How Common Mineral Deficiencies Impact Our Health

even if you go and eat um it's quote unquote real food if it's not from a regenerative farm there are four main minerals that are now depleted in both animal foods and plant foods across the board and that's magnesium calcium copper and iron welcome to the doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman that's pharmaceutical a place for conversations that matter and if you ever thought about the fact that you might be deficient in certain nutrients well this is a podcast you want to listen to because we're going to talk about minerals today and we're going to talk about it with james nicole antonio who's an incredible researcher scientist uh he's just prolific and is constantly helping me understand the world of nutrition minerals and all kinds of stuff related to nutrition and health so welcome um james thanks mark great to be here yeah james is a doctor of pharmacy he's a cardiovascular research scientist he's uh known internationally for his work on health and nutrition and has actually testified in front of the canadian senate on the harm of added sugar no surprise that's harmful he's an associate editor of british medical journals open heart and on the advisory board of many other medical journals he's authored over 250 publications in scientific literature and the author of five best-selling books includes a salt fix which challenges our ideas about salt uh super fuel which i think he wrote with joe mercola about fat and in the diet and longevity solution immunity fix and the mineral fix uh which is what we're gonna talk about today which is minerals so thanks james for being on the dr pharmacy thanks for having me mark it's great uh great to be with you okay so we know we think about food we think about you know protein fat carbs maybe fiber and we talk about vitamins and minerals but most of us don't recognize how deficient we are and you you wrote that it's estimated that one in three americans are deficient in at least 10 minerals i mean insufficient deficient how does this happen and why are we so deficient and well tell us more about this this rampant pandemic we're having it seems of nutritional deficiencies even in the world of abundant calories and food well that's a great way to put it it really is a pandemic and it really almost started in 1940 and there's three primary reasons why most of us are actually deficient in about 10 minerals and the the number one reason is the foods that we eat are now just simply more nutrient depleted compared to 50 to 80 years ago because how we grow our food the second reason is 60 of our calories come from processed foods which flour sugar seed oils which essentially that eliminates 80 to 100 of the minerals in those products and then the third factor is that at least for the majority of adults in the united states most of them have at least one chronic health condition which either that condition depletes us of minerals or the medications used to treat those disease states deplete us of minerals and so we can sort of take a deep dive into each one of those to sort of explain to people what's happening yeah and then and then when else we get into not only you know why we're so deficient but what does that mean for biology and how does that show up clinically or symptom-wise because it's it's not just an idea that oh i'm deficient in certain minerals these minerals are key for our biological functioning when they're not inadequate amounts in our body we get problems we get symptoms and conditions diseases and so it's it's important to sort of think about you know why we're so deficient but also how do we diagnose it and what do we do about it because it can make a huge difference in people's health i've seen using minerals in my practice over the last 30 years of functional medicine be one of the most powerful things to help improve people's overall well-being and health so uh let's let's drop down and just go through each one of those four points i think it's important so why is the food less nutritious than it was than it was 50 years ago and and what does it do with the way we grow it right that's a great point there's a there's two main reasons why one is that we now grow food for yield so essentially we are growing plants and animals quicker whether we're fattening up a cow and slaughtering them at 14 months instead of two to three years and so um the the animal or the plant simply does not have the time to actually take up all the nutrients so it's literally more diluted in nutrition whereas if we were to you know an animal that had lived for years it would have had much longer to actually extract nutrients from the diet so that's number one the other is the phosphorus fertilizers that are being used that inhibits the uptake of numerous minerals so clinical studies have shown if you take let's say for example raspberries and you use those phosphorus fertilizers that decreases the calcium and magnesium by 30 percent the boron by 30 percent and same thing with zinc so it's it's kind of shifting away from regenerative farming and more to these monocropping increasing yield and it's leading to these nutritional delusions compared to just six years ago yeah i mean also aside from the fact that we breed for yield and not not flavor or nutritional density which is one problem and aside from the fact that because of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the plants are eating that and they grow more carbohydrates become more starchy and less nutritious and less protein and minerals and then the soil has been damaged so much by all these compounds you're talking about even things like glyphosate that kills the microbiome of the soil and there's a symbiotic relation between the soil microbes and the plant because the microbes and the organic matter in the soil are required to extract the nutrients from the soil to put in the plant so even if the soil is full of nutrients if there's if the soil is dead and no organic matter no microbes the plant can't get access to those nutrients exactly so that's that's 100 correct so for example there are some studies suggesting that glyphosate will inhibit the uptake of minerals into the plants the acidity of the soil also reduces the uptake of those minerals so you may not necessarily see a reduction in the mineral content of the actual soil although we know the topsoil is obviously much more nutrient depleted but even in those instances if the if the soil is more acidic or you have glyphosate then the plant there's a reduction in its uptake of nutrients yeah and the second point you made was you know eating processed food you know 60 of our calories basically is deliberately stripped of all of its nutrients and then it's fortified with stuff because they've taken it all out and and then you know we actually first saw signs of vitamin deficiency when we um started to polish rice uh and and it was you know it was it was interesting it was given to the the chickens in prisons in europe and then to the prisoners and they all got really sick uh and it was because of the vitamin deficiencies and the same thing's happening now then we decide we have to enrich the flour or rich the rice but that's silly why not eat the whole food which has all the nutrients but we now are seeing a massive depletion of our diet in these minerals so what are the top minerals that we're we're depleting in our in our food because we're eating processed food yeah so there's well there even if you go and eat um it's quote unquote real food if it's not from a regenerative farm there are four main minerals that are now depleted in both animal foods and plant foods across the board and that's magnesium calcium copper and iron so copper's been the worst so vegetables have lost about 75 of their copper animal foods like meat have lost 50 of their copper and then you have 80 to 90 percent of copper lost in cheese and we've lost almost all of it in milk and so really trying to source regenerative um agriculture crops and and foods and animals from regenerative farms is going to be much more nutrient-dense so really finding those local farmers that are that are using like real natural manure that are not using these phosphorus you know artificial npk fertilizers and glyphosate is really going to make a tremendous difference um just from the real foods that you're eating not even talking about the processed foods that's that's a good way to help with that and and the other thing you mentioned was chronic disease and also medication cause mineral depletion and we are now what are the data that six out of ten of us have a one chronic disease and four to ten have more than one and i think uh what was it 81 of americans over i think 50 or something or are on uh one or more medications i mean 80 of americans so what is all that disease and drugs doing to our mineral status well exactly right that most of us are sick and what ends up happening is you you you basically you know don't you're not able to absorb nutrients well if you have a damaged gastrointestinal tract for one and so so many people are suffering from gluten intolerance celiac disease crohn's ulcerative colitis and if you have damage to the gastrointestinal tract which many of us do from eating these processed foods you can't even absorb the minerals and then even if you are able to absorb them we require insulin to drive numerous minerals into the cell including magnesium and potassium and we know 75 of the u.s population is insulin resistant and has very high levels so you can't even get the minerals into the cell as well when you're insulin resistant and if you have elevations in your insulin levels that kicks out magnesium and calcium in the urine as well and so wait wait just so it back unpack this you basically eat a lot of sugar and starch your insulin goes up and you start to pee out minerals like magnesium yeah yup and you can even drive them into the cell to utilize them so you could be taking you know all the magnesium or calcium or potassium that you would like to take in a day but if you don't fix the insulin resistance you're never going to get the full driving of those nutrients into the cell where it actually is needed to work amazing so and then the other thing you know so you have chronic diseases which then cause your minerals to become depleted you have um you know soils which are not good which allows us to sort of not get the minerals we have processed food which you know just by nature has no minerals and then we take medications which often are mineral depleting and you know in medical school we all know yeah if you give someone a diuretic for high blood pressure or for heart failure you have to give them potassium because the medication causes potassium to leach out in the urine but also causes other minerals like magnesium so talk about this general idea you know we talked about oh be careful of taking those supplements gonna interfere with medications but you know the opposite is also true that whatever medications you're taking may be causing massive nutritional deficiencies whether it's an acid blocker causing b12 deficiency or certain antidepressants things causing b6 deficiency or or you know the diuretics causing magnesium deficiency so talk about the minerals and the depletion of our of our nutritional status by the medications what are the top medications that cause the problems and what do they do well one of the first medications a doctor will throw someone on if they have high blood pressure is something called the thiazide diuretic so something like hydrochlorothiazide or chlorthalidone indapamide are some of the names that some people may be familiar with and you're right that the medical community thought for a long time and they still think this that the potassium depletion you just give these people more potassium but it's really the magnesium depletion that these thiazide diuretics are causing that is causing the body to not be able to hold on to potassium so 80 of people who are on a thiazide diuretic for six months or longer are deficient in magnesium eighty percent and it's one of the most prescribed medications in the united states what's so fascinating about that is that magnesium lowers blood pressure so you're kind of getting rid of the very mineral that you need to keep your blood vessels relaxed and not have high blood pressure in fact that's what we give women when they come in with high blood pressure from pregnancy we call preeclampsia the treatment is intravenous magnesium right exactly we used to before we had all these types of medications we used to treat many health conditions with magnesium including preeclampsia there have been many clinical studies that show that live birth rates are much better especially if you start earlier on in your labor um or pre-term with magnesium supplementation and so it really is um the missing one of the missing minerals in the diet and said that 50 of people with high blood pressure heart disease have magnesium deficiency and half the population isn't even getting the rda for magnesium yeah and what's interesting what we talk about in the mineral effects so before you go into that so the rda for listening is minimum amount you need or they call them rdi the minimum amount you need to prevent deficiency diseases it's not how much you need for optimal health it's like how much you don't get scurvy for vitamin c or rickets you know vitamin d it's not really the amount your body needs for optimal functioning and so it's so important to rethink our approach to nutrition based on optimum performance and function rather than simply prevention of deficiency diseases which is what our whole medical training has been around vitamins and and the the interaction between the drugs and the nutrients is a really big deal and like you're saying with diazi diuretics but there's other examples of other nutrients that get depleted what are a few other examples of common medications and and the nutrients that they plead well another common medication is proton pump inhibitors which are prescription quote unquote um acid suppressing therapies as well as antacids over the counter there's actually a third leading class of drugs by the way after statins and antidepressants it's their leading class of drugs exactly and if you have heartburn or reflux most doctors will just throw these at you and you're not really supposed to be on them for longer than two to three months at the most um doctors used to just kind of put people on these for years and they started noticing that people were becoming deficient in numerous minerals particularly magnesium and now there's an actual black box warning that these medications can lead to magnesium deficiency an actual black box warning a black box warning is on the label the pharmacist has to put this black box that says if you take this medication this is going to happen to you or this may happen you might get magnesium deficient so this is this is a kind of a big deal for that to happen right exactly and well that's the crux of the book the mineral fix is that the rda does not match the optimal intake for nutrients and most people understand that things like refined sugars and carbohydrate refined carbs and seed oils are bad for their health but what a lot of people do not realize is that if you do not hit optimal intakes for nutrients that is just as damaging to your body well that's a that's a big sentence so you know if you are avoiding all the crap and you still don't have optimal levels of nutrients in your body it's still harmful to you it's extremely i mean what was really interesting was one study they put women on a diet that contained 100 milligrams of magnesium within just a few weeks a third of those women developed atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter so you can induce arrhythmia simply by lowering the magnesium content of the diet and you can see these types of harms with numerous nutrients they've done this this with copper as well if you go on this is actually what's really scary we have the rda completely wrong for copper so it was set based on um essentially just one or two balance studies and they forgot to to actually test mineral losses through sweat they didn't think copper was lost through swat so they just looked at urine and stool copper loss for the rda for copper well it turns out that we lose about .3 milligrams of copper through sweat per day and so the rda doesn't even actually maintain balance for likely half of the population and there's studies that show that if you even go slightly above the rda if you put someone on let's say one milligram of copper per day you can induce insulin resistance high cholesterol high triglycerides all these problems that you would induce with a high sugar diet simply by eating a low amount of copper wow that's incredible so we've got copper magnesium what are the other common minerals that we're low in and what are the impacts of those the top-down minerals are really boron manganese potassium magnesium calcium zinc selenium even molybdenum and when it comes to immunity immune health we all know that zinc and selenium are extremely important and simply being deficient in selenium can essentially turn non-virulent viruses into something that could potentially kill you well you know there's a fascinating study on covet in china where they looked at areas where there was high selenium in the soil versus low selenium where people were tending to be deficient in selenium i think they had five times higher risk of getting up in the hospital or dying or three times higher risk was it was a dramatic difference between the adequate and the deficient selenium groups and so just that's just one mineral but we have many many minerals that are all dynamically interacting together that regulate thousands of different biological functions and these people think oh well vitamins minerals are just you know not really that important or you can get it all from your food or uh you know we're not really that deficient how could we be deficient we're such a well-known country there's so much obesity but there's actually a phenomenon of the more obese you are the more mineral nutrient vitamin deficient you typically are even like vitamin d it's sort of striking to see this paradox of sort of obesity and malnutrition going together uh and and we we we really have this moment to sort of look at our our biology go wait a minute how do we optimize it because it's not simply about you know getting adequate levels it's about getting optimal levels and that has a profound effect on our overall biology so tell us a little bit more about about um you know why these deficiencies drive disease you mentioned a little bit about it but i think uh give us some practical examples of if i'm deficient in x or y what will i see as a doctor in my practice well if you think about let's say just let's talk about brain health for example if you want to actually create the three feel-good neurotransmitters uh serotonin noradrenaline norepinephrine in the brain and dopamine there's enzymes in the brain that require minerals to actually create serotonin and then also form melatonin from serotonin they depend on like magnesium zinc calcium iron copper if you are deficient in those minerals most doctors don't even look or test for that they simply just give you an antidepressant or if you can't sleep they will simply give you a pill to help you sleep but if you're deficient in any of those minerals the enzymes can't even convert tryptophan eventually to serotonin and melatonin so a lot of these issues with sleep anxiety mood disorders depression are literally being driven by these mineral deficiencies yeah it's incredible i mean i've seen so much fun practice i just remember this one patient my doctor before but she had you know classic signs of magnesium deficiency she was a doctor a radiation oncology resident actually worked at mayo clinic and seen the top headache specialist had intractable migraines was on narcotics and zofran which is like a chemo anti-nausea drug she and and so i talked to her i said well tell me about your other symptoms besides the migraines i said how's your digestion so you know i'm pretty regular i'm like oh willie well how often do you go to the bathroom she's like i'll go once a week i'm like that's not regular so it's regularly for me i'd go every week and i'm like no you got to go every day i said well tell me other symptoms you have anxiety i'm insomnia i have palpitations i have muscle cramps i have bad menstrual cramps these are all signs of magnesium deficiency and if you're alert to it and it may be other things like sensitive to loud noises or irritability or um and anything that sort of spasms twitchy or irritable is typically a sign of magnesium deficiency and that's because magnesium is a relaxation mineral and and when i gave her magnesium i literally had to give her 2 000 or more milligrams a day in order to get her start going to the bathroom and relieve her headaches and it was amazing once we gave her the magnesium all of her symptoms went away and you know what causes magnesium deficiency besides not getting your diet is things like caffeine stress you know i remember one study in kosovo where they looked at magnesium levels in the urine and they found high levels in people who were really stressed and you can't really test for it in a way that most doctors test for it's not really adequate so maybe um would you mind just sharing a little bit about the challenge we have with testing and how we can diagnose these mineral deficiencies because people are looking i'm listening to this and i'm like do i have mineral deficiencies is it causing my health issues how do you diagnose it because because typically traditional medicine is pretty crappy at diagnosing nutritional deficiencies and particularly around minerals right that's a good question and part of the problem is some of these minerals are what are called a acute phase reactants meaning if you have inflammation in the body the levels of those minerals will either go up or down depending on inflammation so for example if you are inflamed zinc will go down selenium will go down and iron will go down and you may not be deficient but the inflammation is driving it down on the flip side inflammation will actually increase copper levels so you could be deficient in copper but the inflammation is driving your levels up because it's an acute phase reactant the other problem is most minerals do not sit in the blood they're mostly in the tissue or the bone so take magnesium for example one percent of your entire body's magnesium is actually in blood 99 is in things like muscle and bone and of course we're not going in and you know taking a sample of someone's bone or tissue to test for magnesium deficiency so what are some of the best ways to actually look for mineral deficiencies that people can actually do and it's really actually looking to see if you're at the lower end of normal on a blood test so what happens with mineral deficiencies you don't typically fall below and the actual normal threshold unless you are significantly deficient but what will happen is you will go from a middle point of normal just to the lower end of normal and if you're sitting on that lower end of normal especially if you have a low amount coming out in the urine that is highly indicative of mineral deficiency yeah that's a great point i think you know we in medicine we're learning lab tests and we see okay this is the normal range you know but when you understand what normal means it's a statistical number based on the population so if i were to land in america from mars what's the normal weight of americans well given that 75 are overweight it's normal to be overweight it doesn't mean it's optimal and in addition we use this sort of two standard deviations meaning we use a wide bell curve for figuring out what's normal so you could be 2 or 92 and it's still the same reference range right and and maybe it should be like one standard deviation should be where we think is optimal and anything outside above or below is is a problem and i think we're learning this in medicine that disease is not just an on or off phenomena it's a continuum so you might for example see blood sugar being normal up to a hundred but fact we know that if your blood sugar is over 87 according to israeli studies that your risk goes up of heart disease and death in a linear way so 88 is worse than 87 and 90 is worse than 88 and and the same thing with nutrition i mean we we don't want too much but we don't we want to make sure we have optimal levels and you know magnesium is an interesting phenomenon when i uh you know started practicing magnesium one of those miracle drugs that i was started using in functional medicine it's like incredible i help people sleep with with all sorts of issues and uh it's hard to test because the typical thing i learned in medical school is just check the serum magnesium level so you're saying if it's a low end of normal which is like two then you're worried you're worried but by the time it gets there you're already pretty depleted um right and then you can look at red cell levels which is a little bit better which is what's in the cells because typically magnesium is more in the cells but that also isn't perfect although it can be a little bit better and then there's the real test which is a magnesium loading test where you basically deplete the body of magnesium you don't get to take it for a while you give a big magnesium load and then you collect the urine for 24 hours because that'll tell you how much spills out if you hold all the urine if you hold all the magnesium in your body it means you're pretty deficient if you don't pee it out and yet no nobody does that test uh there are other indirect tests we use like organic acid testing and so forth amino acids we can sort of indirectly tell whether there's some nutritional deficiencies but it's really tough hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that i know and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is called mark's picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it i share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that i use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and i'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter i'll only send it to you once a week on fridays nothing else i promise and all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash picks p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode so besides magnesium um what are the other tests if you're if you're uh you know wanting to know what your nutritional says you just go to a regular doctor and get regular tests or what are the best tests for the top things like selenium zinc magnesium we talked about uh copper yeah so the best test um that has actually been matched against the gold standard iv magnesium load is actually mononuclear blood cell magnesium levels the white cell level it's called mononuclear blood cell and um it's the only blood test that i've ever seen that actually correlates well with the iv magnesium load which is the gold standard for testing for magnesium deficiency so um that typically though is not ordered by your doctor and that's the problem right is that you would think the first thing you would that all of us would know is we would have a list of 20 30 40 vitamins and minerals and we would understand if we're deficient or not and our doctor would first instantly say okay you're deficient in 10 minerals here's the foods you need to start eating to replace those they don't do that they just say high cholesterol high blood sugar high blood pressure here's this pill this pill in this bill and they send you on your way and that's the problem we need to get health insurance companies to to pay for and reimburse for vitamin mineral tests because you can do hair analysis it's not perfect but that is a three-month reflection of blood so that's a potentially better way for numerous minerals you always want to have serum as well and you want the serum to be not on the lower end of normal and then you can also do many other tests but typically it's white blood cells that you look at for minerals whether it be fills or leukocytes leukocyte copper neutrophil zinc are some of the best tests to actually get for those minerals and people can do that through the regular lab test typically i mean typically doctors don't do that there's there's certain companies that specialize in those type of tests um and some have their own unique methods for doing this but that's the problem um we don't have insurance companies demanding or paying for these better tests or minerals so most people are stuck with serum and they just you just want to make sure that you're definitely not at the lower end of normal on serum yeah kratom okay so we're seeing that there's massive deficiencies we probably need to take something how how do these nutritional deficiencies of micronutrients um have on our health span and lifespan in terms of longevity and premature aging and and how do we you know how do we get to avoid premature aging and increase our longevity so what we sort of need to understand is everybody focuses on macronutrients right how much carbohydrates versus how much bats you have people that are high carb people that are low carb they forget that it's the minerals that determine how well you actually convert those macronutrients into energy how well you your muscle can grow how much atp you can produce everything is dependent on so i i kind of laugh when people say it's all about calories with weight loss when literally your fat burning machinery depends on minerals so some people can be eating a low calorie diet but a nutrient micronutrient deficient diet you're going to gain much more weight than someone who is eating more calories but are getting more minerals because your fat burning machinery will actually work better so take magnesium for example um you cannot activate atp without magnesium it binds to atp it cleaves the terminal phosphate and it releases energy everything depends on atp magnesium is required to produce protein dna rna i don't know a single function in the body that does not work without atp and protein and dna so literally everything depends on minerals and so like you had said i mean magnesium is the relaxed uh mineral it prevents calcium from actually accumulating in the uh in the arteries so one sign of mineral deficiency is coronary artery calcification which a lot of docs are starting to use versus just cholesterol tests yeah so how does mineral deficiency cause the calcium deposit so essentially magnesium is a is nature's calcium channel blocker and it prevents the cells and the endothelial cells that are lining the arteries from accumulating calcium and so there is this balance we talk about in the book that it's not also just about the the overall amount of minerals you're getting it's the balance between them you have to you don't want to have really more than a two to three to one ratio of calcium to magnesium otherwise you're going to start getting issues because the balance is off yeah interesting so the thing we often hear about let's just sort of talk about some of these chronic age-related diseases is you know high blood pressure is an issue and we're taught that we should not be eating salt or having too much salt because it can cause high blood pressure um and and yet you know you challenged that whole hypothesis we've had you talking about this before i think on an instagram live podcast and and you wrote this book called salt fix which challenges our notion of salt being the enemy and the evil that we thought it is although it is for some people can you kind of break down in just sort of a short nugget you know what what is the right thinking about salt and and where have we gone wrong and how do we fix it if you eliminate refined carbs and sugar you make sure you're getting enough magnesium you make sure you're getting enough potassium only one percent of the population would probably actually have a significant rise in blood pressure with a normal salt intake in other words it's not the salt the problem is the sugar and the refined carbs that are causing you to over retain salt yeah it's really not a problem for most people if they fix those three underlying causes and that's sort of what i discussed in the mineral effects and the salt fixes the three causes of being again of over retaining salt would be insulin resistance low potassium low magnesium intake okay so this seems so easy to fix you get magnesium you get potassium which we get from vegetables and plant foods right and you cut the starch in sugar and you know as a doctor was interesting when i tell people to cut out starch and sugar what happens is the body starts to dump huge amounts of salt and you get all kinds of quote side effects from going on a low carbohydrate diet including you know feeling achy tired wiped out and it's like essentially having electrolyte depletion and the reason that you're doing that is not because your body's doing something wrong it's because before you were having so much sugar and starch your body was holding on to all this salt and so it dumps fluid and salt which is a good thing but you have to make sure you get adequate salt while you're doing that because if you don't you're going to feel like crap and so it's really important for people who do switch their diets to understand that you can and the same thing happens with the keto flu you know this whole idea that the keto flu when you go keto you kind of carbohydrates you get sick like the flu but that's because of the mineral depletion from the dumping of the salt from the lower levels of insulin in the blood which is after you cut out the starch of sugar so it's really it's a really important idea but there are but there are people who are salt sensitive and have salt sensitive hypertension right the african-american community has more of that is that is that fair to say it's fair yeah they do have more but typically it's because their dietary potassium magnesium is very low and they eat high amounts of carbs and sugars and what's interesting you give those people metformin and you help fix their insulin resistance and you actually fix most of their salt sensitivity so in in the mineral fixed in the salt fix especially we cover a couple of those clinical studies you give salt sensitive people metformin or you put them on a lifestyle a better diet and you fix their insulin resistance they're no longer salt sensitive so really one of the best measures of insulin resistance is if you're salt sensitive interesting interesting so yeah i see you know a lot of my patients soon as they change their diet boom their blood pressure comes down and it's they have to start peeling off the medications because their blood pressure drops too low so it's sort of paradoxical to think that actually maybe it's not the salt it's a lack of potassium and magnesium which are rampant deficiencies and potassium you know comes from mostly plant foods so you say i'll eat a banana for potassium but it's if you just make a big vegetable broth or you know make a good soup even like a seaweed i like to put seaweed in the soup that helps you get a lot of potassium and extra minerals so it's really important seaweed is a great source of mineral isn't it yeah no it absolutely is and that's a good point that just being a little bit low in potassium can cause you to over retain salt and so again it's this balance you need to make sure typically what i do i probably get four grams of potassium per day and four grams of sodium and i don't have high blood pressure and it dramatically improves my performance most people don't really utilize salt correctly okay before you before you go on just the average recommendation is like two grams or less for salt right it's it's two and a half so you're saying twice the amount of salt that our our current experts are recommending but you also eat a lot of potassium and it seems to balance out exactly so the typical american's only consuming maybe two and a half grams of potassium and that's the problem if they bump that up to about four grams then most of those individuals wouldn't have an issue with a normal salt intake and i mean i've published numerous papers on why we recommend such a low intake of salt and it's strictly based on blood pressure um but they never look at the other surrogate markers that are actually worsened on a low salt diet so for example you may have a slightly lower blood pressure but that's not necessarily good i can dehydrate you and tell you to only drink two ounces of water per day and lower your blood pressure so just think that that one surrogate marker is the most important is is you know really just narrow focused but if you look at the harms like stress hormones aldosterone renin angiotensin ii those artery stiffening hormones they all increase with a low salt diet if you go below three grams of sodium per day all those stress hormones increase we're all pictured yeah i mean it's great it's really helpful i mean historically you know as hunter gathers we probably had ten to one i mean sorry you know one to one sodium potassium now we often have ten to one uh sodium to potassium and that's coming probably primarily from processed food i always say it's not the salt or sugar you add to your food it's the sugar salt that's added by corporations that's hidden in your food it's the problem and the amount i mean you probably wouldn't be able to tolerate that much salt if you just put it on your food but when it's sort of a buried in tasteless you know refined ingredients it kind of makes it all taste good but it's actually uh killing you well i mean getting a normal salt intake is actually one of the best ways to reduce sugar cravings because one of the mechanisms the survival mechanisms that we had uh they you can see this in animals when they're depleted how do they know to go to a salt that can actually eat salts like how do they actually do that right it's because their reward center and the brain is actually hyper activated so that's what happens in humans as well if you don't get enough salt your reward center is hyper activated and you get you get more of a dopamine response to things like sugar adderall or or any type of addictive substance and so low salt can literally drive sugar addiction it's incredible all right let's talk about covid 19 because we're in the middle of this pandemic and it's clear that minerals play a role in the prevention and potentially even treatment of of covet and we did see with with uh you know our government recommendations they're not including all these guidelines about how to upgrade your nutrition or improve the quality of the food you're eating or take these supplements although i was sort of surprised when president trump had covet they put in the hospital in the new york times they report oh he's taking zinc and he's taking vitamin d you know so they actually were like wow you know they're they're practically applying it in the hospital but they're not telling americans to do this so talk about what are the key nutrients that can worsen covet outcomes if you're deficient and what we should do about it yeah i put together a pretty good chart in some of the books on the top nutrient deficiencies and how much they actually increase the risk of having a poor outcome or dying from coved then the top nutrient deficiency would be vitamin d essentially if you are significantly vitamin d deficient you're at up to 15 fold higher risk of dying from times higher risk of having a poor coveted outcome selenium and zinc said as you said somewhere between a three to fivefold higher risk of having a poor covet outcome or dying from covet if you're deficient in those minerals and i mean i love this example that that we there was a non-virulent rna virus called coxy virus it causes hand foot and mouth in some kids but in adults it doesn't do much unless you're selenium deficient if you're selenium deficient and get coccy virus you end up with ketone disease cardiomyopathy and you potentially die from the virus because you're selenium division and we treat these people by just giving them selenium so this would obviously translate to other rna viruses as well so we have a clear past example that mineral deficiencies can lead to fatal outcomes from an rna virus so why this isn't being talked about with covid is beyond me it is it's incredible and the selenium study from china was so fascinating about kova 19 and the dramatic changes in outcomes just based on one mineral and you know zinc also how does zinc play a role in immunity and and what is it what is it um what is the role of zinc in the body so there's two different sort of mechanisms so zinc lozenges have a direct antiviral effect right you know reducing viral replication and penetration into the cell um there's these you know so quote-unquote zinc ionophores that are trying to get more zinc into the cell as well and then you have zinc that just controls numerous uh immune cell health and they utilize zinc for um you know helping to kill viruses and actually magnesium is probably one of the most important because the ionic magnesium in immune cells actually controls their receptors to be able to attack viruses so zinc magnesium selenium is important for the antioxidant functions most we don't we kind of think of vitamins as being the antioxidants in the body but it's actually the minerals um because reaction control or antioxidant enzymes yeah so there's like copper zinc superoxide dismutase which it's the superoxide anion that depletes us of our nitrogen oxide and so not getting enough minerals can actually reduce nitric oxide and increase blood pressure okay let me unpack that for a minute because i think you just not people and people are going to necessarily get that so basically your body has its own antioxidant system and there's some very powerful antioxidants like superoxide dismutase you know catalase and so forth and these in order for these things to function they need the right amounts and the right types of nutrients so you're saying copper and zinc are important for uh or selenium and copper important for superoxide dismutase and selenium is important for glutathione peroxide so there's a lot of these important antioxidants that our bodies make that are way more powerful than any antioxidants you can take by taking a supplement and then they need the right levels of these minerals to function and what you're seeing is that 80 of us are deficient in in these nutrients and yet uh we're not taking advantage of this knowledge from science to actually upgrade our our own immune and antioxidant systems exactly what's actually really interesting is three billion years ago when algae was producing oxygen and this is where oxidative stress even comes from right is the actual change in the atmospheric oxygen um by these you know things like blue-green algae the first antioxidants that they used against their the defense of their own production of oxidative stress was iodine and selenium and algae their minerals were actually the first antioxidants in the first life forms on earth and what's really interesting even protection of the mitochondria depends on minerals so superoxide dismutase is not just in the blood and in helping the cytosol in the actual mitochondria there's something called manganese superoxide dismuta mitochondria and we know that's the powerhouse of the cell and produces atp so if you can't protect your own mitochondria because of your nutrient depleted you cannot protect yourself from oxidative stress yeah which is a big deal and and now with covid we're really seeing the need for increased levels of some of these nutrients like selenium and zinc um talk about iodine because uh you know we all were eating iodized salt there was a big problem with goiters and thyroid issues because of massive iodine deficiency in in history and so we decided to supplement salt with iodine but now people are eating iodine free salt and sea salt and what i recommend the redmond salt from for real salt from redmond i mean so how do we how do we have to think about iodine in the you know 20 because i'm now seeing when i test people uh iodine deficiencies and and i'm sort of surprised about it but i think it might be because of our changes in our dietary consumption of the type of salt we're eating you talk about why why um it's a problem and what we should be taking should we be taking iodized salts should be adding iodine treating more seaweed or fish what should we be doing well that's a great question and one of the primary reasons that a lot of people don't realize is we actually lose a lot of iodine through sweat so we don't just lose salt we lose iodine and i think that's the keys we lose about 50 micrograms per hour of exercise so if you're not um a natural cell that contains the iodine right you are then just simply becoming depleted and we know that iodine controls our thyroid hormones right iodine literally makes up t3 t4 and that controls our metabolism so you could literally have low thyroid functioning not only from a lack of nutrients particularly iodine but also salt because salt is required to drive iodine into the thyroid organ so and it actually moves a lot of other nutrients as well salt so the reason why we are likely deficient in iodine is a our salts are typically depleted in it unless you're consuming a healthy something like a himalayan or redmond or you're just over exercising and you're you're losing that iodine through sweat so do we think we should be taking iodine uh supplements should we be well there's a narrow there's kind of like this narrow therapeutic range with iodine and so you know you have to be careful because typically the sweet spot is about 150 to 250 micrograms per day um but you start getting into the three four hundred and you can actually start increasing the risk of thyroid disorders and uh autoimmune issues it's uh and so selenium is actually what's really important too with thyroid health yeah uh right in order to activate the thyroid hormones selenium is required to do that so it depends on your overall intake if you're getting if you're eating a lot of pastured eggs and you're getting a lot of sources of good sources of iodine maybe you don't need it but if you're not eating good amounts of iodine then yeah you probably want to either get it through supplementation or through a salt that actually contains that but there is that narrow therapeutic range with iodine you got to be a little careful so talk about the food we should be eating and the minerals that are in the food let's let's break down like the foods by the top minerals that we see are deficient you sort of outline give us the top ones and then sort of quickly go through what are the foods that these minerals are founded and how do we increase the intake of those okay that's a good that's a really good question so how i sort of build my diet is i start with um about 10 to 12 ounces let's say of pastured red meat typically i'd like to actually do bison or elk or venison because that's true ancestral meat and those meats actually have about 50 percent more minerals than even grass-fed cattle numerous reasons for that we don't need to go into that but i try to eat true ancestral meat and then i try to build um things off of that because if you're not getting a little bit of red meat it's going to be very difficult to get the b12 the protein the zinc and um the iron right because those four nutrients are packed in animal foods and once once you have that down then you can build and start adding plant foods to that right um and so plant foods are really great for things like potassium and magnesium and that's the key a lot of people and calcium a lot of people are deficient in calcium potassium magnesium and it's like get try to get those greens uh into the diet because they're very very high like kale and spinach are high in potassium calcium magnesium um and magnesium is very very low in most animal foods yeah and it's high also high in beans and greens and nuts and nuts a lot of magnesium and nuts right yes um and some fish has a decent amount of magnesium um some actually i what i love is lobster and crab because uh a it doesn't really destroy our ecosystem like fishing does the fishing industry destroys the ecosystem but um it's great great sources for copper magnesium iodine selenium and then a lot of people a lot of people do really well with just like an ounce of pastured liver per day for the copper folate and vitamin a just adding a little bit of pastured liver uh is a great source for those nutrients you can get um folate and vitamin a through a pastured eggs so i think some most people should be consuming a little bit of pastured eggs as well because because that brings vitamin d it's very difficult to get vitamin d in the diet unless you're consuming pastured eggs and they're also good sources of lutein zeaxanthin omega-3s as well so i'd like to have some re-pastured three to four pastured eggs per day some pastured red meat one ounce of liver or a half ounce of liver per day and then you can do your plant foods for magnesium potassium calcium yeah and the liver you know the liver has actually more vitamin c than carrots or apples i mean it's amazing if you look at your for for 100 gram portion for example of an apple or or so you get like seven milligrams of vitamin c with beef flavor you got like 27 milligrams of vitamin c so actually it is probably the most powerful superfood on the planet believe it or not and is higher in most nutrients and minerals um than than plant foods well what's interesting too is that uh stressed out animals actually produce up to 10 times more vitamin c so if we were actually hunting an animal we would be stressing that animal out incredibly and it would its production of vitamin c would have been much higher and we don't typically eat fresh meat but we've sort of lost our vitamin c through that mechanism we sort of buy supermarket foods that have been hanging for two three weeks and that doesn't have nearly as much vitamin c as a fresh kill would have so yeah the key is try to eat as fresh as possible when you cut so so basically you're outlining like you know grass-fed or wild meats a little bit of liver hey pasture-aged eggs lots of greens vegetables and also nuts and seeds i mean selenium is high for example in brazil nuts and zinc is high in pumpkin seeds and i mean iodine is high in seaweed and obviously fish so by understanding where these come from you can start to create a diet that is actually more nutrient dense uh but but you're often saying that that's not enough even if we figured out how to eat all the foods that you know and i i once had a patient she was obsessed was like look i don't want any vitamins so i'm gonna have my like three brazil nuts a day my 17 pumpkin seeds and my life she figured it all out and i guess that's okay to do but make sure you check and test to see that you're actually using absorbing it what we're assuming we're doing all the great dietary changes that help us upgrade our mineral intake um who should be taking supplements what should we be taking how do we get these and upgrade our mineral levels right and and that that comes down to the difference between are you getting the rda and are you getting an optimal intake and so and and what's your diet actually made up of so what's interesting is the you only need about 150 milligrams of magnesium to live per day but the optimal intake is sits more around 700 milligrams so it's like a three four-fold difference between just maintaining balance and having optimal intakes of minerals and same thing with copper and selenium and the list goes on and on so whether you're building your diet appropriately like some of the foods that we talked about and hitting optimal nutrient intakes then maybe you don't need to supplement as much but most people are still going to be lacking boron and manganese because those nutrients are very very difficult to source in the so diet those would be great to take and a lot of people are deficient in magnesium even eating um good amounts of the foods we talked about and so i i love to drink mineral waters for that reason natural mineral waters like gerald steiner which is high in magnesium and calcium and bicarbonate to offset some of the acidosis from the animal foods that i consume it's a really good bioavailable source of of minerals as well yeah so the the key is is to um one make sure your diet is upgraded so just to review you know magnesium is found in nuts and seeds and and greens and beans selenium is high in brazil nuts pumpkin seeds uh my knives oysters have high zinc uh and so so does uh animal protein as you mentioned iodine you can get from fish or seaweed um and uh you know some of these other hard to get minerals you sometimes need to use mineral waters or supplements um you know should everybody be taking a multi-mineral supplement um should we be taking more of some of the other minerals should all we'd be testing first before we take minerals or should we just assume it's okay to take them and what's yours what's your sense well this is this is really interesting they did they did a study they looked at the typical diet and uh 50 of the population was deficient in things like magnesium calcium then they gave them a multivitamin mineral almost the same amount of people were still deficient because they don't typical multivitamins and minerals don't add back the key nutrients that are missing in our diet like magnesium like calcium like copper so it's it's like the multivitamin mineral it doesn't get you there for a lot of those that are still deficient yeah and now people take right things like calcium or magnesium um or even copper because of that and so i do think a lot of people probably would benefit from from actually taking not just a multivitamin mineral but separate minerals especially things like selenium zinc because it's it's typically not high enough as well in those type of multis so why why would you say you you need to extra because you're not getting the height of dose is what you're saying but if you've got a a good dose as a multi-minute you'll be okay but the things that i think are most important people take are magnesium that's a miracle supplement zinc is another common one that i'll clinically use calcium often i think people can get from their diet if they upgrade things like chia seeds and tahini and sesame seeds and other things that have a really powerful you know mineral content um i think that sometimes you know we'll give extra iodine or chromium or boron depending on the clinical situation but what you're saying is we sometimes need to take separate minerals because of this and we need to measure our levels and we need to upgrade our diet and that will help to address this sort of rampant mineral deficiency in our society exactly and i think you know the other thing people don't realize is they don't think oh you know um i'm going to take this medication and it's going to work on this single pathway doing this one thing right a proton pump inhibitor fury acid blocks this one pathway in your stomach the problem is that these these are not like drugs nutrients are multifunctional substances that literally affect dozens to hundreds of different biological processes every second right you have 37 billion billion chemical reactions every second in your body and every one of those reactions needs an enzyme and the vitamin minerals are the helpers for those enzymes so magnesium might help regulate hundreds of different enzymes all doing the things that you mentioned whether it's keeping your blood pressure good or your brain function or your dna regulation i mean all these things are so critical to our biology and we're low in these nutrients even though they're in small amounts can have profound effects i mean we really profound effects and and you know just just just an example we used to work in the emergency room and we had this incredible uh scene where people would come in with alcoholism they'd be completely wiped out drunk and have never eaten food they're very nutrition deficient they get thiamin deficiency uh and they have encephalopathy which means they're basically psychotic you just give them a vitamin and the psychosis goes away overnight like literally so that's the power of these nutrients incredibly small doses that can have profound biological effects right and we didn't i mean we didn't even know about um these issues you said until we started polishing rice right or until people started doing these abnormal things to their bodies and then all of a sudden you just give one you give thiamin to someone um and all of a sudden right it goes away and so sometimes health really is that simple it's just in the vitamin or mineral that you're deficient in well this is such a great conversation i think you know we're we're willing to pay attention now more than ever given this idea that uh we're more nutrition efficient ever the covet is actually exposing that uh and and we have an over nutrition of starch and sugar and under nutrition of real nutrients in your book the mineral fix how to optimize our mineral intake for energy longevity immunity and sleep and more is out now it's great it's on amazon go there and get it called the mineral fix it'll really enlighten you it's a big book it's like i think of it as like a bible for minerals i was like whoa this is a big bucket i think it's going to cost me extra money to ship at home from why and and i think you know we just can really by tweaking our nutrition particularly micronutrients get a profound effect and they don't just make expensive urine like we all were taught in medical school so so james thank you for the work you do thank you for being so obsessive about nutrition and studying the literature and translating it for all of us your work is really quite amazing and all the scientific papers you write are just fabulous i've learned so much from them and and continue what you're doing and for those of you listening uh if you've enjoyed this podcast please share with your friends and family and subscriber ever get your podcast leave a comment tell us how you've been affected by mineral deficiencies and what you've learned about it i would love to hear from you and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy [Music] hey it's dr hyman if you enjoyed this video you're going to want to check out this next video coming up we have to take proactive steps to protect our dna and some of the things that we can do are pretty simple like for example we know that an elemental vitamin vitamin c can actually do it

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 45,616

Rating: 4.9310665 out of 5

Keywords: mineral deficiency, minerals, magnesium, salt intake, Dr. James DiNicolantonio, mark hyman, health podcast, the doctor's farmacy, aging, chronic illness

Id: lfAd1pTHYJM

Length: 57min 28sec (3448 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021