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Transcript
- 02:06 About Dr. Carolyn Dean
- 09:39 The Magnesium Miracle
- 16:51 Different Magnesium Products and Lines
- 23:00 Reasons for Magnesium Deficiency
- 30:55 The High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol and Diabetes Cycle
- 37:23 Daily Magnesium Intake
- 41:29 Preferred Forms of Magnesium
- 51:40 “Too Much” Magnesium
- 62:19 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 64:30 Where to Find Dr. Carolyn Dean
Wendy Myers: Welcome to Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me at myersdetox.com and you can find this video podcast on the YouTube channel, WendyLiveto110. Please go there and subscribe. You can also find the video on the corresponding blog post on my website.
Today, we have Dr. Carolyn Dean on the show. She’s the author of The Magnesium Miracle and is an expert on magnesium. We’re going to be talking about the importance of magnesium and why everyone is so deficient and how medications deplete magnesium and how magnesium and other minerals are essential to our health and functioning. You cannot be healthy without ingesting adequate levels of magnesium on a daily basis.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition, and is not a substitute for professional, medical advice. Please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on the show.
I’m so happy I have finally launched my online health program called Body Bio Rehab. You can learn more at BodyBioRehab.com. I created this program because I wanted a simple online program to help people to improve their energy, to improve their sleep, give them a four-week meal plan so they can follow a Paleo diet for about a month, also to reduce brain fog and begin reversing their health conditions.
I’ve got many different modules in the program. There are six different modules with about three different lessons. It’s a very comprehensive program that teach you all about the basics of health and all the things that you need to be doing to live a healthy life, a healthy, long, disease-free life. So go check it out at BodyBioRehab.com
Dr. Carolyn Dean is our guest today. She’s not only a medical doctor, she’s also a naturopath, an herbalist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, lecturer, consultant and author. She has a thriving practice over the phone. She lives in Maui, in Hawaii. I’m very jealous.
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. is the author of 110 Kindle books and 33 health books, including The Magnesium Miracle and Invisible Minerals Part I and II. Dr. Dean is on the medical advisory board of the non-profit educational site, Nutritional Magnesium Association. Her magnesium outreach has won her an award from the Heart Rhythm Society in the UK for outstanding medical contribution to cardiac rhythm management.
Dr. Dean has a free online newsletter and a valuable online two-year wellness program called Completement Now! Find out more at Dr. Dean’s website, DrCarolynDean.com and her RnA drops, ReMag, ReLyte, and ReAline at her website, RNAReset.com.
Dr. Dean, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Carolyn Dean: Thank you, Wendy. Thank you for inviting me. It’s insane to me having to fly to the mainland to be able to do it this way over Skype.
Wendy Myers: Yes, and you’re a very good friend of Morley Robbins, yes?
Carolyn Dean: Well, Morley, as I say to people, I infected him with magnesium. He’s never been the same since. He made a huge study and still makes a huge study with magnesium and the importance of it. I say to Morley, just get the information out there and tell as many people as you can. The word is spreading.
Actually, just today in Medscape, the medical online information news source and forum, a well-known cardiologist, he finally spoke up for magnesium. And that’s huge! I’m going to blog it later on.
So it’s very huge when doctors do get involved because they have been misinformed about magnesium. When allopathic medicine focuses on drugs, they really turned their back on nutrients. But you well know that minerals, they’re the foundation of the function of the body, the electrical activity, the structure of the body.
But in medical school (and I went to medicine school so I know firsthand), they did not talk about nutrients. But in the biochemistry (and I had 200 hours of biochemistry in my medical training), all the diagrams that show the biochemistry and the biochemical activity of the body, each step in progression for certain cycles requires vitamins and minerals. The most required mineral is magnesium.
Seven hundred to eight hundred different enzyme systems require magnesium. And by enzyme systems, I don’t mean the enzymes that break down your food in your stomach. I mean the biochemistry that things like the Krebs’ cycle.
Krebs’ cycle, some people may know trades your energy, your ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Six out of eight of the steps of the Krebs’ cycle require magnesium.
So when you see people talking about, “We should be taking CoQ10. We should be taking this for the Krebs’ cycle… that for the Krebs’ cycle,” if they don’t say, “You should be taking magnesium,” they’ve got it wrong.
Unfortunately, in allopathic medicine, and even in natural medicine, we ignore magnesium and it maybe because there is no really good blood test for it. It may be because most of the magnesium that has been used in the research studies is magnesium oxide. Most of the prescribed magnesium is magnesium oxide and only 4% of magnesium oxide is even absorbed.
So the rest of the 96% will go through the intestines and will cause a laxative effect. People say, “That’s the side effect of magnesium. When you reach the laxative effect, you should stop. Your body has enough.” It’s just nowhere near true because I’ve been working with people. If we can get them saturated with magnesium, that’s when the miracles occur.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your mission to educate people about magnesium?
Carolyn Dean: Right, I delved right in there.
My name is Carolyn. Basically, I was studying natural medicine in my teens. That’s going back 50 years that I’ve been interested in nutrition and lifestyle. When I was in high school back then in the ’60s, even though I was vice president of the student council (because a woman could not be president of the student council back then) and I was in the top 3 all of the time of marks on and on and on, my guidance counselors told me that I could be an executive secretary or a nurse.
So, by the time I grew out of that misinformation, fortunately, I did a year of, get this, secretarial science in university. So, I got my typing and my shorthand. So by the time I went to medical school, I shorthanded every word they said and I knew everything. I memorized and had it in my brain.
Anyway, through medical school, I was not dissuaded. I was not turned away from nutrition and lifestyle, and just getting the right nutrients. So when I went into my medical practice in 1979, I right away was operating as a naturopath and I had already had naturopathic courses and continued them.
So it was always giving people the natural options and choices. And often times, just a lot of common sense and just telling people rest, go home. I would, more often, write prescriptions for taking a week off work, a prescription to have husband to do the dishes, a prescription to go to the spa every week. I hardly ever wrote drug prescriptions because there are so many options and choices in my naturopathic work.
I learned acupuncture, homeopathy, hair analysis. I learned all the things that can support people to stay healthy.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about magnesium. You wrote a book called The Magnesium Miracle. So I take it you’re an expert on magnesium.
Carolyn Dean: Yes, I apparently am and I’m the most outspoken. Actually, that reminds me, calling me an expert because a couple of months ago, I was invited to an experts’ conference in California. About a dozen, only a dozen of the top researchers and experts in magnesium came together. We’re trying to figure out how do we get the word out there, how do we get better studies, how do we get better testing.
As I mentioned earlier, the blood testing for magnesium that’s done only measures 1% of the magnesium in the body. That little bit of magnesium in your blood stream keeps your heart properly balanced with calcium, keeps your muscles from twitching, it helps make you sleep properly at night. It does hundreds and hundreds of things, but we don’t measure it properly.
The best measurement is ionized magnesium test that’s only in research labs. I bridged the gap between the serum magnesium, which is not very good and the ionized magnesium test, which is not available with a magnesium RBC blood test. It’s helpful especially people around a lot of medications, for them to see just where their magnesium is.
And even that test, if they take that test to their doctor, the range in the lab is usually about 4.2 to 6.8 milligrams per deciliter of blood. So 4.2 to 6.8, if they come back 4.2 and they take their test to their doctor, the doctor goes, “You’re okay. You’re in the range.”
However, at least 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium. So when you get that range in the lab, it’s measuring the sick population, the population that’s deficient. So I tell people, “Look, you want to be up there around 6.0 to 6.5 or even higher.” But people do pay sometimes more attention to blood test than their own symptoms.
I have on blog seen in my Magnesium Miracle book a list of a hundred factors that relate to magnesium deficiency. I tell people, “Look at those factors, look at your symptoms, and start supplementing with magnesium.”
Sometimes I just say to people, “Look, just soak your feet in Epson salts and see how your body and your symptoms improve just with that little bit of magnesium.”
I’ll tell you, Wendy, people will come to me on dozen different medications and say that they’re afraid to try magnesium.
What happens when you start to take magnesium? You’ll feel different. You may feel so different that you’re afraid that it’s another symptom. You’ll start waking up, things may start to tingle and shift, and you’ll think, “Oh, no! It’s more symptoms,” because we’re so focused on symptoms.
I covered that as well in my book and online in my blogs with the blog that’s called When Magnesium Makes Me Worse. Magnesium doesn’t make your worse. It’s just a grabber. What’s happening is you’re actually maybe taking vitamin D along with your magnesium. And the vitamin D will pull in calcium and block your magnesium.
If you’re taking high doses of calcium or if you have done over the years, that calcium will block your magnesium. If you take enough magnesium, it will actually dissolve your calcium.
And we’ve got a real problem in, mostly our female population because women have been told for decades to take thousands of milligrams of calcium supplements.
Wendy Myers: That was me for a long time.
Carolyn Dean: And in the past decade, there have been at least six major studies showing that women who simply ingest calcium supplements are at a higher risk for heart disease. What they don’t really put in their headlines, it’s heart disease, it’s heel spurs, it’s kidney stones and it’s breast tissue calcification.
So women who take supplements like calcium supplements are usually just about 4% absorbed, so the other 96% does go into creating constipation and it does precipitate in soft tissues.
So this breast tissue calcification, all of a sudden, is diagnosed as a pre pre-cancer condition, DCIS, disseminated something or other, in the breast tissues. So what does that mean? More mammograms, more breast tissue biopsies because calcification in the breast has been equated with breast cancer.
So we’ve created such a scary situation with the calcium and the magnesium could help. You can take it by mouth, you can actually spray magnesium liquid or magnesium oil on the breast to help breast tissue calcification.
Wendy Myers: I made the mistake of spraying magnesium on my thighs one time. My thighs started itching really, really bad and stinging really bad. But I think it’s a better idea to soak your feet in it.
Carolyn Dean: Yes, it’s like going into the ocean and letting the salt water dry on your skin and stay there for days. There are magnesium liquids that don’t cause that type of itching, but a lot of them do.
And it used to be that it was magnesium oils that you’re talking about there. That used to be one of the only ways of getting enough magnesium without causing the laxative effect.
So, I wrote about that in the second edition of my Magnesium Miracle book in the 2014 edition. I talked about different products that I’ve been working with that do not have the laxative effects. So people have many choices now, which is wonderful about the internet because people can find choices, find products that suit their metabolism.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you talk about your magnesium line. You’ve got several products, the ReMag and some other supplements. Why don’t you talk about that?
Carolyn Dean: Thank you, Wendy. ReMag is a magnesium product. I personally have heart palpitations and leg cramps if I don’t get enough magnesium. But what I found is even taking one pill or one teaspoon of a magnesium powder, I would get the laxative effect.
So I have a bowel sensitivity to magnesium. It does not mean I had enough magnesium because I got the laxative effect. It really means people who have mild IBS or some sort of bowel problem, sometimes they just can’t take the magnesium.
And what happens is they end up having to take intravenous magnesium in order to get enough magnesium. So for about 10 years, I was looking for a type of magnesium that had no laxative effect, was concentrated enough, that was in a high enough milligram dosage to saturate.
I finally created what I call a picometer-sized magnesium. It’s a billionth of a meter. It’s so tiny, it’s the same size as the cell mineral ion channels. The cell only has little openings for minerals, so it doesn’t get flooded.
So the picometer magnesium, I stabilized the ionic form, gets into the cells, saturates them. But in the process, actually, it does quite a lot. It will kick out extra calcium, it will kick out chemicals and heavy metals like mercury. So there is some detox effect. Something like ReMag is very beneficial to people because some people are so sensitive that they can’t take the major intravenous chelation products that are out there. They get very sick with them. So it serves a number of purposes.
And after I had such good results with the ReMag, getting people off intravenous magnesium that they had to take onto ReMag and doubling their blood levels of magnesium were some of the reactions to the ReMag.
So then I decided to get the chemist to make multiple mineral and that’s called the ReLyte. And it’s now changed to ReMyte, R-E-M-Y-T-E, just a trademark thing going on there.
So with the mineral, I’ve been at this, as I said earlier, since 1979 was when I went into medical practice, but I’ve been studying for 50 years. And it’s only in the past couple of years using the ReMag and ReMyte to really get well-absorbed minerals into the body that I’ve really seen people’s health improve because minerals, for example, nine minerals are required for the thyroid. It’s not just iodine, it’s not just iodine and selenium. There are nine minerals.
When people finally get these minerals in the body, they can actually get off thyroid medication, which is what happened to me. I was able to get off my Armour thyroid.
So there’s a lot going on, but I also really promote sea salt in water, Himalayan salt in water. Sometimes, I’m telling people, “Look, pure sea salt water, put your feet in Epsom salts and start feeling better. And drink enough water.”
Because when we tell people that they’re going to be detoxing with the ReMag, pushing up minerals, you have to have enough water in your body to flush things out. And what I’m sure you’re used to seeing, when people don’t have enough minerals, they can actually drink and drink and still feel dehydrated, and actually build up fluid in their ankles or even if your skin doesn’t bounce back after you pull it up like that. If you have thick skin in your wrist, that’s fluid retention.
But if you have enough minerals that go into your cells, like sea salt minerals, in my case, ReMag minerals and ReMyte minerals, then those minerals pull fluid water in after them. The metabolic functions go along smoothly.
Some of that water is used up in metabolism. And then you urinate out the waste products. It’s not just water going in and water going out, like a lot of people say. I have folks, when they get proper mineralization saying they don’t even get up any more to use the bathroom and they’re not going to the bathroom every hour or more.
So minerals, yes, to me it starts with minerals. Certainly, there are other things that I talk about, but until I see people saturated with minerals, I don’t go into too much more except yeast overgrowth.
And I’m sure you’re aware of that, the importance of yeast and how yeast toxins can block our hormones. They can block the thyroid, the adrenals and the sex hormones and mimic those hormones. I pay a lot of attention to yeast overgrowth as well.
Wendy Myers: Most of my clients have some degree of yeast overgrowth. When your body’s vitality declines, these infections are opportunistic and can take hold, take root.
Wendy Myers: So can you tell us why everyone today is so magnesium deficient?
Carolyn Dean: It’s because it’s no longer in the soils. Organic farmers, if they don’t put minerals in their soils, the plants just don’t have minerals. There’s much more calcium in the soil than there is magnesium. So there is an imbalance right there.
When you cook foods, you lose magnesium. Magnesium, if you recall in high school chemistry, they would give us a strip of magnesium and you light it up through your Bunsen burner, it just explodes.
Wendy Myers: Yes, I remember that experiment.
Carolyn Dean: Yeah, that’s magnesium. And magnesium is a huge part of fireworks, so it burns off really quickly. The example I give to people about plants and magnesium is I have clients who have been on crazy 140 ounces of green drink a day program, they come to me with heart palpitations and leg cramps.
I tell them they’re magnesium deficient, they don’t believe me. They do the blood test, they’re deficient because even though they’re drinking organic green juices, those plants do not have enough magnesium for them to sustain magnesium in their blood or in their muscles, and then they suffer the magnesium deficiency symptoms.
From head to toe, it’s crazy. When you go to a doctor with magnesium deficiency symptoms and it’s migraine headaches, it’s esophageal spasms, it’s heart palpitations, it’s high blood pressure, it’s tissue calcifications, it’s kidney stones, it’s cramping and irritability of the intestines, it’s toe cramps, it’s tingling, it’s muscle twitches, people are just sometimes bedridden with all these symptoms and doctors will just medicate each symptom one at a time until then you’re suffering from side effects from medications. And a lot of the side effects from medications these days are magnesium deficiency symptoms.
I don’t know if you follow drug side effects, but what are most prominent is cardiovascular side effects of drugs. And to me, heart side effects are related to magnesium deficiency. The heart muscle, most of the magnesium in the body, is in the heart, the highest levels are in the heart. So that means something, or it should mean something to people.
If there’s not enough magnesium, the heart starts going into twitches and spasms. It will start triggering extra pacemakers in the heart, which will cause atrial fibrillation and heart palpitations. It will cause angina. It can cause a heart attack.
You only have to look at athletes who run big marathons, get very depleted with all the sweating. They don’t replace magnesium in their electrolytes. It’s mainly sugar and salt. They die of an electrical misconductivity and irregularity in their heart.
The specialists are scratching their heads. “Well, we don’t know what causes this.” Because they don’t really pay attention to the electrolytes. They’ll give lip service to sodium and calcium and chloride but they don’t even measure magnesium when they measure electrolytes.
Wendy Myers: It’s insane to me that people that go into hospitals with cardiac events that they don’t measure their magnesium and administer magnesium. It’s just preposterous.
Carolyn Dean: There’s even a duplicity there in my Magnesium Miracle book. I talk about several magnesium trials where they give intravenous magnesium at the onset of heart attack, and they stop the atrial fibrillation or the heart palpitations that can be created with a heart attack. They stop the spread of the damage in the heart. There are all kinds of benefits to that IV given immediately after a heart attack.
And then there comes along the studies that say, “Well, let’s measure drug reaction along with the magnesium and see how they compare.”
And what I see when I read the fine print of the study is they won’t give magnesium for a day or two after the event, which completely throws it off. It’s erroneous study but then they’ll say, “It doesn’t work as well as the drug or it works just as well as the drugs so we might as well use the drug because we know more about the drug.”
Another thing I wrote about in Magnesium Miracle was when women go into labor and start experiencing high blood pressure, fluid retention and seizures, or they may be experiencing it weeks before their labor, what are they given to reduce the blood pressure, get rid of the fluid retention, stop the seizures? Intravenous magnesium.
So they have it right in front of them. They have the answers but they don’t apply it. They don’t give magnesium to people with high blood pressure and they don’t give it to people with seizures, and they don’t give it to people with fluid retention. And they’re really missing out on helping a lot of people. But it’s as I said before, they don’t use the right tests to measure it and if they give magnesium, they give the ones that create diarrhea and people don’t want that happening.
That’s why I appreciate being on your show because I can get information out there to people to show them that they can just simply read the information I provide. Most of it is free. You can buy my Magnesium Miracle book but you don’t have to. You just put my name in Google and magnesium, and I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of articles about magnesium that show you how you can benefit. I actually have some free e-books on my website or on my RnA Reset website with my products.
So I’m all about educating people so that you can get the right information.
My customer service person and I were talking the other day. It’s not really a matter of you doing more and more research about magnesium because you put magnesium in there and you’re going to get all kinds and even contradictory information. You’re going to get people who say magnesium is dangerous. Don’t take it if you have kidney disease. And heaven forbid, people with kidney disease really need magnesium. But they do need a magnesium that’s well-absorbed and doesn’t cause a laxative effect.
So that’s again where I come back to my ReMag. I really try to get people to understand that if you’re having problems with your magnesium, if you’re still having symptoms, it’s not that you’re saturated and your body is trying to get rid of the excess. You just may not have the right type of magnesium for your condition.
Wendy Myers: I wanted to ask you about high blood pressure because I know for many people that have high blood pressure, they can simply take magnesium and dramatically improve their blood pressure regulation. But by taking the diuretic pill and blood pressure lowering medication, they actually severely deplete magnesium and make their condition worse. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Carolyn Dean: That’s a very good point because that’s the entry point of most people in taking a lot of medication, is when they’re stressed and tense. They’ve lost a lot of magnesium due to their stress. The magnesium keeps the smooth muscles of the blood vessels relaxed. If you don’t have enough magnesium, your blood vessels just start tightening up and getting smaller, and you can push less blood through them. So your pressure goes up. It’s a hemodynamic natural occurrence.
Low magnesium, your blood vessels tighten up, your blood pressure goes up. You go to your doctor, your blood pressure is up. The doctor doesn’t say, “How’s your stress level?” The doctor never asks if you’re taking magnesium, but just get a prescription going right away because your blood pressure is up because that’s the only mechanism they know for blood pressure.
It’s usually a diuretic. A diuretic will drain off more fluid and drain off your minerals. They may say, “Well, you’re going to lose some sodium and potassium. So eat bananas.” But they never tell a person about magnesium.
So a month later, you come back, you’ve drained off more magnesium. Your blood pressure might even be higher. Your doctor will say, “We caught your blood pressure just in time. You need two more blood pressure drugs because it’s resistant to the diuretic.”
What they’ll do is give you calcium channel blocker. A calcium channel blocker, a natural one, is magnesium. Magnesium balances out calcium. And they’ll give you an ACE inhibitor, which is another way of trying to block your blood pressure at the kidney level.
So you’ve got three drugs now. You go back two months later to have blood test, to make sure the drugs aren’t harming your liver. But all of a sudden, they find your blood sugar is elevated, then your cholesterol is elevated. And the doctor again will say, “Oh, good. We just caught your diabetes and we caught your high cholesterol. Here are two more drugs.”
Without a thought in their head that actually those three drugs have drained so much magnesium that now your blood sugar is elevated because of magnesium deficiency and your cholesterol is elevated because of magnesium deficiency. Even in the medical texts, one of the signs of diabetes is low magnesium, and one of the ways that you can control cholesterol is with magnesium because the same enzyme that is killed by statin drugs for cholesterol, that same enzyme is balanced by magnesium.
So it’s this crazy scenario. When I speak about this scenario or write about it, people say, “Oh, my gosh! That’s exactly what happened to me, my dad or my mom.” It is so crazy that this keeps happening and doctors just don’t get it. And what’s more, what they’ll say to people is, “You can never go off your medications because you’ll just get worse and worse and worse.”
Wendy Myers: That is a lie. I hate that lie, so many we’re told about so many different medications.
Carolyn Dean: But to just quickly wrap up because I know I’m going on and on.
Wendy Myers: We want you to go on and on. I love it.
Carolyn Dean: Thank you. Why they say don’t come off your drugs is because they never see people getting better. And they don’t get better because of the drugs, because of the magnesium deficiency and then patients are never given the opportunity to get better by going off their drugs and taking magnesium.
How do I get around that? I don’t even say to my clients or my blog readers, “You have to get off your drugs.” What I say, and I wrote this in a recent blog about weaning off your medication is take the ReMag and ReLyte. I also have a very gentle detox formula, those RnA drops which is a very interesting product for helping you make better cells, healthier cells. I say go on my four products. That’s all you need to make you feel better.
And once you start feeling better, your blood pressure will be consistently better even on your drugs because usually, on your drugs, your blood pressure is still abnormal. So as your blood pressure normalizes, then you and your doctor both will want to get you off your blood pressure meds because you don’t want your blood pressure going too low on those meds. You don’t need your meds if your blood pressure is normal.
Same with cholesterol, same with blood sugar.
So I tell people get health on these products first and then you can wean off your medications because what happens, Wendy, with most people is they get so sick on their drugs, they feel so bad, they just quit them cold turkey. And then they feel even worse. Even if they do start magnesium after they quit their drugs, which is what some people [inaudible 00:37:00], they’ll say, “You better not take magnesium along with your drugs. There could be an interaction.” Oh, my gosh. Magnesium is like food. Why would you want to stop eating your food?
I’m on my soap box now.
Wendy Myers: I like it. I wanted to get on your soap box rant.
Wendy Myers: So how much magnesium do we need per day?
Carolyn Dean: Well, we need a lot. The RDA is about 300 to 400 milligrams a day, maybe 20% of that is absorbed from our food sources at the cellular level. What are we getting? So I tell people since you’re lucky these days to get the 200 from your food, whereas a hundred years ago, we were getting 500, nowadays I say, people probably need about 700 to 800 milligrams of magnesium. I personally mostly have to take 900 milligrams with my ReMag, which is 100% absorbed. So I need a lot of it to keep myself under magnesium saturation.
There are some of us that we just lose magnesium. High metabolic rate, sensitive intestines.
So it really does depend on how you feel. I tell people they may need 300 to 400, and see how they feel for a week or so. And actually, the types of people who come to my products, they’re very ill. They’re very complex. They have tried so many things. They’re very sensitive.
I even tell some people, just start with 10 drops of ReMag. Each drop has 2.5 milligrams. So that’s 25 milligrams of magnesium. That’s enough to start revving up some of these hundreds of enzyme functions in the body.
You don’t want to go from being in a wheelchair to riding a Maserati, is that the name of that car? You don’t want to put your foot down on the gas pedal too fast.
It’s like with any good thing, you want to do it slowly and gently because some—even though I make that announcement all the time. It’s on the labeling. It’s on my free book about ReMag, people think, “Oh, my gosh! I took a teaspoon of ReMag. I thought it would be okay and I’m all stirred up. And I say, “Well, at least you know it’s working.” That something is helping. But I really caution people just to go slowly like they should with anything they take.
Wendy Myers: And what form of magnesium is the ReMag?
Carolyn Dean: It’s a magnesium chloride. And that’s the basic sea salt, the magnesium. It is one of the best absorbed. But in the way it’s manufactured for me, it’s stabilized at the ionic level. So what that means is you’ve got your MG and your CL, which is magnesium chloride. And the processing it goes through separates the magnesium and chloride, stabilizes them. So now your stabilized magnesium ions, which are the picometer size, they can dive right into the cells and be immediately activated.
One of the other amazing things about a product like this is it doesn’t even matter if you have a leaky gut because you don’t even need your gut for absorption. You start absorbing in your mouth, in your esophagus, in your stomach. Because I’ve heard some practitioners say, “Well, you have a leaky gut so don’t even bother taking nutrients because you’re not absorbing any,” which is crazy because you really need your minerals to start your body, structure, function and electrical conductivity. You need your minerals for all those functions in the body.
Wendy Myers: What are your favorite forms of magnesium? Of course, we know you love ReMag. There are lots of people taking different forms of magnesium. There are many different forms. What are your top two or three preferred forms of magnesium?
Carolyn Dean: Well, after the ReMag, magnesium chloride, it is the magnesium citrate, the magnesium citrate powder which the Natural Calm product that you know about. They’ve done a great job. They’re a very good company, high integrity. With that product, you put in water and you stir it up. You can actually sip it through the day and that decreases the laxative effect.
The same with ReMag, because it is a liquid to start with, you put it in water and you can sip it through the day. That means you’re not taking one dose all at once which in the case of the magnesium citrate powders can cause diarrhea.
Then I would go with the transdermal forms. ReMag can be put in a spray bottle and spray it anywhere in the body. What I say about spray forms, say you have a painful wrist, you spray it on, maybe tap it in so it doesn’t run over the sides. Let it dry. Spray again. Let it dry. Spray. Let it dry. After four or five applications, our painful area will actually—the inflammation will go and the pain will go away.
We’ve had many, many reports. There are the ancient minerals, magnesium chloride sprays. They call it magnesium oil. What I tell people who have the reaction that you did with the itching and irritation, it’s to dilute it. Distilled water is the best thing to dilute it with. And just go from there.
You can spray your whole body with ReMag. And actually, that doesn’t cause as much irritation but you can spray your whole body with magnesium oil. Leave it on for half an hour, and then take your shower. A half an hour is usually enough time for the absorption.
But what’s interesting about the magnesium oil form is that you can actually get diarrhea from spraying or from an Epsom salt bath because it’s still not the picometer ionic form. When it’s absorbed into the body, it still has to be ionized to get fully into the cells.
So when you get the laxative effect, then your body just is not able to absorb enough of it. In my experience with the magnesium oils, it’s too much trouble and they really can’t do it two or three times a day to get enough to match where you can get by taking something like a ReMag by mouth.
So I tell people do both. Spray it on, take baths, take foot baths, take some natural calm. But also add some of the ReMag to get that last bit into your cells to really change your clinical symptoms.
Wendy Myers: Do you like magnesium glycinate because I read that that helps raise RBC or red blood cell magnesium.
Carolyn Dean: Well, the glycinate, that was the one that people use for less laxative effect. What I found for myself, it does cause a laxative effect in me so it’s not 100% absorbed. I find that I would have to take about 15 pills a day in order to get my therapeutic effect. So I go by that and what people tell me is that yes, magnesium glycinate help to a certain extent but then when they added something like the ReMag, then they got a much more therapeutic effect.
People just have to try different forms. But yes, whether we’re talking about magnesium citrate, the glycinate, the ReMag, magnesium chloride, some people even will take the magnesium oxide for its laxative effect. If you’re constipated, that will really help. But then you really have to be careful of getting diarrhea when you take magnesium because then you’re draining out even more minerals.
If you’re taking magnesium oxide, also take a ReMag to get the magnesium into your cells, not just flushing out your intestines.
Wendy Myers: What about the magnesium 07 that you find in products called Oxipowder? Are you familiar with those? They have a very much a laxative effect that they use this as intestinal cleansers.
Carolyn Dean: I have looked them up and like you said, I’m pretty sure they are in oxide form. So it’s like a flushing and a cleanser.
Wendy Myers: Yes, they’re oxide.
Carolyn Dean: And even magnesium citrate, some doctors will just say, “Magnesium is just a laxative,” because they’re just used to the citrate forms where you take 3000 milligrams. Instead of 300 or 600, you’re taking 3000, which is what causes the flushing out the bowels before you take a colonoscopy.
So they just know it is a laxative. And that’s how far behind the doctors are. I have doctors who are e-mailing me or e-mailing customer service all the time just saying this stuff and, “I’m so glad I found it.” But there few and far between the doctors that really understand magnesium. And that’s why again, it’s important that shows like yours to educate people, to understand the importance of magnesium, and other minerals because we can’t forget that other minerals are important as well. And I have people telling me and I was an example of this as well. When I just took magnesium, I needed three teaspoons a day, let’s say, which is 900 milligrams. When I started taking my ReLyte with all the other minerals, I only needed two teaspoons most days.
So what I was doing with my magnesium was actually treating other mineral deficiencies with higher doses of magnesium. That’s one thing people might be doing as well. I know I’m throwing a lot of information but this is how much information is available on magnesium and how we’re forgetting about it.
I haven’t even talked about the drugs that are made with fluoride molecules to make them stronger.
Wendy Myers: Like Prozac.
Carolyn Dean: Yes, right. Cipro, certain anesthetics that are used in surgery, hay fever drugs, statin drugs, and the fluoride in these drugs has the potential to bind with magnesium as an insoluble, brittle chemical or brittle compound that will deposit in bones, make your bones brittle, deposit in tendons and cartilage, and lead to the Cipro side effect, which is tendon rupture.
So the drugs we’re taking with the fluoride, they are an abomination.
Wendy Myers: And all anti-depressants, all of them have fluoride including Prozac except for Zoloft. Zoloft doesn’t.
Carolyn Dean: And even if they don’t have fluoride, all drugs will put an extra strain on the liver to help detoxify those drugs. It’s a thing that amazes me. When I first started my practice in 1979, I thought in a few years, doctors will know more about nutrients and they’ll start prescribing them. But actually, the opposite happened.
So we’ve come to a point where nutrients are being vilified and doctors don’t know anything about them. And unfortunately, if doctors have not learned something medical school, they deny it and they say, “Well, I learned everything in medicine. So what you’re talking about doesn’t exist. It’s quackery.”
Also doctors ignore side effects of drugs. They actually start treating drugs side effects with more medication.
So you’ve got the statin drugs, which have fluoride in them. Some of them do. That causes you to need Viagra. So you get the statin drugs that deplete the body of the necessary cholesterol to make our hormones and to coat every cell in the body with the fatty membrane, to coat the neurons in your brain with the necessary fatty membrane. So with statin drugs, you start having symptoms of infertility with women, and in men, erectile dysfunction, and also, symptoms of Alzheimer’s and memory problems affecting the brain.
So it totally boggles me that doctors are so focused on drugs now that they’re missing the importance of nutrients, especially minerals.
Wendy Myers: Can you take too much magnesium?
Carolyn Dean: No. As we talked about many times, you actually have a failsafe of this laxative effect. So that if you take too much—even with my ReMag, if I take five teaspoons, I get the laxative effect. So it’s always there to help us. That’s something that is an evolutionary process, I think, because humans grew up around oceans for food supply, for the fish and everything.
Sea water has three times the amount of magnesium as it does calcium. So in order to get enough calcium for our bones, et cetera, the body developed the need for vitamin D, sunshine, and that helped us take all the calcium we could from plants and from fish, fish bones, et cetera. So the vitamin D was supportive of our calcium because there is so much magnesium in the kelp seaweeds and more in fish, we developed the laxative effect. If we took too much, okay, then it goes through you.
What we’ve done is turn that completely around to where now we’re eating in our diet probably 10 times the calcium as magnesium. We’re taking huge amounts of vitamin D which actually bumps our magnesium because you need high amounts of magnesium to metabolize your vitamin D. And the vitamin D holds on to calcium which also bumps your magnesium.
I have people who tell me, “Oh, my gosh. I was doing great on my magnesium but my doctor said my vitamin D levels were in the low normal range. So he gave me this way high dose of vitamin D and all of a sudden, my heart palpitations came back.”
One woman had an eight-week migraine. Another woman said her son started having seizures.
So when you use high doses of these nutrients, except for magnesium, you can get into side effects. So the failsafe of magnesium is always going to be there.
But then, people should be aware that when you’re taking high dose of magnesium, you do have to look at your calcium. And I make a big deal about that in my books as well, in my free e-books.
What you do is you look at your calcium food intake, you can get 350, 400 milligrams of calcium in a cup of yogurt. And what I say to people, “Don’t look at your RDA for calcium as needing 1500 milligrams. Look at the RDA of the United Kingdom and the World Health Organization. They say you only need 500 to 700 milligrams of calcium.”
If you’re eating dairy products, if you don’t eat dairy, look at fermented yogurt. Look at kefir. Those do not have lactose, if it’s lactose that you’re worried about. If it’s casein that you’re worried about, then look at bone broth and your deep, green leafy vegetables and your nuts and seeds. Just add it up and then every day, look to your diet.
Actually, because some people are really taking a lot of magnesium for their symptoms, I am working on a picometer ionic calcium product with silica and vanadium and boron as well.
Because I don’t eat dairy and I’ve gone years without calcium supplements, I’m realizing myself that I should make something available for myself and for people who don’t eat dairy products.
Wendy Myers: I find myself [inaudible 00:55:57] on a regular basis, but sometimes I find I do need it. I feel a strong and a little bit of help sleeping or I get a muscle twitch. And I can tell I need a little bit of calcium, but definitely not daily supplementation like a lot of people are doing.
Carolyn Dean: When I noticed my calcium weakness was when I was experimenting with intravenous EDTA chelation. So I set myself up. I did my own IV chelation. And after two treatments, my knees started to hurt. I thought, “Oh, my gosh. There’s my calcium.”
When you do these intensive chelation and detoxing, the body will react. I have a lot of people who come to me after intravenous chelation and they say, “Oh, my gosh. I think I’m magnesium deficient. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve been doing IV chelation.”
I do get an intravenous afterward with minerals but what I find is people need consistent minerals when they’re doing chelation. And I actually end up telling people, “Well, maybe you just need a more gentle form of chelation.” And I work with my ReAlign and the ReMag and ReLyte so that the body—the body does not want toxins or heavy metals or chemicals. It will put those toxins and heavy metals in fat cells first. And that’s where a lot of the weight problems come with our current problems with people in our society, the toxicity and everything.
When you go on a weight loss program, you lose fat cells, you feel worse because of all of those toxins coming out. So I tell people just gently detoxing on a regular basis is much more effective than going on either crash diets or crash detox.
You’ve seen them do a three-day detox and all will be right with the world. It’s time to entice people to take better care of themselves, but it’s also trying to meet their needs that they want to a quick solution, but it’s never that easy.
You have to develop a program, a consistent program. I don’t know if you’ve seen, I have a two-year online wellness program called Completement Now where every week people get a module that helps them decide, to know about their diet, lifestyle, sleep, what nutrients to take. There are seven different formats or seven different pillars I call them.
But people, they don’t gravitate to that. It’s too much information. People are too busy. They’re working too many jobs. And it really did come down to we deciding to do my products because people just said, “I can’t. I don’t have the time. Just tell me what to take. Just give me a supplement.”
And so for those people, I’ve created four different products that I think meet 85% to 90% of people’s needs and then they can come to folks like you to fine tune because there are some people that they can’t do it on their own.
I’ve done a lot of consulting over the years and I just don’t have the time to do that much anymore, but I do refer to people now and I know that some people, they need their hands held, they need to fine tune it with a knowledgeable practitioner so that they can address just the multitude of conditions that they have, and the overwhelming information.
Even now, Wendy, I’m looking at all this genetic testing that’s going on, and I tell people, “Let’s start with the basics,” even there. I say, “Minerals and vitamins are actually what turn the genes on and off.” You’re not going to be able to manipulate your genes, not once since all this genetic engineering has begun. Have they been able to go into a human and take out the bad genes and make you better, they are not going to be able to do that although that’s the promise that they seem to keep enticing us with.
I say, “No, it’s more the epigenetics part of things where you want to manipulate the triggers for turning your genes on and off.”
The biggest trigger for the genes is magnesium. So even in the gene world, I really caution people not to get so involved that they have this list of the hundred diseases they could have because they have these MTHFR or some sort of gene snip that’s abnormal. Oh, my gosh! These poor people. It’s like the natural practitioners who do these machines like [inaudible 01:01:40] machine or the different machines that test your body, you put your hand on the machine and it tests your electrical conductivity compared to remedies or compared to tissues, they’ll come up with a hundred of the top things that are wrong with you. And it really freaks people out.
I tell people just go with the basics. Get your minerals in line. Gently detox. Take some RnA drops, if you want the woo-woo factor, and just see what’s left over after you do the basics.
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Dean, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so educational. I love talking about minerals with an expert like yourself. But one last question I like to ask my guest, what do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Carolyn Dean: Well, I could say magnesium deficiency.
Wendy Myers: I knew you’re going to say that.
Carolyn Dean: It’s probably misinformation. It probably is just the—so much information and even myself, I do admit, I’m focused on the products I’m making now because I know they work so well. But when you go to a lot of websites now, the allopathic websites are trying to promote drugs. And all the product websites are trying to say that they are just the best.
People really have to try to have an open mind about where the information is coming from. But more so, it’s to test things yourself. I have people that come to me on hundreds, literally hundreds, 300 to 500 was the highest number of daily supplements that this woman was swallowing. And I say to these people, “Well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if these were helping you.”
When you try products, just give it a one to three months. If they’re not helping, put it aside and move on. And if that’s going to take too long, just use your intuition. Learn how to muscle test. There’s the old ring muscle test that people can do to test whether or not something is good for them.
So it’s really getting yourself the information that feels right to you and then you focus on that, give it a try and see if it helps you. If it doesn’t, move on.
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Dean, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell the listeners where they can find you and more about your products and your Completement Now program?
Carolyn Dean: Sure. My main website is RNAReset.com. R-N-A-R-E-S-E-T dot com, and that has free e-books under the info section, infolink. And my blog website is DrCarolynDean.com. And there’s my free newsletter, four free weeks of my online wellness program. And actually, people can e-mail me if they want a discount on my online wellness program.
I’m sure you’ll have that information up where they can reach me on my e-mail, is that true?
Wendy Myers: Yes. I’ll put your e-mail and your contact information in the corresponding blogpost on the YouTube channel description. Absolutely.
Carolyn Dean: What more can I ask?
Wendy Myers: Well, thanks for coming on the show. And listeners, you can find more about me at myersdetox.com and learn all about how to heal your health conditions naturally, all about my version about Paleo, the modern Paleo diet and all about detoxification, one of my favorite subjects.
Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.
