, doesn’t matter if you eat the Brazil nuts. You could probably eat a whole bag and not boost up selenium, if you’re deficient and you’ve got things stealing your nutrients or compromising your digestive quality.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And it’s just good to have that insurance policy with selenium. Uh—it’s gonna be hard to overdose with it if you’re in that 2 to 400 µg range and you’re using a good quality like Selenium Methionine. You’re gonna be in really good shape. And again, just kinda tag teaming, we got a lot of people talking about hormone stuff. Selenium is really important for hormones especially testosterone and then we even have Zinc, right? Whether it’s zinc aspartate or zinc methionine or uhm— zinc’s really important. The zinc fingers have a lot to do with the genetics like the DNA the epigenetics. So having enough zinc is really important to activating— having good affects our epigenome. Zinc is extremely important for making HCl. It’s a really good building block for our sex hormones as well. So gotta love zinc and when you’re stressed and you have low hydrochloric acid level, zinc can go low. And you can do is a tally test. We do some Zinc Chloride or—is it Chloride or Sulfate? I was getting confused.
Evan Brand: I think Sulfate for that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. So Zinc Sulfate. We could do a Zinc Sulfate test. The more metallic you’re tasting it is, the better— the better your Zinc is. The better or the more neutral taste, the lower your zinc is. That’s a good little kind of rule of thumb test.
Evan Brand: So people heard that, they’re like, “What the hell is he talking about?” So basically, uh—Justin and I can send a high-quality liquid Zinc Sulfate and based on the status of your zinc, that will change the flavor of the zinc. When I took this test a few years ago, I think they say, “hold it in your mouth for up to 30 seconds” So you put a little bit zinc in your mouth, you kinda gently swish it around. I swallowed it,. I tasted nothing. That was when I had all those infections. I literally tasted nothing. It tasted like water. My zinc was trashed and then as you improve infections, you get your digestion better, your supplementing with the right type of zinc, all the sudden you could put the zinc in your mouth and then it almost tastes like your licking a piece of metal like right away. That’s the goal but would you say, Justin? 95% of people they’re not going to taste the metal right away which means they’re super deficient.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean a lot of them are gonna be deficient if they have gut issues or stress issues or malabsorption those kind of thing for sure. So I think that’s a really important one look at. So we hit the Vitamin C, we hit Magnesium we hit Selenium and we hit Zinc.
Evan Brand: I’d say Omegas and vitamin D would be two others we have to mention.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think Omega-3 is really important which is—the typical Omega-3 fatty acids there is ALA Alpha Linolenic Acid. That’s the omega-3 in flaxseed oil. We have EPA which is 20-chain carbon which is Eicosapentaenoic Acid, that’s EPA. And then we have the_ DHEA. These are the 20 and 22. The EPA or the DHEA are the fats found in fish oil. These are the really important ones. These have all of the anti-inflammatory action. They help block this prostaglandin E2 pathway which gets inflammation jacked up. They also are really good building blocks for the brain and the neurological system. And the ALA are the Alpha Linolenic Acid from the flax seeds and the vegetables, that actually has to get converted via this enzyme, I think it’s Delta 5 Desaturase. And that enzyme converts the 18 carbon to the 20 carbon and things like insulin resistance and inflammation and stress can affect that conversion and knock it decreased function by 80 to 90%. So you’re not getting those really biologically active omega-3 fatty acids when you’re doing a lot of the plant-based Omega-3’s because of those mechanisms I mention. So getting the really good Omega-3’s from the fish is going to the best way. Plus the fish actually bio accumulate how the plants get it which will typically is the algae, right? A lot of the good vegetable, Omega-3 supplements vegetarian ones are gonna be algae based. Well the fish concentrate the algae. It’s kinda like the grass that cows concentrate the grass. So you’re kinda getting that bioaccumulation in a more concentrated form when you’re doing some of these really good fish oils.
Evan Brand: Well said. Yeah. Pastured meats, too, you will get some— you will get some fatty acid. So your bisons, your elk, which are my two favorites.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Your grass-fed beef, pastured pork. I would assume you’d get some from pork.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. More than likely you’re gonna get some from any of the animal products. The healthier they are, the more pastured they—the more pastured, the more biologically appropriate their diet is, uhm— the better chance that you’re gonna get more of these Omega-3 fatty acids than the more inflammatory Omega 6. But again, Arachidonic Acids are really important building block which is an Omega-6 fatty acid, but that’s gonna be a really good fat, too. So you don’t want to say, “Oh, all Omega-6 is bad. It’s just gonna really be a lot more of the Omega-6 that are gonna be driven from vegetable oils like refined vegetable oils, right? The good vegetable oils are gonna be olive oil which is a—a Oleic Acid which is really an Omega-9, your—your uhm—short chain fatty acids are gonna come from your butters and ghee which that’s gonna be more animal-based. MCT oil or your Caproic, Caprylic uhm—Lauric acids. These C6, C8, C10, C12 fatty acids, these are gonna be in the coconut. That’s great. Uh—so those are gonna be some of the really good ones to start with. All avocado oils, another really good neutral one as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I just wanna point out the fact that we’re hitting a lot of really good foundational nutrients but we could do entire episodes just on magnesium, just on vitamin C.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We have that on magnesium. I know that.
Evan Brand: I think we did. Yeah. So if—if we feel like we’re glossing over some deep aspects, then that’s okay. The vitamin D that’s huge. It’s really a hormone called vitamin but vitamin D is important we like to your levels at preferably 60 or above. I say nine out of every 10 people are gonna. be deficient in magnesium As you get older, you can’t convert sunlight into usable vitamin D as much. So even if you’re getting plenty of sun exposure which I’ve talked to people who garden for six hours a day, they are still deficient in vitamin D. And so in less— you’re like Dr. Mercola, where he said he hadn’t supplemented in seven years, something like that, 5-6-7 years, he lives at a very south latitude in Florida. He’s out on the beach hours— three hours a day with so much skin exposed and he keeps his levels at about 60. So I unless you got that amount of time and lifestyle to dedicate—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Evan Brand: ..to sun, it’s gonna be really tough to keep it at adequate level.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I hundred percent agree. So Vitamin D is really important. We try to do it with actual sun exposure, uhm— don’t burn, kinda get your Minimal Erythemal Dose, MED, if you will. And uhm— supplement the rest. If you can— if you just do a really good 25 hydroxy vitamin or a regular vitamin D3, mine’s uh—Emulsi D Supreme and it’s got the uh—MCT oil and the vitamin D3—D3 in there which is a really good form. Again, you can also add some K2 in it. My biggest issue is you don’t get enough vitamin D with the K2 ones but just make sure getting some really good K2 in your foods which fermented foods are gonna have a lot of K2 uhm—a healthy gut bacteria makes some K2 and then also a healthy grass-fed butter or ghee are gonna be other excellent sources of vitamin K2 as well.
Evan Brand: So Designs has one that’s got 5000 IU of D+ K warning K2. I can’t remember the name. But it’s a pretty good one and I’ve used it before think. I think—I think it’s gonna be called the Su—I think it’s Supreme.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Evan Brand: That’s what is it. D Supreme.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The problem is the vitamin D levels in it are very, very low. That’s the only issue.
Evan Brand: I think it’s a 5000. What are you—what are you talking about using? You talking about using 8 or 10 thousand or is 5,000 good in your eyes?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It just depends. I like doing the liquid Vitamin D just because if I need to use it therapeutically like someone’s sick, right? I may do 100,000 IUs—
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that ends up being like 20 or 30 pills. It becomes doing too hard, so it’s easier to take like 30 or 40 drops put in your smoothie and you don’t even know you had it.
Evan Brand: Well said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I go more with the liquid, but again, your great vitamin K sources are gonna your green leafy’s, fermented foods like—like Natto, of course, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, fermented dairy, prunes, uh—high quality uh— grass-fed butter or ghee. So you really, you know, you can get a lot of those uhm—make sure you’re getting a lot of good nutrients from those foods. Make sure their organic and that will help significantly. So if you’re doing a vitamin D, you really want to make sure that K2’s there and make sure those foods are really good in your diet and a lot of good multis and have a little bit of K2 in there, too.
Evan Brand: Good, good. Well said. Shall we look at a couple questions here?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Let’s hit them.
Evan Brand: Okay. So uh—we had a question about Mercola’s complete probiotic. It’s probably decent, Justin and I use professional grade. So if there’s a consumer grade product out there, we’re always gonna say ours is better because we’ve got healthcare manufacturers that make our products. There is very, very, very stringent restrictions in testing and manufacturing processes that we use and so were always going to push you towards our probiotics instead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: His is probably good, though.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’m sure their good. I mean Mercola’s, you know, he’s very detail oriented. So I’m sure his are good but we’re biased. So we’re gonna want you to buy ours.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So you could check out uh—justinhealth.com Check out his line. He’s got several in the gut support section and I’ve got a few formulas, too, that I’ve got on my site evanbrand.com You can check out those.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Perfect.
Evan Brand: Alright. Let’s keep going. What else as we’ve got here? Uh— Robert he asked, “What foods and supplements can you take to speed up restoring low secretory IGA?” What do you think? I think a lot of the gut supports like the leaky gut formulas, your slippery elm, your marshmallow roots, chamomile flowers, anything that’s kinda fix a leaky gut situation maybe some mushrooms to support the IGA for the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think making sure the infections are gone, number one. Making sure the diet’s good. Making sure you’re breaking down the foods that you’re eating. Uhm— number three, once the infections gone, adding in a lot of the healing nutrients. So in my line, we use one called, GI Restore, which is a lot of those same nutrients. Uhm—it’s got the glutamine, it’s got the slippery Elm, the aloe, the DGL, a lot of the healing, soothing nutrients. Getting the probiotics up is gonna be really helpful, you know, the Lactobacillus, the Bifidobacter strands, various strands there. Also very high amounts Saccharomyces Boulardiis is proven to help improve IgA levels. So those are really good things that you can add in there. And just making sure the adrenals are supported.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because a healthy cortisol levels have a impact on your immune system which has an impact on your IgA. Coz your IgA is that mucosal that first-line defense for your immune system.
Evan Brand: Yes. So chronic stress, too, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: If you’re taking all the supplements in the world but you have a terrible boss and you hate your life, you’ve got to address that chronic stress component coz that’s gonna be the number one cause that’s going to drive down the secretory IgA.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent.
Evan Brand: Uh—there’s another question here. There was a supplement a person had to had a tiny bit of soy lecithin in it should they be concerned? What’s your take?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I wouldn’t worry about soy lecithin. It’s tough. Uhm—soy lecithin is more of an emulsifier. It’s more to help with the digestion and the mixing of that product is typically not gonna be soy protein in that.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The soy protein is really what causes the problems. Lecithin’s more of an emulsifier. So as long as it’s a good quality product uhm— I’m okay with there being a little bit of soy lecithin in there.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I’ve got a couple formulas that have it in there. I’ve had people say, “Oh my God, I’m allergic to soy.” They’re fine. They have no issue. that’s not actually— it’s such a— it’s such an extracted form that it’s not like you’re eating soy. You’re not eating soybean.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. And then in my line, I think I may just have a few that have soy lecithin in there. But we were able to make sure that it’s guaranteed that it’s non-GMO soy. So you really want to make sure it’s at least non-GMO soy lecithin. And as long as that’s there, I’m okay with it.
Evan Brand: And it’s gonna be a tiny amount. When you look at the formula we’re talking and the other ingredients, it’s not an active ingredient. So could be 1% of the formula.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And less, you know, single digits fraction of percents for sure.
Evan Brand: Yup. Good. What else we’ve got here? If you feel like hitting this and we can, we can save it for another day—symptoms of chronic intestinal infections. I think we hit on that already with the hair, the skin, the nails, the acne, depression, anxiety, fatigue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. All your— all your common symptoms, right? Your uhm— your intestinal symptoms: bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, bloating, acid reflux. And then your extra intestinal which are all the mood-based and energy-based: fatigue, mood, joint pain, depression, anxiety. Those kind of things, sleep,—
Evan Brand: Autoimmunity—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hormone stuff, autoimmunity. And we got a whole podcast on that. So just google digestion or parasites or leaky gut and you’ll get a whole bunch of podcast and videos on that topic.
Evan Brand: Cool. Robert said he loved our podcast on histamine and it hit home prior to having infections no foods were problem, uh—post infection, fermented foods read havoc on him. So thanks for the podcast. Thanks for the feedback Robert. We love to hear that the histamine podcast was a killer one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m looking forward to chatting with you soon, Robert. I know uhm—you’ve been doing good work on your— on yourself there with uh— some of those good informational put in the podcast. But if you need more support, let us know. I’d get retested. Make sure we get to the root cause coz if those issues are still there with the post histamine stuff, there may be some additional critters hanging around.
Evan Brand: Yep. I agree. Another question about chronic dry eyes. “How often have you seen this with your patients? I’m working on healing the gut do you think there could be other root causes to dry eyes?” Justin, what’s your take?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Chronically low cortisol. You’ll see load—you’ll see dry eyes. Typically, get your diet stable. Once your diet’s stable, you can add a lower carbohydrate kinda diet. If those dry eyes are still there, gently taper out that carbohydrate every couple of days. You know, 10- 15 g of carbs primarily at nights. Do the safe starchy versions: squash, sweet potatoes, plantains, those kind of things. And you may see those dry eyes start to go away. You can even try a tablespoon of coconut oil and a teaspoon of honey, right, before bed as well that may help.
Evan Brand: Cool. So what else we’ve got? “Can I re-infect myself with H. pylori with makeup like lipsticks that I’ve used when I had H. pylori? I’ve no idea what the lifespan of that is on the product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is possible. I mean I would just look at uhm—the lipstick stuff. Maybe just get a razor blade and cut that end off there. I think you’d probably be okay with that. Uhm— typically, you know, as you knock out the infection, you know, you’d still be using it. So eventually, you’d wear off that but I think if you wanna be on the safe side, I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind. Even more important uhm—things that you can quite excise as easy like partners, right? Spouses. Ideally getting them at least treated semi- “semi” meaning maybe we only use one supplement just coz the compliance is so important. I would really be more—more imperative on the spouses and the partners.
Evan Brand: I agree. Partners are probably much bigger issue, much bigger carrier and reinfection source than your makeup and lipstick. I don’t know of any high-quality lipstick. Maybe they’re out there, but I would just throw that stuff away and maybe does discontinue using lipstick, too. I doubt you’re missing out on much in you know it’s— there’s parabens and all sorts of other stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And they have some really good things on the market now that do a lot like food-based ones where they are like extracting cherries and all these different food-based ones that kinda produces the fruit-based stain and kinda gives you a similar look but it’s using nutrition and foods versus, you know, some of the synthetic things.
Evan Brand: Uhh..okay, okay. So maybe you— maybe you stick with the lipstick then. Alright. James said he had a over sympathetic—let’s see having over sympathetic with sexual activity does blood pressure med Norvasc affect ED issues? That’s kinda like—I don’t even fully understand what you’re saying coz it’s kinda like a piece together thing. Are you understanding what he’s asking?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think what he’s saying is those medications have a potential side effect of erectile dysfunction? I would just go to RXlist.com and put that medication in there and look at that long list of side effects. I can—I can do it from right here while we continue with the conversation. What was the medication called again?
Evan Brand: It’s N-O-R-V-A-S-C. Norvasc.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool. I’ll pull it up here in a second. N-O-R-V-A-S-C?
Evan Brand: N-O-R-V-A-S-C. as in Charlie.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Norvasc. Got it. Okay, cool.
Evan Brand: Then he’s saying, even with Viagra, it doesn’t correct lack of sensitivity. So, yeah, I mean here’s my easy quick answer. If you didn’t have those symptoms before and now you’re on this drug and those symptoms are happening, how could that not be a factor?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. This is a an—an—Am—Amlodipine, which is a basically a calcium channel blocker, okay? Which is a calcium channel blocker, which again, magnesium kind of does the same thing, FYI. And if we look at the side effects, uh—feelings like you may pass out, swelling in your hands feet and ankles, pounding heart beat or fluttering on your chest, chest pain, heavy pain spreading arms and shoulders, nausea, general ill and there’s more uhm— side effects as well. So—
Evan Brand: It’s like a commercial all of a sudden.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know, right? Let me see here: dizziness, drowsiness, tired, stomach pain—
Evan Brand: What is this—what is that? That’s for blood pressure? Is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. This is for blood pressure medication, but I think what you said is the best advice if that wasn’t there before and then you started taking the medication and it started happening, as long as your blood pressure is not too bad and you could taper down or you could come off with your doctor’s approval, uhm— I would have no problem doing that and seeing if those symptoms improve, then you know. Coz in the end, if it’s not a side effect on RX list.com but you take the meds out and it gets better, does it really matter that they say it is? We know clinically, right?
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Evan Brand: There’s so many ways. Didn’t we do a whole podcast—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Don’t—don’t come off. If your blood pressure is 160-170 and you’re on blood pressure medications, coz it will go that high afterwards, don’t come off it. You really want to make sure that if you’re on a medication and you wanted to try and see if there’s an issue, one, fix the root causes; but two, talk to the medical doctor that prescribed it and make sure they’re in concurrence—you know, in agreement with you on the taper that you’re going to do. Make sure they are on the same page.
Evan Brand: Yes. Some people they go to the other end of the spectrum where there are so anti-pharmaceutical that “I’m getting off of this.” That’s bad. You— that’s like stroke territory. So don’t do that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You just gotta be careful. Some people if you’re like 130 or 140 over like 80 or 90, not too bad. You could probably come off as long as you’re fixing other root issues, but just have a blood pressure cuff by your bed, test it in the morning, see where you’re at. Just you— you want to do it responsibly. If you do it and you want to get to the prescribing doctor on the same page as you. You don’t want to go rogue.
Evan Brand: Yup. Well said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Any other questions you wanna hit up?
Evan Brand: Uh let’s see. What else we’ve got.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I have one here. We got one on Facebook here from Michelle or from
Mitchell. “Can L- tyrosine for dopamine support be too stimulating? How much should be taken to minimize side effects?” Yeah. It can be for some people. Uhm— tyrosine can kinda provide precursor supports to dopamine which then above that can go to adrenaline, so it can be. I think starting at 500 mg and working up to maybe, potentially 3 to even 6 g a day is okay. But start low and slow and if you know that it is stimulating, use it more in that first half of the day not the last half of the day.
Evan Brand: Yup. That’s a simple fix. Good answer. Uh—Nora had a follow-up here. “Thanks for answering the question. So can I successfully eradicate H. pylori and other pathogens as if I live with people who have it. Do they have to do treatment in parallel with me?” Well, if you’re sexually active with people, you’re kissing or simple enough, even just sharing straws, sharing cups, drinking after each other, that’s enough to infect them. So even if it’s not a partner, but it’s someone, “Oh, hey, let me have a drink of that.” That’s enough to still pass H. pylori. Justin and I have seen it hundreds of times.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The stronger your immune system is, it becomes less of an issue so like with Evan and myself, we have stronger immune systems coz we work on that. We maybe less prone because our IgA levels are up high enough where the tiny bit of that in your system, our IgA would squash it. But if your IgA is lower and you got more the stress going on and you have poor hydrochloric acid levels, then for sure. That could happen.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I had low IgA, too. So that’s something that you’d want it measured Nora and check with the stool testing and look for your IGA figure out which your first line of defense is looking like. If it’s low and weak, you’ve just got a lot of chronic stress, then, yeah, you’re gonna be more susceptible to—to pick it up. But to answer the question, “Could you eradicate it?” If you live with other people, yeah, you could but there’s gotta be a lot of things in your favor and you’re not sharing or sharing cups or drinking for most people or kissing them etc. Uhm— Anthony—well there’s one question about—from Anthony. He said, “It’s been over five years with gut issues, irregular stools, many doctor visits.” He found out that he had a whey and casein allergy. “Where should you start to get help?” Oh, wow! That’s a hard one to answer. Uh—right here. Justin and myself. justinhealth.com evanbrand.com I mean we’ve dealt with people who’ve already been to many doctors. I mean it’s such a common story. We always asked the question, “Hey, kinda give us your history. What—what’s been your experience with other practitioners? What have you tried to help? What have you tried that hasn’t helped?” I’d say 90% of people we talked with they’ve already been to a either a Gastro doctor or some other type of doc for their gut issues and they’ve had no success and only prescription drugs like I got recommended to myself anti-spasmodic, anti-acid drugs. If you’ve got a regular Bell’s, man, you’ve got infections. I can put money on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I’m a huge believer— I want every patient to at least go in the conventional medical workup before they come see functional docs or functional practitioners like ourselves just to rule out big picture pathology stuff. You know, it just makes it so we at least know that the big glaring stuff is at least been looked at and addressed and assessed. And now we’re looking more functional imbalances which is really what functional medicine is treating. It’s not medicine from a conventional disease based medicine; it’s medicine from a uh— nutritional kind of support perspective working on supporting systems, not treating symptoms and disease.
Evan Brand: Yup. We’ll take one more question here. Uh from Charlotte O: “How do you feel about NOW foods brand supplements my health coach is using them on me. I think NOW foods is okay it’s once again, a consumer grade product, so it is going to be likely less high-quality. I have seen some fillers and some of their products. I have seen them do some inferior forms of certain nutrients; however, they’ve also got a lot of really good products, too, where they’re stepping up their game in they’re using the methylated bees and the higher qualities with the Omega’s, so.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And plus, people doesn’t know. NOW has another line. It’s a higher up line. It’s called “Protocols For Life” That’s their higher-grade line. So if you like NOW, look at Protocols For Life.
Evan Brand: Is protocol uh—will that have to be through practitioner or is that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Couldn’t say it’s a practitioner one but it’s a little bit higher grade but it’s—it’s made by the same company. It’s their one step up.
Evan Brand: But overall what’s your take on NOW?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean I think they’re okay for certain things. You know, uhm— so as a kind of initial kinda get in your foot in the door kinda thing, I think it’s okay. But of course, you know, we—we have are our bias because were trying to get the highest quality in everything. And part of that is because we actually work with patients face to face. It’s not like they go online and buy something, we never see them again. We’re working with them face-to-face so we have to know that what we’re recommending is the best because we need to seek clinical outcome. So we have to know that. So it’s a little bit different for us because we gotta go all out and make sure that nothing is held back.
Evan Brand: Right. So when you’ve got these other companies and people out there promoting stuff, they’re not working with people one-on-one. So it comes directly back on Justin or directly back on me if we give him our product and it doesn’t work. That’s not very sustainable for us. So that’s why it’s much, much better enough for us. That’s why we have access for people that don’t work with us. We allow other people outside to access our uh—products because they’ve been tried and true and tested. And if they didn’t work with people, we wouldn’t carry them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And if it doesn’t work, too, then it allows us to say, “Okay, there’s not some crappy filler or there’s some sub—sub nutrient in there. Let’s look a little bit deeper.” So it gives us the confidence that we just need to look deeper now. So it’s gonna be on both sides.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And just a firsthand experience with NOW foods and the secondhand, I guess, through clients. I’ve had people taking like their super enzymes, for example, and I get their digestive health markers investigated on the urine and stool test, and it looks terrible. Their digestion is not working at all even with the high dose of their enzymes. So does that mean the quality is bad? Does that mean they’re not dosing it properly? Maybe they’re not consistent as much. I don’t know. Probably a combination of factors, but I always switch over people over to my professional enzymes and then I retest and then all of a sudden, it’s fixed. Is it compliance? Is it quality? Probably both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And you know everyone has got their bias and we kinda state our bias there. You know, we’re trying to be uhm— super transparent. Uhm—but yeah, I think there 95% of companies that are out there are bad. But I think that would be in that—I would say they’re in that 5% at least are better, for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s it for questions. Anything else you want to hit before we wrap it up. I think we did pretty good today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think James uh—who is it—someone came out there—was it James—Yeah. James asked about Tom Brady. Again, love Tom Brady. Huge Patriots fan. Again Tom Brady does lots of things I would say go back and check out the podcast I did on him a year and a half ago for more specifics but he does use the green stuff. He does kinda promote like a Paleo-Alkaline diet. A lot of people have really uh—let’s just say Tom Brady like have a vegan cook. So because he had a vegan cook, Tom Brady was now on a vegan diet. No. He eats 20% meat. That’s far from vegan, okay? So just kinda keep that in the back of your mind. A lot of misnomers about Tom and he has a lot of a different training uh—modalities, too, that I’m hoping— I would love to get Tom Brady’s coach or strength coach on there.
Evan Brand: Or just get Tom Brady and the coach in a three-way podcast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would love that, man. I would love to hang out with Tom and get some secrets down. That’d be awesome. I think he may need to wait til he retires to truly unveil some of the stuff. But we’ll see.
Evan Brand: That’s true. That’s true. Well, reach out. I’m sure there’s a media/press person and tell him, “Look, we’ve got insanely popular health podcast. Uh— we’d like to interview Tom and his coach.” But yeah, they’d probably be like, “No way, dude. We’re not giving you the secret sauce, hold on.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know. I know. Exactly, so— I know Alex Guerrero is— is his—uh coach that does a lot of the stuff. So I mean— really, really interested to get Alex on a uh— podcast. That’d be freaking awesome.
Evan Brand: Never hurts to ask.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, absolutely, man.
Evan Brand: Well, let’s wrap this thing up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We had a great call today. I’m late for my next patient here, but uhm—keep dropping knowledge bombs all day, man. Really enjoyed this call with you. Anything else you want to add or say?
Evan Brand: Well I think we mentioned it all. If people wanna work with us, we work with people around the world. So Skype and phone consultations is what we do and all the lab testing except for blood you do at your house. So if you want to get help, get to the root cause, reach out justinhealth.com or Google Dr. Justin Marchegiani or myself evanbrand.com or type in Evan Brand. Find us. Subscribe. And if you have more questions, concerns, get a hold of us. That’s what we’re here for. We love helping people. That’s what makes us thrive so we won’t help you thrive, too. So, have a great day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And leave some comments below. If you like this podcast, tell us. Tell us what you like. If you don’t like stuff, tell us what you don’t like. And tell us what you want us to talk about next time and give us a thumbs up. Give us a share. We really appreciate it, guys. And you all have an awesome day, Take care you all.
Evan Brand: Take care.
References:
https://justinhealth.com/products/magnesium-supreme/
https://justinhealth.com/products/emulsi-d-supreme/
https://justinhealth.com/products/gi-restore/
Magnesium Deficiency Causes and Solutions
By: Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Magnesium is essential for proper function of over 300 enzymatic reactions and for the performance of many vital physiological functions: from heartbeat regulation to muscle contraction and relaxation. Magnesium is crucial to the body and plays a part in almost every facet of your well-being and that is why a magnesium deficiency can be responsible for almost every symptom dragging you down.
BENEFITS
- Boosts memory function
- Muscle relaxation and sleep
- Regulates mood and stress
- Manages the excitability of the nervous system (calming)
- Blood sugar control
- Healthy bone density
- Cardiovascular support
- Detoxification pathways in the liver
- Normal gut function
- Inhibits calcium-induced cell death
- Helps prevent osteoporosis, needed for bone formation
- Vital for proper transcription of DNA and RNA
DEFICIENCY CAUSES AND SYMPTOMS
Due to soil depletion and the omnipresence of processed foods, magnesium is becoming hard to find in the average American’s diet. Even within the health-conscious, high rates of prescription medications and antibiotic use lead to digestive disorders and impaired gut function, causing malabsorption of not only magnesium, but of minerals and nutrients in general, despite an otherwise clean diet.
Watching sugar and caffeine intake is important to ensure proper absorption of magnesium. Fluoride in our water supply can also negatively affect magnesium absorption.
A magnesium deficiency can cause:
- Muscles aches and spasms
- Poor digestion
- Anxiety
- Trouble sleeping and insomnia
- Kidney and liver damage
- Hypertension
- Cardiovascular disease
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Alzheimer’s
- Worsened PMS
- Behavioral disorders
- Mood swings
- Osteoporosis
- Depressed immune system
- Cavities
- Muscle weakness and cramps
- Heart arrhythmias
- Headaches
- Nausea
- Depression
…and pretty much everything else you don’t want. Neurosurgeon Dr. Norman Shealy says ,“Every known illness is associated with a magnesium deficiency […] A magnesium deficiency may be responsible for more diseases than any other nutrient.”
A study by the British Journal of Cancer in December 2015 looked at the incidents of pancreatic cancer by magnesium intake categories of 66,000 men and women, aged 50-76. It found that for every 100mg per day of magnesium less that was consumed, your risk for pancreatic cancer went up by 24%.
If you are concerned about a magnesium deficiency or have other health queries, book your intro consult today with Dr. Justin: http://justinhealth.com/free-consultation/
SOURCES OF MAGNESIUM
- Leafy greens
- Nuts and seeds
- Fish, such as mackerel and salmon, especially eating some of the very small bones
- Green beans
- Avocado
- Banana
- High quality dark chocolate (It’s postulated that women crave dark chocolate around the start of their period because the magnesium helps with cramps and PMS symptoms)
- Epsom salt baths are excellent as you have a large surface area (your skin) taking in the magnesium. Try 1-2 cups of Epsom salt (which is basically magnesium sulfate) in your bath for some incredibly relaxing effects.
- An alternate mode of relaxation through magnesium would be to hop into a float tank. Taking in about a thousand pounds of Epsom salt in about 10 inches of water leaves you feeling incredible.
- An alternate mode of relaxation through magnesium would be to hop into a float tank. Taking in about a thousand pounds of Epsom salt in about 10 inches of water leaves you feeling incredible.
DOSAGE & FORMS
- Magnesium oxide only has about a 4% absorption rate and is comparable to table chalk. It’s cheap, easy to find, and works well as a laxative.
- Magnesium citrate, as you find in such products as Natural Calm, is a step above magnesium oxide. It’s also rather inexpensive, works as a laxative, with a higher absorption rate.
- Magnesium malate is very well-absorbed and acts as a calming agent rather than a laxative.
- Magnesium glycinate is also calming without the laxative effect. It is well-absorbed as it binds to the amino acid glycine. The glycinate form tends to provide the highest levels of absorption and bioavailability, and therefore is ideal for those trying to correct a deficiency.
- Magnesium threonate is a newer form which seems promising due to its ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and mitochondrial membrane.
If you are looking to get some extra magnesium into your diet, try Magnesium Supreme (https://justinhealth.com/products/magnesium-supreme/): a relaxing 50/50 blend of Magnesium malate and Magnesium glycinate.
To listen to Dr. Justin’s podcast with Evan Brand on magnesium, check out podcast #93: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LWIGamxE2k
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4455825/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10727669
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1855626/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23853635
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19828898
http://gotmag.org/magnesium-deficiency-101/
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/12/08/magnesium-health-benefits.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVZqJM5BGRU
Magnesium Benefits and Magnesium Deficiency – Podcast # 128
Join Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand as they talk about Magnesium – its importance and reasons for deficiency. Listen to them and learn the symptoms and implications of not having enough magnesium in our health.
Discover Magnesium Threonate and Magnesium Taurate as the listeners pose questions about it. Explore the different sources of magnesium that can be found in natural sources, whether food or supplement. And know about the changes that you can make in your lifestyle that will have an impact on magnesium and in turn, bring positive effects to your health.
In this episode, we cover:
1:45 Importance of Magnesium
3:10 Magnesium Deficiency Symptoms
6:27 Magnesium Threonate
8:38 Magnesium Taurate
15:57 Top Ten Food Sources of Magnesium
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we’re live on Youtube and we are live on Facebook. Evan, my man, we’re back. Whats going on, man?
Evan Brand: How you doing? Feels like uh just– yesterday we were doing this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Its still a live Q&A. Just a few minutes ago, I appreciate you uh – gracing us with your presence at the inn.
Evan Brand: How did that go? What did you do? You just went in there, and you just said, “Hey, I’m here to ask – uh answer questions, start asking” and that was it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We gotta start on a little Impromptu Functional Medicine Club, you know. Instead of doing comedy and skits, we just do our functional medicine info.
Evan Brand: I agree.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It would make us look better, what do you think?
Evan Brand: I agree. Let’s do it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool man. Well, I’m live on Facebook here. You’re not gonna be able to hear Evan’s beautiful voice on YouTube. So I’ll see if we can a link below. You can also go to YouTube.com/justinhealth and I’ll try to put a up on here, right now so people can access that information if they are ready to go over there. So Evan, why don’t chat for a minute about uh –magnesium.
Evan Brand: Yes. This is huge and we’ve gotta give credit where credit is due. And so Morley Robbins from gotmag.org I’m not quite sure how that worked if he founded it or what, but the magnesium advocacy group, it’s just an incredible source of information about magnesium-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Evan Brand: How big of an issue is magnesium deficiency; Why is magnesium deficiency happening; why is this so much more prevalent in the modern world; how can you test for your status; and what is your protocol; how do you restore magnesium and what type of symptoms would someone listening be experiencing if you were deficient. That’s what we want to cover today – together today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Well magnesium over 1000 in enzymatic roles in the body, really important as a muscle relaxer; really important for blood sugar handling; uhm – really important just to – for anabolic Krebs cycle for helping to reduce the brain inflammation. So many different things. The more stressed your under, the more you’re actually gonna burned through magnesium. The more you eat sugar, right? The more refined sugar, the more –magnesium’s the cofactor for metabolising sugar; so high sugar diets and high stressed diets are one of the major ways you’re gonna deplete magnesium. Number one, you deplete it because you’re burning it out more to – to process it. Two, for stress, you’re gonna dump more of it in the kidneys into the urine. And then number three, if you’re busy eating crappy food, you are not getting magnesium rich foods, leafy greans and such in your diet and boost up your magnesium.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s over a couple of statistics here. In terms of magnesium deficiency statistics, two out of every three Americans-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Evan Brand: -do not consume even the RDA from magnesium, which is 500 mg a day. A lot of times the RDA’s are crap and we typically like people above those, but even that, people are not meeting that 500 mg. And then for those headed to the hospital, uhm – 80% of patients in an ICU setting are considered magnesium deficient.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Evan Brand: So that’s pretty interesting. There in the wait- Morely kinda breaks down the his uh –magnesium deficiency symptom. And he’s got tons of scientific literature on this, too. He’s got your uh – mild symptoms such as like food cravings for sugar, headaches, hiccups, hyper-, hypoglycemia, irritability, loss of appetite, mood swings, muscle cramps, nausea, and nervousness, poor memory, uh – weakness and then you can go into the really, really big magnesium issues like uhm – A fib, which is what my grandmother’s got – cardiac atrial fibrillation. You’ve got congestive heart failure; you’ve got obesity; you’ve got renal failure; you’ve got stroke; you’ve got alcoholism, which makes sense; you’ve got celiac disease linked; you’ve got chronic kidney disease; concussions; depression; failure to thrive. I mean we could just list a thousand. Even PMS, I mean, we could list a thousand and bore people but I think a lot of those symptoms will probably hit home from many people listening.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, 100%. And again, magnesium is super important, especially like in today’s day and age of anxiety, right? And mood issues, one of the first things that we’re reaching for with mood, is like a benzodiazepine or like an antidepressant. And one of things that you can do to kinda like wind down and relax your nervous system and kinda relax your stress handling systems, is up to magnesium. That can make such a huge benefit.
Evan Brand: Well, remember that one night, I think it was when I was about to move back to Kentucky and I was stressed out, we had the house all packed up in Austin, I called you, I’m like, “Yo, my heart is 5000 beats a minute.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Evan Brand: This is crazy. And you go, “Oh, man, don’t worry just do a gram of magnesium.” I’m like, “Alright, I’m going for it.” I did a gram of magnesium and things slowly came back down to normal. So, you know, I’ve personally experience the benefits of magnesium. And you and I use it in some form, typically with all of our clients. Even if it’s just a uh – maintenance dose, so whether we’re trying to do a therapeutic intervention, which we can talk. Either way, we’ve typically got everyone on some sort of magnesium somewhere.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Whether it’s in our multi- support and typically the big one’s that I like, right? I like a good magnesium malate because it interplays with the Krebs cycle as well. And it’s chelated to an amino acid malate.
Evan Brand: Yeah, its pretty cheap, too, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It’s pretty affordable. I mean that and glycinate are really good. They’re very well absorbed. Uh – and they’re also gonna help with the Krebs cycle, which – that’s gonna help the blood sugar issues; it’s gonna help with energy issues; and it’s gonna help with stress and relaxation. That’s a good one. Magnesium citrates, commonly in like uh – a natural calm, which is really good. I typically do a little bit of mag citrate at night in a powder form and I mix it with collagen, so it’s kinda like – almost like my own little magnesium glycinate coz I’m taking it with all the glycine and collagen. And l like that for bed for hour and hour of relaxation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Most of our audience is pretty advanced but it is worth mentioning that if you are thinking of picking up a magnesium supplement, if you go to Walmart or Target or just your typical store to get magnesium, you’re likely gonna end up getting magnesium oxide, which has a 4% absorption rate. And typically there’s gonna be tons and tons of fillers, gluten, rice, other types of stuff in there. And so we only use professional grade products in our lines and then also, you know, we will refer out to other professional lines as needed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We got in some questions on a Mag Threonate here. A Mag Threonate, again, that’s gonna be really good especially if there’s some significant malabsorption issues. It helps with healthy brain inflammation, so taking it transdermally can help coz it can cross the blood-brain barrier. And if there’s like a lot of brain inflammation, and we’ll see that like in organic acid test. We’ll see an elevated – quinolinate or we’ll see an elevation in picolinate – picolinic acid. And that will be a big sign for increasing magnesium and if we have kids that are like autistic, or a lot of gut issues, or people can’t swallow pills, the transdermal’s great. I did flow tank, man. I did a flow tank over the weekend. So I was in 1200 pounds of magnesium salts. So after I came out of outside, it’s like shallow and super relaxed.
Evan Brand: Where did you go? Did you go to my friend zero gravity, over there at Manchaka? Or where did you go?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That zero gravity, man. How did you know?
Evan Brand: Well, coz Kevin – I know Kevin. He’s been on my podcast three times – the owner.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, I gotta have him on my podcast. That’s awesome.
Evan Brand: Yeah. He’s in – he’s in Austin. You guys can do an in-person podcast, if you wanted.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, I love it. I’m definitely excited, man. I love it. I love it.
Evan Brand: Let me connect you guys right now, then.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s do it. Live in the flesh.
Evan Brand: Alright. So uh – I did wanna mention about Threonate coz I saw there was a question about it because I discussed it in my latest video, on my YouTube channel – my top 12 ways of reducing anxiety. And I love Threonate. So I have a formula called, Calm Clarity, and that’s what I use for people. And there’s a lot of cool research about Threonate specifically for people with PTSD. So I do have some veterans that I have used the Threonate with them and they say that it seriously works. And even if they’re not veterans, if they just experience trauma, it does an amazing stuff gain, the magnesium into the brain, much more than just getting it into the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean that’s gets really good stuff. In my line, we have Magnesium Supreme. It’s what I used and that’s the magnesium malate. Uh – and I’m doing an lot of Krebs cycle uhm – support prgoram. I find a lot of people with Krebs Cycle or mitochondrial issues. They do really well uh – the magnesium uhm – malate just because of the uh – Krebs cycle.
Evan Brand: Yup. That’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So looking at other things here, we got – so my buddy, Steve, here on Facebook wants to talk about Magnesium Taurate for blood pressue issues. He wants to know is there mag uh – glycinate and taurate. Well, outside of just the obvious, that glycine is amino acid and taurine is an amino acid. So they’re just bound to different amino acids. I know glycinate has phenomenal absorption. In the research, it’s like 90+ percent get absorbed. What’s your take on magnesium Taurate, Evan?
Evan Brand: I like Taurate, but I haven’t used it as much as glycinate, the malates, citrates, or the threonates. Doesn’t mean it’s not as good, I just haven’t had as much hands on experience with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I just don’t have a ton of experience with it, Steve – but I mean, binding it to an amino acid is good if you’re getting a good clinical effect, let us know in the chat window. We’d love to hear that. But I’m definitely more biased towards a gycinate and malate but in the end, I’ll let the clinical outcome guide the ship.
Evan Brand: Agreed. That’s the best answer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Anything else, Evan, you wanna address? Like I gotta jump on another podcast here in a few uh – with our friend here, Kevin over at relive your bodies that will be – go on. Anything else you wanna – we wanna knock down here, in this quick little magnesium podcast.
Evan Brand: Epsom Salt Baths are great. They’re very easy. The Float tanks are gonna be better, though. And you’re gonna spend a lot of money on Epsom Salt if you’re trying to even match something that would be therapeutic. So, look up floatationlocations.com, and you can check out – type in your zipcode or if you’re out of the United States, type in your postal code and you can actually find float centers that are located near you. And typically you’re gonna spend about 60-75 bucks per hour, but it’s the best hour of your life. And when you come out, you’re gonna feel like you’ve been reborn.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Highly recommended, especially the whole sensory deprivation aspect where you open your eyes and you just don’t know if you’re asleep or awake. That’s pretty crazy. It has a big effect on relaxation. I may even go tonight, man. They’re open at 10 o’clock. I may –
Evan Brand: I know. Now, was that your first? First float?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: First float. Loved it.
Evan Brand: Are you serious?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Loved it.
Evan Brand: Oh, my god.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: First float.
Evan Brand: So I did my first float back in 2013. That was when I actually live flew into go to the Paleo f(x) for the first time and that center wasn’t open. I went to actually this little house. It was like a massage studio and they happen to have one of the small float tanks in there. And I had an out of body experience. I was basically looking at myself from a third . I’ve had some insane experience. There’s one time at Kevin’s facility, I visited Egypt during my float session. Like I was sitting on a pyramid overlooking the Nile River as it used to flow in Egypt, and then I snapped back into my body and I was, “huh” It was unbelievable. So yeah, float tanks are just unreal. We can do a whole show on it. Uh – Robert said, “What if taking magnesium causes slight nausea?” It think that – with citrate. Do you have any say on that, Justin, in terms of nausea and magnesium? I think it possibly could depend on what you’re getting. Coz if you are doing the natural calm, and you don’t feel well with the Stevia, maybe that’s part of it and not the magnesium itself. What do you think?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Regarding that piece, if you take too much magnesium, especially like uh – a magnesium citrate or oxide, it will create bowel flow, it will help – it’s a natural laxative, right? Magnesium oxide is actually a pretty good laxative; not good for absorption, but good for moving the bowels. Same with citrate – citrate is better for absorption but also good for moving the bowels. That could help move the bowels a bit which is excellent. Uhm – but again, if you move the bowels too much, or if you’re kinda in between, if you don’t get enough to move the bowels, if you don’t get enough to move the bowels, you can just kinda feel like your stomach in knots a little bit, and your stool is a little loose, so you just may be in that in between magnesium tolerance dosage. What do you think?
Evan Brand: Yeah. That, I agree with you. Uh – Riley said, “Please talk more about Magnesium Threonate.” Okay, I’ll tell you a couple of things here. Uhm – there was a study in the Journal of Neurosciences 2011 that suggest an enhancement of plasticity in brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex and/or the hippocampus with the use of uh – Magnesium L- Threonate. Also, the fear memory, without erasing the original fear memory, so this is like the trauma use. There is also another part, there is another piece of research here that shows that it can increase learning ability, working memory, short and long-term memory. And then also – let’s see, there’s one other thing. It will mediate the effects of exposure to stress on memory. And so basically take 2 grams for maintenance but if you’ve got memory loss, or other issues then you’re gonna 3 or 4 grams of the Threonate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. It’s great.
Evan Brand: There you go.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Magnesium is excellent. It’s a natural beta-blocker as well. Uhm –part of the receptors on the beta cells of the heart, they get stimulated by calcium, right? And magnesium and calcium kinda have this natural ratio and magnesium’s gonna come in there and block the beta receptors of the heart. So it decreases that – that stimulation. So that helps to relax the heart a little bit. And if the sympathetics kinda in overdrive, it will help bring that blood pressure down naturally, too, which is really cool.
Evan Brand: Ah. I love it. Okay. So before somebody gets in some type of ,crazy hard drug, it is possible that they could get on some magnesium first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Plus uhm the medication into the uhm – that medication and that medication, Foxglove is a natural herb for the medication that helps kinda reduce stroke, fall and reduce the heart pumping. That medication is a natural herb called Foxglove. So people, just starting low dose, Foxglove, if you’re having a lot of overly heart stimulation, like your heart is beating out of your chest, you know. First make sure you don’t have a heart attack, right? That’s number one. Rule that out by your conventional medical doctor. But uh – Foxglove and magnesium can really help kinda relax the heart a bit.
Evan Brand: You oughta chat with uh – Dr. Cawin, too. We talked about Ouabain. Ouabain it’s like uh – it’s like an ancient medicine but it’s used for heart attacks. And he said it should be basically standard care are in all uhm – ambulances. When they go to pick up someone that could potentially be having a heart attack, he says Ouabain should be on board on every ambulance in the world and it would save a lof of lives.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What is that exactly?
Evan Brand: I believe it’s some type of – I wanna say, it’s some type of plant. The spelling of it is really weird. It’s like –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s not Wobenzym, right? You’re saying something else?
Evan Brand: That’s correct. I’m saying Ouabain. It’s O-U-A-B-A-I-N. It’s also known as Strophanthin. And if you look it up, it was uh – traditionally use as an aero poison in Eastern Africa for hunting and warfare. But in lower doses, it can be used medically.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ouabain.
Evan Brand: Yeah, Ouabain.Yes. So that’s a trip but, uh – it is some type of plant. It’s uh – Strophantin, that’s what it is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Almost as good as when you say matcha.
Evan Brand: You like when I say “matcha” ?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Matcha tea. I love it. Love it. Very cool. It’s like word candy, man.
Evan Brand: Yes, it is. Well if there’s any question about magnesium, let us know. But otherwise, this is pretty straightforward. Modern life depletes magnesium, you have to replenish. I like float tanks. I like magnesium oil. Justin and I both use magnesium supplementally.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Evan Brand: We use it with our clients, too. So, also get your leafy, green vegetables, too, though. I mean that’s a good maintenance way, too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean let’s go over the top ten foods real quick. Let’s just make sure everyone knows what’s the top 10. I mean, off the bat, just your leafy green are gonna be excellent.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Your kale, your spinach, your leafy greens are just gonna be absolutely great. I mean if you look outside of the leafy greens, what else we have for magnesium? We have nuts and seeds. Squash and pumpkin seeds are gonna be the absolute highest. Fish is gonna be right there, in number three. Uhm, beans and lentils – again, uh – just be careful with that, right? White beans and French beans and Black eyed beans and kidney beans will be the best – Chickpeas as well. Again, if you’re kinda Paleo or you’re having some issues with the legumes, and you wanna stay away from that, uh – whole-grain, brown rice, but we’re not gonna make a recommendation there because it’s – grains are creating any malabsorption or gut irritation, you’re not gonna absorb the magnesium, anyway. Plus there’s lectins and phytates in there that will bind it up. So even though it says it’s good, the question is, “Do you actually absorb it?” And I will put a – a nay on that one.
Evan Brand: Agreed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Avocados are really excellent. Uhm – litle bit of bananas. Remember, like we’re talking about magnesium here. People think – when I say, bananas, what nutrient do you think of?
Evan Brand: Potassium
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bananas – bananas.
Evan Brand: Potassium. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. But avocados have twice the amount of potassium –
Evan Brand: I know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: – than bananas do.
Evan Brand: I know. How much does it – do you have any type of numbers in front of you, like how many milligrams of magnesium or – in one avocado, for example like a husk?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So uhm – 27 milligrams in a hundred grams per banana. And then in an avocado, it’s about uh – 29. So just a little bit more.
Evan Brand: And that’s for a 100 grams avocado. I don’t know how much is a 100 grams. I mean how many grams are in one full avocado?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Typically, about 3.3 ounces is a 100 gram. So probably about 1 avocado, maybe a little more.
Evan Brand: I mean I’ve had some avocados. I feel like they’re a pound.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know.
Evan Brand: It’s gonna be –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know. So – Just do the math, you know, figure out what 3.3 ounces is. It’s like the medium kinda husk avocado uhm – again, you’re probably okay. And again, we’re taking out the outer coating and the big uh – seed in the middle.
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, anything else we wanna hit there, so far?
Evan Brand: I don’t think so. Pumpkin seeds are great. I’m a huge fan of pumpkin seeds. Uhm, what about sunflower or kernels? Were those on the list at all?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhm – sunflower, kernels were not but we did have the pumpkin and squash seed. So- I’ll give you the run down. Uh – sesame, brazil, almonds, cashews, pinenuts, mixed nuts, peanuts, pecans and walnuts. In that exact order. Outside of squash and pumkin being number one and two.
Evan Brand: I’m a huge fan of walnuts, too. Put a little cinnamon on those bad boys, uhm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Love it. Excellent. And then obviously, uhm – dark chocolate at the end, great source of magnesium. Why the women at their period time crave dark chocolate? Very high source of magnesium. And again, if you’re choosing high dark chocolate, high cacao rate, you’re gonna get more cacao, more dark chocolate without the extra sugar and berry if it’s gonna be a milk chocolate. So try to reach for higher quality. Endangered species, 88%. Cobber on the front, uh Lindt. Any other good brands you like?
Evan Brand: So the endangered species is good. I love what they’re doing to save these animals, but they’re not organic. Trader Joe’s.Trader Joe’s has an organic bar. Get this – three ingredients, it’s 2.99 for the bar, I believe it’s 72%. And it’s coco cacao butter and sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s nice. That’s good. But for endangered species, they are GMO and they are certified gluten-free. So –
Evan Brand: They’re GMO free?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They’re GMO free, at least and they’re certified gluten – So that’s. And you know, you get two good things ideally if we could have the certified organic that’d be better.They do have one but it’s like a 75%. So you could go down to the 75 and get it that and what will you get, you’d get a little bit more sugar your bucks there.
Evan Brand: So what do you got in your fridge? You got 88 in there?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 88.
Evan Brand: Nice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 88. Absolutely, man. And I also got a couple of the KIND bars, too. There’s a 5 uh – 4 grams of sugar the uh – the uh – Madagascar Vanilla. Love those.
Evan Brand: That sounds good. Reviews help. They very, very much help. So go to uh – Beyond Wellness Radio on iTunes. That’s where Justin’s podcast is housed. Put a revie there. I mean, it takes a few minutes and you’re probably just gonna ignore me because just like when a pop up comes up on your phone and this is, “Hey, do you love this app review?” And you just click, “No, thanks” Don’t “no thanks” me. Please review Beyond Wellness on iTunes and notjustpaleo, too. And – and review it. It takes literally two minutes but when you do that, what it does is keeps us in the top 100 of health. So that way we’re beating out Jillian Michaels which is the exercise more, eat less approach. And I don’t want to be number one on the – on the rankings. We want functional medicine at the top of the charts because this is with the masses needs. So the review helps us to do that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, by the way, yeah – people Facebook, give us a review, notjustpaleo.com and justinhealth.com Click on the podcast link, iTunes review. Also you just mentioned, biggest loser people like Jillian Michael’s. Bob Harper just had a heart attack last week.
Evan Brand: Tell people about that if they didn’t hear. Just give –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, Bob Harper was Jillian Michael’s side kick. They’re on the biggest loser and uhm – you know, I like the guy – his personality, pretty cool guy. But again, they’re kinda recommending this exercise more, eat less low-calorie, whole grain, low-fat kinda mind set. No emph – no emphasis on uhm – nutrient quality; no emphasis on inflammatory nutrients; no emphasis on toxins and organic foods. And again, just do more exercise, more oxidative stress, not good fats, it’s not healthy animal products. The guy gets a heart attack. I mean, maybe he’s not eating that way, but that’s the way he’s suggesting a lot of the contestants to eat. And the guy’s in his 40’s. You shouldn’t be getting a heart attack looking like as he does in his 40’s. Again, fit and healthy are two different things, though.
Evan Brand: Yes, so let me give a couple of more notes so people understand the insanity of this. I mean as you mentioned, he’s the host of the show.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: On TV that’s getting broadcast to millions of people. Yeah, he looks okay, like if you look at his uh – his picture, there’s a couple article where he posts like an Instagram picture of him. He looks okay externally. I mean the guy is not like overweight. But internally, it could be a whole different show. So –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Evan Brand: He was working out at a New York City gym, and he collapsed, and he was unconscious in hospital for two days.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Crazy.
Evan Brand: So, there you go. And he’s a called, fitness expert. I’m sorry if my fitness expert who’s young has a heart attack. Unless there was some other type of genetic or you know –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Heart Valve issue or some kind of abnormality in the heart valve at birth that you didn’t know about, I mean –
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This guy is pushing the diet that we don’t agree with and more than likely getting excessive oxidative stress with the exercise piece to go in there. So yeah, keep that in mind. And lots of the stress, that’s the stress component that will cause you to pee out more magnesium and Steve, 5.9 for your red blood cell magnesium is perfect. I like five and above. And the medication is the Digitalis. Digitalis is the uh – medication that is the uh – synthetic version of Foxglove that helps reduce stroke volume.
Evan Brand: And of course, we do want him – we wish the guy a speedy recovery. But man, if you say you’re a fitness expert and you’re pushing a low-fat more exercise approach, man, that’s not good. That’s not good. So we like exercise. We both do it, but it’s the dose make the poison and the intensity makes the poison, too. And those are two levers that we adjust based on clinical symptoms and lab results.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A 100%. Anything else here, Evan, you wanna address? I gotta jump on another podcast. We’re on a podcast cycle here today. Giving them the question you wanna hit real quick?
Evan Brand: No. That’s it, man. Lets wrap it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright. Give us 5 star reviews and we’ll be back more frequently and more questions with more content and more great guests. We’re here for you guys.
Evan Brand: Take Care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Evan, my man it’s been real – You take care.
Evan Brand: Bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
References:
https://justinhealth.com/healthy-living-store/
Are you deficient in magnesium? – Podcast #93
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand discuss the issue of magnesium and break it down for us by differentiating the various forms. Listen as they share the top conditions that can affect or be affected by magnesium and signs of magnesium deficiency to look out for.
Find out what the different types of magnesium do the body and what they are good for. Discover what foods are nutrient dense and magnesium-rich. When buying magnesium, they advise to look for the quality and who’s selling it or what company is selling it, etc. Also learn about how magnesium & calcium and magnesium & fluoride work together. Listen to this interview and find out as well about magnesium boosting your brain function.
In this episode, topics include:
05:01 Magnesium bank
05:42 Different types of magnesium
09:52 Nutrient dense magnesium-rich foods
11:36 Epsom salt baths
15:59 Magnesium & calcium and magnesium & fluoride
21:42 Research studies on magnesium
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, Evan! It’s Dr. J. It’s a marvelous Monday here. How’s it going over in Louisville?
Evan Brand: Hey! This great, this morning, man. I’ve been watching Cardinals actually all morning fly around, it’s—spring is in full bloom, so I’m happy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. Your mic sounds are really good today.
Evan Brand: Good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Alright, well, let’s dig in today. We talked at pre-show we wanted to dive into the issue of magnesium. So I’ll let you open it up here.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so magnesium—everyone hears about it. A lot people likely supplement with some form of magnesium and we’re gonna kinda break those down, but by some estimates up to 80% of Americans or more are magnesium-deficient, and so there’s a real awesome lady that you and I probably need to get on our podcast which is Dr. Carolyn Dean, medical doctor who wrote the book, The Magnesium Miracle, and I think a new version of it came out in 2014, but long story short, I’m just gonna read off some of the top 22 symptoms or conditions that can affect or be affected by magnesium. So this anxiety, panic attacks, asthma, blood clots, bowel diseases, cystitis, depression, detox, diabetes, fatigue, heart disease, hypertension, hypoglycemia—which my blood sugar is a lot better now that I have more magnesium—insomnia, kidney disease—I’ve read about kidney disease being because if you’re deficient in magnesium, now calcium is going to be able to take root in your kidneys and you’re at more risk of kidney stones if you don’t have enough magnesium—you got liver disease, migraines, fibromyalgia, cramps, back pain, nerve problems, PMS, infertility, osteoporosis, tooth decay, on and on. So I mean, we could probably list a thousand things here together but the truth is even some of the early signs of magnesium deficiency are things to look out for. So this is like the numbness and tingling, muscle cramps, personality changes, heart rhythms, sometimes heart palpitations, things like that. When you’re under excess stress, which is probably the lens that we’re coming at this, and soil depletion, it’s sort of being a double whammy for being deficient. You’re burning through your mineral stores when you are in a state of chronic stress which I’d say 90% of our patients had some level of chronic stress that led to their issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I totally agree. Now a lot of people here. Number one, if you’re eating excess carbohydrate or excess refined sugar, what’s actually gonna happen is you’re gonna be burning through your magnesium to help metabolize your sugar. So your body has to then take that sugar and run it through glycolosis and which basically is breaking down the sugar for energy and then it shoots it into the Kreb cycle where your body spits out FADH and—and NADH which then takes the hydrogens from that whole electrons—so it takes the hydrogens from the Kreb cycle and throws them into the electron transport chain where it generates more ATP for fuel. So if we just kinda back up, right? We have glycolysis is part one where we take that sugar and break it down, then we shoot it into the citric acid cycle aka the Kreb cycle and part of what is happening there is our body has to use magnesium and breaks down, requires magnesium to help generate energy from that sugar, so the problem is if we’re eating a whole bunch of refined sugar, what we’re not getting in is nutrients and magnesium’s one of those nutrients that we’re not getting in so we’re actually robbing Peter to pay Paul. We have to then use up more magnesium to then generate and break down energy from that glucose and/or sugar that’s coming in. So eating lots of refine sugar and carbohydrate especially if it’s not from a whole food, organic source is gonna require more magnesium for us to use than what’s actually coming in. So we start going into magnesium or nutrient debt.
Evan Brand: Yup, so for me, I mean, a lot of my mood instability in my past and my blood sugar crashes and all of that, it’s not to say that the adrenals weren’t important but getting more magnesium which is why I talk about floating tanks all the time and how helpful they’ve been, just getting in more magnesium has been really helpful. Now a lot of people, they’re just gonna go do magnesium citrate like the Natural Calm which you and I both enjoy; however, that’s just one piece of the puzzle and that’s only one form of magnesium, so maybe do you wanna talk about those together? Like the different types of forms, and how, you know, like magnesium oxide which you’re gonna get at Walgreen’s or your typical–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Cr—crappy supplement store. It’s about a 4% absorption rate, which research is looking at, so I mean if you’re taking 400mg thinking you’re doing good, you’re kidding. Just a tiny, tiny fraction of that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, so first off, just to kinda wrap everyone’s head around the situation, right? Imagine you walk into this bank. The bank’s called the Magnesium Bank. Now to make a deposit in this bank, imagine it requires $2 of deposit. Like imagine there’s a $2 fee to make a deposit. So if you go into that bank and you’re not depositing $3 or more, you’re actually losing magnesium, right? So most people—imagine we have this $2 initial fee just to make a deposit. Most people are making $0 deposits if not $1 deposits, so every time they go into that bank, it’s actually costing them more magnesium than they’re actually putting in the bank. Does that make sense, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s a great analogy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So kinda wrap the head around that, now you mentioned some of the different types of magnesium. So there’s like magnesium oxide which is like your conventional table chalk. So most people, when we look at their supplements, we see magnesium oxide in there and we’ll say, “Hey, you know, this is some expensive chalk that you’re buying there.” And then number two, typically if they’re doing magnesium oxide, we wanna know what the reason is. A lot of people are taking magnesium oxide because it’s cheap, number one, and some doctors will recommend it because of the laxative effects that they have. So it may not be a bad thing if you’re using it for a laxative effect. I typically will use magnesium citrate for a laxative effect because it is better absorbed, so I do like that part. And many people are getting it like in their magnesium powders or like their typical Natural Calm, they’re—that like powder magnesium. We’ll typically use that for a laxative effect. So we have magnesium oxide’s kinda the low end of the totem pole. Citrate’s one step above and then depending on the next steps, we’ll either go with a magnesium malate because malic acid kinda enters the Kreb cycle so that kinda magnesium can have—it and affect with the Kreb cycle which can be nice and it’s very well-absorbed. And same with magnesium glycinate. So we’ll use magnesium malate or magnesium glycinate. The only issue is because they’re bound to like either malic acid or—or an amino acid glycine, it’s so well-absorbed. Because it’s so well-absorbed, it tends to not create the same laxative effect that magnesium citrate or magnesium oxide has. So we’ll use magnesium malate and glycinate to have that sedative kinda absorptive nutritional repletive effect where we’ll use the citrate more for a laxative effect.
Evan Brand: That’s great. Yeah, so what do you say you use more? So you use malate more or glycinate? That’s always kind of the debate. I hear a lot of people using glycinate these days when they enter that on their—their intake forms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, my Magnesium Supreme that I’m using currently is a magnesium malate blend. So I’m doing that more. Both are really good. I don’t think—I don’t think you can go wrong with a glycinate or a malate, both are very well-absorbed, and their amino acid chelated, so they’re bound to an amino acid whether it’s a malic acid or—or a molecule of glycine. Both are gonna be very well-absorbed. So I think either way you can’t go wrong with those two, just for helping to enhance magnesium. The next one we have is the magnesium threonate which I know you have in your supplement line, Evan, which is great because that’s one of these amino acid chelates that actually is bound to threonate, which actually can cross the blood-brain barrier. So that can help with extra bits of anxiety and they can help with brain inflammation. I find you can still get very good effects with the glycine and the malate as well, but the threonate is very good, too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the—so a story about that is I had a female last week that I was working with that had severe anxiety issues. She was on Ativan, the prescription anxiety drug, and within a week of starting the magnesium threonate, she was able to completely stop the anxiety medication and she went from having panic attacks per day to having no panic attacks at all. And I was honestly surprised, I—I did not think that it would be that profound, just magnesium. I mean usually we’re thinking, you know, passion flower or chamomile or theanine or some of these other botanicals. Something that powerful coming from magnesium, it kinda blew me away to be honest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, magnesium is powerful and just stabilizing your blood sugar will help, right? Because remember that magnesium bank, right? It cost $2 for a deposit. If we are mitigating the foods that are causing us to, you know, put less magnesium in our tank meaning we’re choosing foods that are stabilizing our blood sugar, because if our blood sugar is swinging less throughout the day, if we’re not on a blood sugar rollercoaster, that’s gonna help stabilize our blood sugar and we’re gonna need less magnesium to help metabolize the—the nutrients that go into the Kreb cycle. And then number two, we’re adding in nutrient-dense foods that have more magnesium. So instead of coming to that magnesium bank with $1 in deposits, we can come with 5 and 10 and 20 because we’re adding in nutrient dense magnesium-rich foods. So a couple of those foods we may talk about here are gonna be your leafy greens, very helpful. Nuts and seeds are gonna be very helpful, too. Magnesium is gonna be great and especially if you’re eating—I’m sorry, fish—especially fish, mackerel, salmon are gonna be great for magnesium as well as calcium especially if there’s some bones in there. If you eat those little small bones, they’re, you know, small enough where you can chew ‘em up. You can get extra calcium and magnesium in there together. Green beans can be very helpful. Avocado is very good. You can do even a little bit of banana; again if it’s glycemically inappropriate, you’d wanna go more with avocado but it’s higher in fat and low in sugar. You can also do high quality dark chocolate. It’s very high in magnesium. So it’s postulated that many women in and around PMS time, those cramps they’re getting get helped by magnesium, so a lot of women actually crave dark chocolate around PMS. So if you’re reaching for the high quality 85% cacao and up dark chocolate, that’s gonna significantly help with those cramps.
Evan Brand: That’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s sort of you’re having these cravings and you don’t know specifically why. You’re probably just trying to get some magnesium and obviously chocolate—dark chocolate’s delicious, but for me, I’ve had great success in recommending the citrate form, too; for some of the hormonal changes that happen, sometimes constipation’s happening around the cycle, too, that and the—the cramping have both been alleviated with the citrate. So it’s almost like I would recommend everyone having at least a few forms around and you just have to really have these in your toolbox, and then depending on what you’re trying to treat at that time, you can bring in or cycle out, on or off different types.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, and then you have other types of magnesium such as our Epsom salt baths.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Epsom salt baths are excellent because you can absorb a lot of magnesium in the actual Epsom salt bath, and the nice thing about it is you increase the surface area because your skin’s in the actual Epsom salt bath, so you absorb a lot of that magnesium there as well, which is phenomenal. So with Epsom salt baths, you’re getting a lot of magnesium sulfate, if I remember correctly. So that magnesium sulfate gets absorbed into your skin and that can have a very positive effect.
Evan Brand: That’s it. Yeah, the other one’s magnesium chloride which a lot of people have been emailing me asking about the magnesium oils which have been really, really, really effective and really popular. You have to watch out some of these magnesium oil companies, they’re just big pyramid schemes. So you really gotta look and see who’s promoting. I won’t call them specifically, but there’s a lot of people in the health space promoting specific brands that are huge multilevel marketing affiliate-based schemes and you’re paying you know double or triple or quadruple what you should be paying and you’re not even getting what would be, you know, the highest quality, you know. So you gotta look for the quality and you gotta look for who’s selling it, what company is selling it, etc. You got—always gotta weigh that stuff in. Don’t get wooed just because someone has a—a, you know, a cool voice or a—a nice attitude to him. You gotta really look in and make sure that it’s legit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’m a bigger fan of just buying a product that you like because most multilevel things they kind of coerce you into now having to be the—the buyer and seller of the product where if you just like a product, you know, you don’t wanna have to also be the seller of it, too. It’s easier just to consume it because you like it. I like that mindset better. But shifting gears back to the Epsom salt bath, you can do 1-2 cups of like the Epsom salt which is basically magnesium sulfate and you could sit in that bath for about 10 minutes and that’ll have some incredibly relaxing effects.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I do a few Epsom salt baths per week and then when I was in Austin, at least I was floating. You know, going into the float tank where you’re not getting just a cup. You’re getting a thousand pounds of Epsom salt in about 10 inches of water, and you come out feeling incredible. I was doing that about once a month but I haven’t since. So there is a place here. I just haven’t made it in there yet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. Like my biggest thing is having like a nice magnesium drink or like a Tulsi tea kinda decaffeinated holy basil adaptogenic herbal tea at night and then if you’re really having a stressful day, light a couple scented candles, maybe a little bit of lavender oil under your nose and then sit in a nice Epsom salt bath for 10 minutes and that will promote significant relaxation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So should we talk about ways that people are running out of magnesium? I kind of alluded to it—the stress, obviously, the dietary exclusion of things that have magnesium in it. Maybe we could talk about just basically people who are burning the candle at both ends and we’re kind of burning up magnesium like jet fuel.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, so a couple of things here that will influence your magnesium levels. Number one, like I already mentioned eating high sugar foods will do it. Eating nutrient poor foods will do it. Being under emotional stress like you mentioned, because magnesium has about 300+ enzymatic roles in the body according to research, right? And research tends to be, you know, under appreciate, you know, what’s happening from a nutritional perspective. So it’s probably even more and that if we’re under more stress we’re burning it up and it has that many roles, that means we need it. It’s even more important, right? Because what enzymatic system in your body do you wanna short circuit today? And most people know that feeling great meaning having at sits—all systems working on all 4 cylinders. So we know that we need about 500mg of magnesium a day. About 500mg is the upper limit of the RDA. Most people are only getting about 200mg. So if we can choose the right foods like I mentioned, so just getting that little bit of dark chocolate can get you about 300mg right there. You have an avocado and some leafy greens, now you’re—you’re cooking on all 4 cylinders there. And then if we’re choosing foods that are glycemically appropriate, not super high in sugar or not overdoing caffeine, now we’re gonna be able to hold on to a lot more of the magnesium we’re taking in.
Evan Brand: Now let me ask you this because this is a bit of a controversy. Why is calcium so promoted? I mean, I could just remember as a kid, one of my grandmothers just eating those stupid little—I can’t remember the brand of it. It was a purple box of chocolates. It was calcium chocolates and it’s so heavily promoted. I mean if we have so much research on magnesium now and we’re mostly getting excess of calcium due to all the fortification. Well, why in the world is magnesium—why is this the—the smoking gun or why is this the hidden nutrient? And calcium is so heavily to—to women especially and to people aging for the prevention of osteoporosis. It’s starting to look like the more and more research there is, the magnesium is actually gonna be one of the key players as well as vitamin D and vitamin K to prevent bone loss.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I do think magnesium has more roles in the body enzymatically just according to what the body is gonna use, but I mean we do know the bones are a big storage site of calcium, right? It’s the largest. We also know that half your bones are protein. People forget like, okay, so we gotta eat protein, and if we have digestive issues, we can see how that can contribute to bone loss because the same mechanism that’s involved in breaking down protein is actually involved in ionizing minerals. So you can see when we start to have protein issues and digestive issues and leaky gut, that’s gonna create calcium and magnesium and other mineral problems. And then if you look at just the top 10 foods, right? We’re using HealthAlicious—HealthAliciousNess.com—the top 10 foods for calcium are very similar to the top 10 foods for magnesium. So it’s gonna be your nuts and seeds, your dark, leafy green, your high quality fish, right? Avocado, dark chocolate, a lot of your greens like I mentioned, almonds, canned sardines with the bones especially with the fish, you wanna eat the bones because that’s where more of the calcium, it’s in the fish. So if you’re getting a lot of the high nutrient magnesium foods, you’re gonna be getting a high nutrient amount of the calcium foods. The next question above and beyond diet is do you have extra stress in your life that will require supplementation, whether it’s magnesium and calcium. We always give it in our high quality multivitamin, but we’ll typically give extra magnesium where there’s stress. And if you’re trying to grow and help support bone health, then we’ll add in some extra vitamin K and vitamin D, and maybe even some vitamin A as well as the good quality magnesium and calcium foods.
Evan Brand: Yeah, see those are the more important pieces and I don’t know if there’s not as much money involved or if it’s just old science or what it is, but you’re never gonna hear your mainstream physician or practitioner promoting magnesium so heavily, but this and vitamin D and vitamin K like and—and protein and good digestion, and making sure you don’t have parasites, all that—this is the real deal. This is the real way to prevent the age degeneration that really does happen, you know, as we get older. I mean, my grandpa, for example, I think he shrunk already like 1-1/2 inches and it’s like, what if I were to give him this information 10 years ago, how much of that would I’ve been able to prevent or maybe even reverse as we start getting these things back in check and not just, you know, having the doctor try to throw him on calcium supplements every time he goes into the office.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, your body can heal, too, right? Vitamin K helps bring calcium into the tissue back into the bone where it belongs, right? Typically calcium will go out into the tissue as a means of inflammation. We know these like little calcium plaques that could hit in the arterial walls of the vasculature in the heart for instance. Well, why is that calcium going in there? That’s part of the Band-Aid process from inflammation. So if we can reduce the inflammation and we can make sure we have enough vitamin K to keep the calcium where it needs to go and then if we can use a lot of our nutrients to help reduce inflammation along with a healthy diet and healthy gut microbiota, we’re in a much better place.
Evan Brand: That makes—that makes sense. So mainly it sounds like, you know, and maybe this is a tangent but the inflammation piece is really the issue here, and then if you have that addressed and you have your digestion addressed, all that—and you have the diet, some of these things are gonna kinda work themselves out. You’re not gonna need these—these conventional interventions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, people can’t forget how important antibiotics are, too, right? Antibiotics can really, really screw up our gut function, and we need to have very good gut function so we can absorb a lot of our nutrients. So that’s—I think something we cannot forget about are the antibiotic effects.
Evan Brand: Yup, amen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I know for instance they talk about fluoride having negative effects on magnesium as well because magnesium binds the fluoride to form a magnesium fluoride and that can drain your body of magnesium. Because if you’re constantly taking in fluoride, you have a lot more of these fluoride molecules that your magnesium will be binding to. So the more we’re getting in fluoride from our drinking water, which is not very healthy unless it’s coming at a natural calcium fluoride source. If it’s the hydrofluorosilicic acid that’s added to our water supply for the dentin thickness or to help improve the outer structure of the teeth, it’s actually shown to be ineffective when it comes to calcium taken internally. It’s like trying to protect yourself from the sun by putting suntan lotion in your water. It’s much better from a topical perspective, not internally taking it in.
Evan Brand: It’s a great analogy. It makes us seem really stupid.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I mean, for instance there’s one article right here, I’m reading it from the British Medical Journal. It was a research facility out of New Zealand that showed that women who simply take calcium supplements are at a much higher risk of heart disease. Nothing is said about magnesium. People were just left up in the air. Some doctors are saying, “Yeah, don’t take calcium anymore.” Nobody’s talking about magnesium as being the balance point. So I think if anyone’s gonna air in taking something alone, take magnesium alone. I believe people should be on a high quality multivitamin and if you’re taking something by itself, if you wanna get extra calcium it should always be taken with magnesium just because of these—some of these studies showing these negative results of calcium by itself but if you were to take one out of the two by itself, make sure it’s magnesium by itself and if you’re gonna do extra calcium, make sure it’s at least in a compendium of magnesium at a 1:1 or a 2:1 ratio.
Evan Brand: Yup, so here was another study British Journal of Cancer. This is a new one, December 2015. It looked at 66,000 men and women, aged 50-76, and it—they were basically—they were in this vitamin and lifestyle, they called it a vital study first and then eventually they were kind of looking at the incidents of pancreatic cancer by magnesium intake categories. Long story short, the people that had, for example, every 100mg that they went up in magnesium—or no, they actually have it backwards here. So every 100mg less per day of magnesium, you add in 24% increase in the incidents of pancreatic cancer. So let me just—I’m gonna repeat that just to make sure it’s clear. For every 100mg per day of magnesium less that was consumed, your risk went up 24% every 100.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Evan Brand: That’s a lot. 24%–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That is. That’s—that’s big. Yeah.
Evan Brand: So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That is really big.
Evan Brand: So I think maybe I’m gonna supplement with some right after this podcast today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’m gonna read one more study here. I think it’s important we have a little bit of study—we wanna be more in the clinical side but we wanna kinda back up what we’re talking about. But there was one study here looking at the effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in the elderly, and it was a—a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. That means the patients didn’t know what they were taking and the doctors administrated. The patients didn’t what they were taking. One group has the—the magnesium. The other group typically had a—a placebo that was innocuous. And what they found that supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia, including sleep efficiency, sleep time, sleep onset and early morning awakening and likewise, insomnia objective measure such as concentration as well as looking at like serum renin, which looks at kidney function, as well as looking at melatonin levels and the serum cortisol in the elderly. All these things improved while taking basically the magnesium supplementation.
Evan Brand: Did it say what form they were taking there?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me see if I can extract that here. They just talk about it being magnesium. They did not go into any detail here. Let me see here. They talk about—no, they did not go into the exact kind of magnesium. Let me pull up the—the full article and I can break that down here. But any comments on that? I think the sleep part is so important because sleep affects your adrenals, your thyroid, it helps your immune system. There’s so many benefits that happen with sleep and we know that with poor sleep, we increase our chance of all-cause mortality and we increase blood sugar issues. We become more insulin-resistant the less quality of sleep we get.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so I wanna add a couple of other comments back about some research on the magnesium threonate. One was looking at when you can elevate the brain and magnesium levels so when you can cross that blood-barrier that you’re gonna change your fear conditioning—they call it fear extinction in the pre-frontal cortex and the amygdala, sort of the fear center of the brain, that when you get more magnesium in there, you’re gonna be able to shut down that Fight or Flight response. So if we’re talking about people that we’re treating with adrenal issues, a lot of times that could be sort of a PTSD-type scenario, so whether it was war or whether it was just significant stress that contributed to PTSD, we can use this as well to try to basically free up that lock that the brain is stuck in that’s keeping them in that chronic stress state. Now another piece of it here, too, was looking at enhancement of learning and memory by elevating brain magnesium. So if you’re looking for like cognition, you know, everybody’s interested in boosting their function, this form of magnesium is something that’s very simple and you don’t really have to go in to some of the heavy hitting nootropics that I’ve written about. You may not have to do that. That may be like phase 2 or phase 3. This might be phase 1 for you to really help with, you know, some of your mood issues and then the last one I wanted to mention was—it was just another study here—on the stress effects. So you got kinda of an anti-aging sleep, cognition, relaxation, memory recall, PTSD, anxiety, all of this stuff can be—can be helped here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Excellent. Oh by the way, I was checking that study just to kinda give you a whole, kind of a full perspective is that they were only looking at, in that study, magnesium oxide.
Evan Brand: Wow. And that gave that–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Good a results even.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that gave—that a significant result. Now if you break it down though, there’s a couple of things that are looked at in there. I’m trying to get the exact definition here. So magnesium oxide’s the most dense form. We already talked about and basically only 4% of it is absorbed, right? That’s like the elemental magnesium portion of the magnesium oxide. So for instance, if we’re taking like a 500mg tablet, that’s about 12mg. Now in this study, interestingly enough, they did—let me pull it up again here. I got the full study right here. They did magnesium oxide which was very, very interesting, but about 125mg of that was magnesium, elemental magnesium.
Evan Brand: Ah, so you’re thinking that—that’s—that’s the winner. That’s why it happened.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so they—but they gave—they administered magnesium oxide twice a day. Each tablet contained 414mg of magnesium oxide, as 250mg elemental magnesium. And we know that typical magnesium oxide is about 4%—4% elemental magnesium. So what that means to me is that they had some magnesium oxide that had extra elemental magnesium in it, so these peeps right here in this study were getting—if we do the Math here one more time—they were doing 2 capsules a day. They were getting about 830mg of magnesium oxide and they were getting about half of that was the elemental magnesium which is far better absorbed.
Evan Brand: Yup, so that takes us right to where—where you were talking about 4 or 500mg per day that you actually want to get. Not 4 to 500 on the label, 4 to 500 that’s gonna actually do something.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Yup, big time. And that’s why we like the magnesium glytate—gly—magnesium glycinate and the magnesium malate because of the better absorption with it.
Evan Brand: That’s awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So kinda looking at everything here, a couple of things I wanna mention. I already highlighted earlier, but there’s a couple of medications that can actually cause magnesium deficiency. Obviously any of your diuretics to help reduce blood pressure because they reduce minerals in general especially sodium because sodium holds on to water, right? Increased water means increased pressure, so diuretics will decrease magnesium. We also have—and again like these are like Lasix, these are things that we give for high blood pressure and then we also have things like medications such as antibiotics, like gentamycin and tobramycin which have an effect of creating magnesium deficiency. Things like prednisone or Deltasone, these are like corticosteroids, which again if you have excess inflammation, guess why you’d be taking those? Well, to help reduce the inflammation. Doesn’t fix the underlying cause. They also can create more blood sugar issues which we know causes further magnesium deficiency and we know they also can weaken the bones, right? So that means we can have an increased need for calcium and magnesium, and then we also note antacids, right? Antacids will cause our body to decrease HCl and less HCl means less ionization of the minerals especially magnesium. And we know insulin. Insulin as a drug can reduce magnesium absorption, but we also note we also stimulate insulin, Evan, eating what?
Evan Brand: Sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, bingo! So like I mentioned before, the blood sugar part, right? We’re trying to go over core fundamental things here. Fundamental foundational issues is keeping blood sugar in check and then also having an unhealthy digestive tract, right? Any kind of inflammation in the gut, whether it’s an autoimmune condition, whether it’s just a regular gastritis or just a SIBO or a chronic infection, those can also drive nutrients malabsorption issues because again, our gut lining’s irritated. When we’re irritated, we’re less likely to digest and absorb and utilize and assimilate these nutrients.
Evan Brand: Alcohol’s another one, too, that we haven’t mentioned.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s sugar basically, right? So yeah.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Totally agree.
Evan Brand: Think of your alcoholics and some of the issues that they’ve developed, it makes sense that the magnesium deficiency is part of this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, so I think everyone here, one, they should be eating a nutrient dense anti-inflammatory whole food, low toxin diet. That’s number one. And number two is we should be on a high quality multivitamin, so you can click on the link to visit Evan’s site and/or mine. We have some really good high quality multivitamins that we use ourselves personally and with our patients. They are chelated to amino acids like glycinate or malate to help with maximum absorption, and then taking it supplementally if you’re under extra stress, right? Most people in this day and age are gonna reach for the glass of wine at night or reach for benzo, like the Xanax or any of those other family of medications. Just reach for a little bit of magnesium instead. That’s a much better, more of a constructive vehicle to help with relaxation.
Evan Brand: Absolutely. Imagine all of the bars just serving magnesium tonics instead of vodka or who knows what else. I think about that all the time about the thousands of people that are trying to relax and de-stress at the end of the work week, but they’re doing it in the most damaging and least effective method possible.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. So we’ll put a lot of our references in the show notes, so make sure you subscribe so you can get the emails for that. Evan, do you wanna kinda wrap things up on your end and I’ll do the same after?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I would say just—this is another thing to have in your toolbox. It’s not to say that you need to put all your eggs in one basket–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Evan Brand: And magnesium is gonna be capable of changing your life, but definitely go pick up the book or—or rent it at your library, The Magnesium Miracle. That book was what really convinced me to really look in to this and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Evan Brand: To utilize this more. So I would say that’s just another resource for further research.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it, yeah. Number one, take a look at your diet, right? Make sure the foods are anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense and low toxin foods. Make sure they are glycemically appropriate, the right amount of carbohydrate for your specific levels and then number three, make sure your digestion’s working and make sure you don’t have a gut infection, and again—oh, I didn’t even touch upon it—objective testing. What do we like? Well, I like magnesium serum above 2 for your typical Lab Corp range, and I like a red blood cell magnesium 5 or above—5 or above. So magnesium serum is like what’s in the blood. Red blood cell magnesium is what’s actually inside. One’s intercellular, one’s extracellular. Extracellular means what’s outside of the cell, alright, what’s—what the blood cell is floating in, the serum, and then what’s inside the cell. So magnesium serum, 2 or above and then red blood cell magnesium 5 or above if you wanna be more objective regarding some lab testing to assess it. So again, if it’s your first time dealing with this, reach out to myself or Evan if you need more help or guidance in dealing with these issues.
Evan Brand: Sounds great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome, Evan. You have a great day!
Evan Brand: You take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
http://gotmag.org/magnesium-deficiency-101/
http://www.ancient-minerals.com/magnesium-deficiency/need-more/
https://www.paleohacks.com/magnesium/help-me-figure-out-magnesium-how-to-calculate-elemental-magnesium-17726
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/01/19/magnesium-deficiency.aspx
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3703169/
https://www.seasalt.com/salt-101/epsom-salt-uses-benefits
https://www.healthaliciousness.com/articles/foods-high-in-magnesium.php
https://www.healthaliciousness.com/articles/high-calcium-vegetables.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26554653