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Transcript
- 03:05 About Morley Robbins and why magnesium
- 14:34 Prevalence and underlying causes of heart disease
- 27:01 Forms of Magnesium
- 36:14 Copper and Heart Disease
- 46:20 Correcting heart conditions beyond magnesium supplementation
- 57:10 The value of Hair Mineral Analysis
- 58:57 The Starved Heart
- 01:00:39 Where to find Morley
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find this video podcast on myersdetox.com or on my YouTube channel, wendyLiveto110. Be sure to go there and subscribe. And today, we are interviewing the illustrious Morley Robbins about the importance of magnesium to heart health and how something as simple as supplementing magnesium could prevent a heart attack. [Gasp] Who would’ve thunk?
But first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatments (like taking magnesium) that we suggest on this show because of course, you need the doctor’s permission before you take supplements, right?
And our guest, Morley Robbins also known as the “Magnesium Man” is founder of the Magnesium Advocacy Group (if I can just say that right). He has a mainstream medical industry background however. Morley was a hospital executive and consultant for 32 years. But he left that to become a wellness coach and health practitioner. Very good idea!
Mr. Robbins has completed the Well Coaches Training Certification – or should I say Mrs. Robbins. I’m sorry, I’m thinking of Dustin Hoffman, Mrs. Robinson. Mr. Robbins has completed the Well Coaches Training Certification as well as the Institute for Integrative Nutrition Health Coaching Program. He’s a fellow IINR like myself.
Mr. Robbins also received a B.A. in biology from Denison University in Ohio and holds an MBA from George Washington University in healthcare administration. Twenty-one bucks and 1200 articles later on magnesium and magnesium deficiency, Morley has come to realize that magnesium plays a role in all metabolic systems and is therefore a contributing factor to nearly all major health issues. Magnesium deficiency or insufficiency is at the center of so many common diseases due to its central role in activating 3751 proteins and thousands of enzyme systems (though on the Internet, it usually says only about 300, but we know the body is far more complex).
Through magnesium and the Magnesium Advocacy Group, he has committed to educating as many people as possible about the magnificence of magnesium and ending the epidemic of magnesium deficiency playing the health and well-being of human beings.
So Morley, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Morley Robbins: Happy to be here. That’s quite an intro. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I like to be thorough.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and why you became such a magnesium freak?
Morley Robbins: Okay. Well, I affectionately refer to myself as a ‘pre-med retread’ and I had designs of going to medical school except my organic chemistry professor, Gordon Galloway saw it very differently and he made sure I was never going to have that experiences.
And I thanked him many times since then, but I chose as a back-up to become a hospital executive and just work in the industry. And for 33 years, I was an allopathic bat. My sister is a nurse, she’s a pediatric nurse. I was raised in a family that the doctors knew what they were talking about I went through a very stressful [inaudible 00:03:57] and then we evolved around a divorce and I developed what’s called ‘frozen shoulder’ and locked up. I couldn’t pick my hand up above my waist and it was really, very disorienting.
So I went to my favorite health food store and asked them what they had to unlock it. There were a couple of women, they said, “Gee, if you go to see Dr. Liz.” I went, “Uh, no, no, no. I don’t do witchcraft, just give me some supplements” because I knew that that was code for chiropractor and I wouldn’t dare do that.
But I was still miserable, I’m not sleeping, a lot of pain. And it was from carrying or pulling a suitcase behind my back for 20 years in airports. That’s really what it was. But what my body was saying was, “We’re done. We’re not doing that anymore.” I went back in the health food store and said, “Look, you guys must have something more potent?” The owner looked me in the eye and she says, “Morley, we love you. Go see Dr. Liz.” I’m like, “Oh, my God.”
So with my tail between my legs, I got an appointment to go see Dr. Liz who is now my life partner and professional partner. She opened me up to a new world of healing, the natural world of healing and I was doing work with her through writing. One of her clients suggested that I write in reverse, reverse psychology. And so I wrote a book on how to create a heart attack. She’s like, “Why would you have a heart attack? Go on the offense and make a heart attack?” So it was a 10-step plan.
And I was sharing it with yet another client who was also a practitioner. She said, “Very funny. I love it” and she looked me right in the eye and she says, “You know, I can’t help, but think that step no. 8 is more important,” which was “deplete your body of magnesium.” I had read in an article that magnesium was important for the heart, but I had no idea what that meant. So I was just being very flippant and provocative and I said, “You know, maybe you’re right.” I sought out Carolyn Dean’s Magnesium Miracle. I remember reading it July of 2011 and it was mesmerizing because I was like, “Oh, my God! Now, I know why everyone is in the hospital” because one of my gifts was helping clients increase their bio. I could never understand where all these sick people are coming from.
Well, I read Carolyn Dean’s wonderful book and it was like a murder mystery, I couldn’t put it down. I burned through it in four or five days. I became obsessed with it. One thing led to another and I started reading articles and I was like, “This is unbelievable! It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” It’s like when you use the Google search engine, you can take every disease that people have and then just put the phrase ‘magnesium deficiency’ after it and what pops up is hundreds of scientific, academic articles that prove that magnesium is the center of the problem. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh!”
And so I just started chipping away at it. And really, it just evolved into –it’s my livelihood now. I formed the Facebook group about a year and a half ago. It was really a truly selfish act. I needed a community so I could help promote a book that I was writing. And I didn’t even know what Facebook was. I didn’t know how to spell it.
And now, it’s like a very active and very exciting group. I’ve learned tons. I think it’s helped a lot of people too. [Inaudible 00:07:55], “Well, that’s not going to cure everything.” I said, “No, it’s not. But it’s going to help a lot.” It just evolved into this realization that in a broader sense that human beings are 72% water and 28% minerals. I mean, you’ve heard the expression ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, well what does that mean? It’s minerals! Ashes and dust are minerals. And the more I dig, the more I study, it’s absolutely true that it’s actually the minerals that run our body.
And what’s really important to understand is that in the conventional world, the world of allopathic healing (and there’s actually a lot of different branches of healing), you have a pecking order and it’s the hierarchy of healing. At the very top of the hierarchy are genes, the almighty gene. And then you come down a notch and you come to neurotransmitters. And then you come down to hormones. And then you come down to enzymes. And then they’ll give a passing reference to vitamins. But they’ll never – ooh, they’ll never, ever talk about minerals.
But here’s the truth of the matter. How does a vitamin work? It doesn’t work until there’s a mineral present. What is an enzyme? An enzyme is a vitamin, a mineral and an amino acid. And it doesn’t work unless the mineral is present. How do you make hormones? You’ve got to have an enzyme to do that. How do you make neurotransmitters? Ditto! You got to have minerals in order to make the enzymes work. And then we come to the almighty gene. They’re bathed in magnesium, zinc and [inaudible 00:09:42].
There’s a lot of psychodrama out there about MTHFR, but the MT on that stands for ‘methyl transferase’. There’s 150 to 200 of them and the ten that I’ve studied pretty closely are all dependent upon copper in order to do the methylation. And in fact, you got to have copper to turn the gene on and you got to have copper to turn the gene off. And it’s got to be properly bound with copper to work. And if it’s not properly bound, it’ll flip and it will become a [inaudible 00:10:16] and it will create hydroxyl radicals.
And what does a hydroxyl radical do? It breaks the nucleotide bonds. And that’s where all of these issue of transcription errors are coming from – from stress. It’s all epigenetically inspired. And it’s just the literature, you have to really, really dig to get down to the truth of the matter, but it’s really minerals that run our body.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Morley Robbins: That’s my pitch and I stand behind it because of all the researches I’ve done going back into the late 1800s. It’s very clear. And in the animal world and in the plant world, there is no such thing as disease. Blood pH, [inaudible 00:11:04] They never talk about disease, but you and I are human, which means we’re gullible and we believe all these labels that are thrown at us.
I think it’s tragic, but a lot of people are like race car drivers wearing a jumpsuit so the doctors can put all these different labels on them, “Well, you’re diabetic. You’ve got hypotension. You’ve got MTHFR. You’ve got this and that…” People are clearly saying, “Gosh! You’re right. I do have all these labels, so I must have these,” but that’s half the battle.
We need people to realize that it isn’t a disease. In my world, there’s no such thing as medical disease. There’s only metabolic dysfunction that’s brought up by mineral deficiencies. The key to the whole dynamic is understanding enzymes. Once you understand what an enzyme and how an enzyme works and we need minerals to form them properly, to have them be structured properly, to be activated properly, it’s like it opens up a whole new level of understanding about how our bodies really work.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Morley Robbins: So it’s been a profoundly exciting and yet disorienting experience for me to be caught in the middle of this whirlwind of unrest and malaise that the world is facing. I’ve never imagined I’d have clients in 14 countries. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh! It is a way of life for them.” I know you know that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Morley Robbins: And it’s a very tragic situation. It is growing in intensity and [inaudible 00:12:49] with each generation.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, because people, they’re not getting the minerals from their food. They have to supplement. And people are missing the boat on the minerals. They’re taking vitamins and the antioxidants and all these maybe successfully marketed supplements. It’s minerals that we have to have. That’s why I have my program, Mineral Power. Just taking minerals heals the body in really powerful ways.
Morley Robbins: Absolutely, it does. And minerals are missing in the food. Well, they’re missing in the soil, so they’re missing in the food. And then the food gets refined, which reduces the level of minerals. There’s very few minerals in water. You just take a drink and it’s like the mineral content of that water is not what you think of it is [inaudible 00:13:36]. And then, we get things like antibiotics and most, if not all of the medications that the big pharma formulate deplete the body of minerals courtesy of – some important researches has been done about that.
And then we come to GMOs. And what is RoundUp? RoundUp is a mineral chelator. It’s the ultimate mineral chelator. It kills the leaves by taking away the minerals. And then it continues to do that when we eat the food products that have been sprayed with it.
That’s what gluten sensitivity is. It’s a mineral deficiency. I think a lot of times, it’s missing magnesium and missing copper. They’re the two most important minerals that are missing. When you are in the crosshairs of those two minerals, it’s very bad for the body.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk about heart health. Let’s talk about heart disease. What is its prevalence and what is the true underlying cause of heart disease?
Morley Robbins: Ooh, it’s cholesterol, yeah. What’s the hardest working muscle in your body?
Wendy Myers: The heart.
Morley Robbins: The heart. It’s pushing the equivalent of five [inaudible 00:15:06] in blood a day. Think about that. That’s a lot of weight. That’s a lot of work. So it’s the hardest working muscle.
It has the highest concentration of testosterone in the body – not in the gonads, in the heart. The heart has more testosterone receptors. The highest concentration of taurine is in the heart. And the highest concentration of magnesium is in the right ventricle of the heart. What does the right ventricle do? It’s the one that pushes the blood out into the body. It’s a big deal. Why is that important? Well, every muscle needs energy. And how does the human body spell energy? It’s spelled Mg-ATP. The Mg stands for magnesium and the ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate.
What’s fascinating is if you ever talked to a cardiac surgeon and ask them what’s your most terrifying moment, if they’re telling you the truth, what they’ll tell you is they obsess about the pH of their patient’s heart because if the pH of that heart that they’re on operating on drops below 6.1, all the magnesium falls of the ATP and boom! The person’s heart is gone.
And in effect, if there are 50 enzymes that run the heart (there are 50 that I’ve been able to identify and there are others), of the 50 that I have found in my research, what do they all need? They need magnesium and Mg-ATP. It doesn’t take a lot of [inaudible 00:16:59] to figure that out.
So what is at the bases of the number one cause of death in America? The heart is starved. It’s a starved heart. It’s not a blockage and it’s not an inflamed heart (although those are two very different popular theories). It’s a starved heart and it’s starved for energy.
And probably the best book that I have read about it and for any of you that does have heart disease, you need to read Stephen Sinatra’s book, Metabolic Cardiology because he comes right out and tells you that there are four – ‘awesome foursome’ as he calls them, the ‘awesome foursome’. And again, it’s very straightforward. All the [inaudible 00:17:49] relate to producing energy in the heart and one of the cornerstones is magnesium.
He’s the only conventional cardiologist that I know that tells the truth. He actually devoted a whole chapter to it. It’s an amazing book! But the point is most people who have any issue with the heart, whether it’s high blood pressure, whether it is a perforation, whether it is a congestive heart failure, whether it’s cholesterol build up, it’s all from the lack of magnesium.
How does cholesterol build up? Well, first of all, there’s not enough magnesium to regulate the cholesterol production. It’s pretty important. And yes, there is an enzyme besides that. And the lipid peroxidation that takes place inside the artery wall happens because there’s not enough magnesium to keep those forces at bay.
Again, I’m mystified. I feel like I’m the one-eyed giant [inaudible 00:18:56], but not a lot of people who see it that way. But the bottomline is the bottomline. It’s about a nickel’s worth of magnesium a day to keep your heart healthy or you could spend $5 a day on a statin and another $5 a day on your calcium channel blockers and your beta blockers and your diuretics and all the other whiz bang medications. I call them the ‘ABCD cardiac drugs’.
And what are they doing? They’re depleting the body of magnesium. And so the individual unwittingly is caught in a bout of vicious catch-22. Because they don’t understand how their body and how their works and they don’t understand that minerals are at the center of the metabolic function of the body, they do what their doctors tells them to do. And because the doctor was trained in medical school and received an MD degree, (but what he/she didn’t know is what the MD actually stands for is ‘mineral denialist’), they don’t understand how the body works.
And so it’s just this incredible infrastructure of illusion. It’s very much akin to the Wizard of Oz. And in some respects, I’m Toto and I’m pulling back the green curtain on the wizard to reveal, “Hey! [inaudible 00:20:24].” And I have very good friends who are physicians. I have a lot of respect for what they’ve gone through to get that training, but at the end of the day, they know more about pharmacology than physiology. And I really fault them for that.
But what I really am most troubled by is their lack of curiosity. How can they sit in their office week in and week out and see these patients getting sicker and sicker and sicker, taking their medications and not ask themselves, “Maybe I’m not doing something right.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what made me really angry with my father who started the statins, that caused diabetes and taking diabetes medication, he then had to take anti-depressants because he was depressed. Then that diabetes and all the other medications eventually led to cancer. It’s just this demise of health over ten years.
I was just asking myself that all these medications, these ten medications that he was taking can’t be good. I mean, if I’m questioning this, why aren’t the medical doctors questioning it because it’s a very rare medical doctor that is asking about diet, that is taking classes about nutrition or learning about supplements or recommending supplements to their clients. I don’t get it.
Morley Robbins: It’s really an important point. You’ve heard of Copernicus. He came up with a very different theory about how the universe worked. He shared that with a friend of his named Galileo and Galileo kept it suppressed for 16 years. And at the later years of his life, he would be the source of this information, this book that Copernicus have drafted.
He was immediately arrested by the Church and was put under house arrest for the last ten years of his life because it was completely averse to the whole model of – well, the earth is the center of the universe and the church is the center of the earth. They just couldn’t handle it.
It was just about 10-15 years that Pope John Paul II acknowledged that there may be some relevance to what Copernicus had to say. This was like almost 400 years after the fact. And so in the belief system, I really come to regard physicians as priests and they’re part of the religion of medicine because it’s all based on a belief system. The belief system is that you get a disease first and then we’ll do something to try and correct it.
Any scientist knows within a couple of hours of doing basic research that the body runs on minerals and that when the minerals are missing, energy plummets. And when energy plummets, that invites a chaos inside the cell and the membrane of the cell, which is where the real action is. And Bruce Lipton did a beautiful job in his book, Biology of Belief explaining that, that there’s an energy shield literally. As long as that energy shield is holding, everything is great. But as soon as that energy shield goes south, all the bad stuff starts getting in, the good stuff can’t get out. And doctors absolutely believe that the disease comes first and then the treatment follows.
And if you’re talking to a cardiologist and you point out the fact that in a cancer, there’s five times more copper in a cancer cell than there is in a normal cell, they’ll look you in the eye, “Well, then the cancer must’ve invited the copper.” And I’ve had that conversation. I was mystified because I thought that oncologist I was talking to was kidding, but he actually believe it and they do believe it because it’s a belief system.
It’s not science because the science is that it’s copper toxicity that destabilizes the cells that allows the cancer’s activity to take place. That’s in the literature. It’s very clear in the literature. But in the belief system, they can’t accept that because it violates the very tenet of the industry, of the profession and then it absolutely rocks the boat of their economics. It’s a very tough situation because there’s only a certain percentage of people who will challenge their doctor.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. Very, very few. Very few.
Morley Robbins: Yeah. But there are two important questions that they can ask. One question is to look the doctor in the eye and say, “Where did you learn that and may I have a copy of the article that speaks to it?” Those are very powerful questions for people to ask their doctor.
The third question that they’d ask (and I’ve trained a number of my clients to do this), I’d say sit down with your doctor and go through the list of medications that you’re taking and then ask them mano y mano, “How are these medications that you’ve got me taking improving my mineral status especially my magnesium status?” It’s a very uncomfortable question for the doctor to answer. First of all, they don’t know. And if they do know, they know what the answer is and they don’t want to say it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Morley Robbins: That’s the yin-yang of modern medicine in America and throughout the world as well.
Wendy Myers: And do you find this is because the medical industry is largely controlled by big pharma?
Morley Robbins: Yeah, certainly the funding for medical schools, I mean, for research. A lot of that changed when Reagan was in office. The government doesn’t need to pay for research anymore [inaudible 00:26:47]. And in the early eighties, there was a shift in how medical education and medical research was funded – big, big change.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about magnesium and the different forms of magnesium that you like to take and recommend to clients? What are the best kinds including chelated magnesium?
Morley Robbins: Yeah. Well, there are about 35 different forms. The two forms that are the most prevalent by supplement companies are either magnesium oxide or magnesium citrate. The fact that they are prevalent does not mean that they are bio-available. Magnesium oxide is the cheapest form of magnesium. That’s why a lot of companies use it.
What people need to understand is that when their doctor using a drug formulae suggest mag, ox or hundred, that’s 400 mg. of magnesium oxide and it has the equivalency of 16 mg. of elemental magnesium because about 4% of it gets absorbed. So be very leery of that.
Magnesium citrate is tricky because it’s usually absorbed, but the citrate molecule is very irritating to the bowel. And so people will take a dose of magnesium citrate and they will get the [inaudible 00:28:28] – and everyone knows that if you get too much magnesium, you get [inaudible 00:28:31] and so then, back off. And so they back off on the magnesium. They don’t get enough.
So what I like to do is have people engage in what I call ‘full court press’ and that is have a good source of mineral water. We’ll use Anderson’s Mineral Drops or Oshea Minerals or concentrates. There are others, but the water needs to be mineralized and almost all of those companies have a magnesium bias to it. So that’s the first one. And it’s an ionic form of magnesium, which is immediately absorbable and taken up by the body.
Then a good oral supplement is very, very helpful. Some of the more popular ones or more effective (at least from our experience) are magnesium malate. The brand that we’ve had a lot of success with is Jigsaw Health; magnesium glycinate whether it’s Pure Encapsulations or Doctor’s Best. There are many different companies out there. The glycinate, it’s probably the most bio-available, chelated form of magnesium.
Then transdermal is very important. Most people have heard of Epsom salts. That’s magnesium sulfate. Magnesium sulfate is wonderful for a bath. It’s great for detoxing the body. It’s not as effective at restoring magnesium. Magnesium chloride oil is probably more effective in that regard. It’s the most primordial form of magnesium on the planet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I put that on my butt, my legs at one point. I thought I was going to die. They were itching so bad. I didn’t do any good. I gave it to a friend. I couldn’t deal with it.
Morley Robbins: Sure. Well, what happened was the magnesium is a relaxing mineral and it opened up the pores and let the chloride ion in and it stings the heck out of your body. That’s what happens. As you get more used to it, you won’t get that reaction.
Wendy Myers: Ah, okay.
Morley Robbins: And some people find that they can do a foot bath, which is very effective. You take like a half an ounce of magnesium chloride and hot water just enough to cover your toes and watch a TV show or read a book or something. That’s incredibly effective at restoring magnesium. The bottom of the feet are very porous and you have thousands of pores there. But other forms of oral that are good are magnesium taurate, magnesium orotate, magnesium gluconate. All these chelated forms are very effective because the body recognizes the chelated the nature and it says, “Oh, you’ve got some magnesium. Fine, we could take that too.” So that’s very, very effective.
And then the other cornerstone in the full court press is magnesium-rich foods and things like leafy greens, organ meats. A lot of people aren’t used to organ meats, but that’s how our ancestors survived. They didn’t eat muscle meats. Bone broths are very rich in minerals, but certainly magnesium. Nuts and seeds. Hemp seeds are incredible at providing magnesium. Seaweed, unbelievable! Probably the highest concentration of magnesium on the planet is in seaweed. Chocolate would be a close second.
Wendy Myers: That’s where I get my magnesium.
Morley Robbins: I know! People just love their cocoa. It’s got to be dark cacao and not cocoa. It took me about a year before I realized, “Oh, my God! They’re spelling it differently” and all the little games. And what’s interesting about people that eat chocolate, they think that they’re getting cacao. And in fact, when you look at the back of a Hershey bar now, what does it say? It says ‘compound’. Legally, we can’t call it ‘chocolate’ unless it has a certain percentage of cacao and chocolate doesn’t have that anymore. So people have to be very careful about the dark candy that they’re eating. Is it really providing minerals if they’re thinking this?
Wendy Myers: So wait! So Hershey Kisses don’t produce health? What?
Morley Robbins: You know what? I’m sorry. Exactly! That’s what makes me illustrious because I’m telling you the truth. No, it’s really tragic. And what’s tomorrow? Halloween. And what are kids going to be downing big time is high fructose corn syrup. Talk about a mineral chelator, really bad stuff. So you got to be careful.
So those are the four cornerstones. Magnesium-rich water, transdermal, a good oil and magnesium-rich foods. A lot of people are still under the belief that it’s got to be two parts calcium to one part magnesium. Uh-uh, no. Do not do that. That was inspired by a French magnesium researcher. His name is Jean Durlack. He was trying to explain that you would never, ever want to go to that level. Two of his colleagues, Bauer and Burton Altura actually have the patent for two parts calcium to one part magnesium because they didn’t want anyone to abuse it [inaudible 00:34:20] people in their supplements.
If people remember just this one thing I’m about to say and nothing else, it’ll be very important. The excess calcium when it’s in excess of magnesium blocks magnesium absorption. Excess magnesium in excess of calcium guarantees calcium metabolism in the body. So always defer to more magnesium than calcium, always. The whole belief system that you need calcium to bring strong bones is just another myth along with cholesterol causes heart disease, along with low solvents is good for hypertension and all the other myths out there.
In fact, probably the most important thing you can do is have magnesium because it activates a key enzyme called alkaline phosphatase. Alkaline phosphatase enables the bone cells called osteoblasts to do their work because they must work in an alkaline environment. And if it’s not alkaline, they can’t do their work. And so magnesium is actually more important, probably way more important than calcium.
The way I regard is magnesium is the quarterback of the football team and calcium is one of the front linemen – pretty dumb, will do what it’s told, but it takes a good quarterback to run the team. So that’s the difference. So you want the mineral calling place, not the bag of rocks trying to stop the[inaudible 00:36:13].
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Wendy Myers: And let’s talk about how copper plays into heart disease as well. I know for all of my clients, the majority of them are copper toxic. They’ve got bio-unavailable copper, that toxicity that’s showing on their hair mineral analysis and this is something, again, that not many people know about. And so what kind of problems is this causing in health in general and with the heart?
Morley Robbins: Yeah, that’s a great question. As I’ve said, to figure out that magnesium is important is pretty straightforward. That didn’t take a lot of time just to figure out. Copper, completely different animal. I think it’s this stealth health issue around the globe. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde.
Copper needs to be bound to a protein called ‘ceruloplasm’. That’s a fancy, French word for blue blood, but it’s a key protein that transports both copper and iron around the body. Its initials are Cp. I call it ‘cape’. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll always wore a cape and he was this consummate gentleman and a very gifted physician. But when he took his cape off, he became a murderer with a dagger. That’s good copper, bad copper.
That’s the dilemma with copper is that people are being conditioned to think that all copper is bad and that there is no such thing as good copper, when in fact, there are 30+ what are called cupro enzymes (Latin for copper) that if they don’t work, we get a whole bunch of problems not the least of which is the psychodrama with MTHFR and heart disease.
Copper, one of its many important roles is there’s little energy factories inside our cells called mitochondria. Those are where actually the energy is made. And inside the energy factory are five, little steps. Step four involves a key copper enzyme called ‘cytochrome c-oxidase’. And when copper is present and it’s got the cape on, it makes sure that the electrons that are on that molecule get transferred to oxygen so that [inaudible 00:39:12] can be made and energy can be produced.
And if that doesn’t happen, instead of making ATP, what the mitochondria makes are free radicals called reduce oxidation species and that’s the very step, step four in the electron transport chain. If copper is not there, a lot of bad things happen. So hearts need energy. We’ve talked about that. Copper is very important for producing ATP. But copper is also important for activating another key enzyme called ‘lysyl oxidase’.
Lysyl oxidase is very important for the formation of collagen and elastin and anybody who has an enlarged heart has copper deficiency because the cell wall has lost its rigidity and it’s getting bigger and less elastic. And it’s because of a lack of copper. And so the heart loses its strength. It’s not able to pump with the same kind of force that it’s supposed to have and fluid builds up and people, very often will have this fluid build-up in their lungs because the heart can’t move the fluids in the body to where they’re supposed to.
Wendy Myers: And it causes heart palpitations and rapid heartbeat and things of that nature as well, right?
Morley Robbins: Absolutely, yeah. So we can get into splitting hairs about which is more important, magnesium or copper, but the way I look at it is – There’s a very important physician, his name was Dr. Fiddler who came up with a very important theory of how disease occurs. 1989, Dr. Fiddler who was a famous Viennese physician came up with this theory, that stress caused magnesium loss, which led to electrolyte derangement.
The electrolyte derangement cause energy loss. The energy loss led to cell death. The cell death was followed by inflammation, which is designed to clean up the mess. And then the inflammation is followed by what’s called ‘fibrosis’ where we know it as calcification. That’s the process that Dr. Fiddler laid out in ’89.
Well, then a very inspired physiologist by the name of Hans Selye in the 1950s and 60s and 70s decided to see if [inaudible 00:41:52] animal experiments in Canada and he wrote a thousand articles and 47 textbooks – pretty active guy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Morley Robbins: He proved that Dr. Fiddler was right. Yes, in fact, stress causes magnesium loss [inaudible 00:42:12]. And then the calcification ends the process.
Now, what’s fascinating is that Dr. Selye is nominated for the Nobel Prize 14 times. Just to get one nod would be pretty impressive. Fourteen times, how many times do you think he won? Zero. Why? Because he made a mockery of medicine. Because every disease follows that path. There’s some stressor that causes magnesium loss that causes the energy loss.
And where does copper fit into that? Well, the adrenal glands are ruled by the relationship with sodium to magnesium. I mean, Dr. Selye proved that the first thing that happens is sodium goes up. We see that on hair tests all the time. The second thing that rises is potassium, but that’s because it’s regulated by magnesium. So when magnesium leaves, potassium is going to come out of the cell. It’s going to rise too just like it does on the hair test. And then if the stress continues and then there’s no resolution, well, the whole thing comes crashing down. That’s called the exhaustion stage of stress.
And so you have the alarm, resistance and exhaustion. We see this on hair tests all the time and it’s in fact what Dr. Selye perfected with his GAS model, with the general adaptation syndrome. Well, when the adrenals get overwhelmed with stress repeatedly [inaudible 00:43:58] to regulate the release of stress hormones. The key stress hormone is ACTH and it whips the body into a frenzy. But what ACTH also does is it kills the production of ceruloplasm in the liver. And then copper doesn’t have its cape.
And so when copper doesn’t have its cape, we have two simultaneous events taking place, we have a rise of unbound copper and you have a lowering of the bound copper. And so you have simultaneous copper toxicity and copper deficiency. It’s vexing to get clients to understand that can happen at the same time. What’s fascinating is that the copper toxicity not only leads to copper deficiency, but it also leads to zinc deficiency. And because the ion-side of the house is copper dependent, it leads to iron deficiency.
So an initial stressor causing the magnesium loss leads downstream to three subsequent other minerals being compromised and just adding to the metabolic chaos that’s taking place in the body.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I see this with hair test after hair test after hair test that I do with clients. You can see the body chemistry going on and the results and health conditions that happen as well including calcifications of the arteries leading to heart disease and calcification of other parts of the body because of this stress, adrenal fatigue, copper toxicity. And then that increases calcium deposits in the body.
Morley Robbins: Right! And it all starts with the stress. It starts with the loss of magnesium. It’s the first to go. Zinc is right on the heels of magnesium and then B vitamins and taurine and some other things. But as soon as magnesium comes out, it’s an end game for that cell. And then a bunch of cells become a tissue. And then the tissue becomes an organ. And then if it happens enough, you’ll have what’s called an myocardial infarct or some other comparable event.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so how do you correct this? How do you go about correcting heart conditions and preventing heart attacks and other health conditions perhaps beyond simply supplementing magnesium?
Morley Robbins: We can’t. People are screwed, sorry. No, we can talk about all the problems all the while, but there’s no – I think the most important thing is testing. The analogy that I use is – and people do this all the time. They just start taking supplements left and right because they read an article, they talked to a friend, their doctor or whatever, but they’ve never tested. I’m like, “Would you ever just start pouring oil in your car engine without working at the dip stick?” Well, yeah, it’s a good point, but people do it all the time. So it’s important to have baseline testing.
The two that I think are the most important are the hair test and the magnesium red blood cell test. It’s a definitive marker for magnesium status. The challenge there is that the reference range that’s used in the contemporary labs is a gross distortion of what it was in 1962. Magnesium in milligrams per deciliter needs to be between 5.0 and 7.0, not as low as – there’s one lab that uses now 3.8, a lower range, but that’s okay. Oh, my God! That’s like the heart, driving a car with two quarts low in oil. You wouldn’t do that.
Testing is the starting point. And then it’s beginning to recognize that minerals can be restored, that we were designed to eat minerals and vitamins and that they’re very essential to the metabolism of the body. And then I think it’s important to recognize fruits play a very important role as well of course.
Wendy Myers: Chocolate.
Morley Robbins: Yeah, exactly, real chocolate. It’s got to be real food. It’s got to be food that our ancestors would recognize. Our great grandparents would be aghast to walk into a grocery store now. They’ll say, “What are you eating?” And if a food is coming in a can, a bag or your car window, it’s not real food. People are too quick to allow that.
The other thing I think where people make mistakes and that I’ll be covering is too much of a hurry try to solve the problem. It might take 18 months to two years because really, what it is is consider that it takes a month for every year that you’ve been out of balance. And most people have been out of balance since birth.
Wendy Myers: And if they’re sick, they’re really sick, it’s going to take longer than two years.
Morley Robbins: Absolutely, yeah. But the most amazing thing is the people who have staying power, we’ve got clients on our end (as I’m sure you do on yours), they do come around.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, eventually. Yes, they do. Yes, they do.
Morley Robbins: That slow, steady progress is profound. And there’s a point, there’s a tipping point where they’re like oh, my gosh! They start to feel really good. And then of course, they do too much. But the funny thing is the resilience of the human body is limitless. What holds us back is metabolic resistance. The most famous researcher of magnesium was a physician by the name of Mildren Seelig. She was prominent in the 70s until late 2006 when she died of a heart attack. But she had no control over that, but I won’t go there.
The point is she got a famous phrase, which was, “Magnesium is the mineral of motion.” And when you think of a human body, it’s constantly moving. Things are going back and forth, electrons and all that. And when there’s resistance, whenever there’s resistance, whether it be physical, metabolic, electronic, emotional, psychic resistance, it’s from magnesium deficiency.
So that’s why I gravitate to magnesium to begin to open up that pathway to resilience and the only caution that people need to be aware of is that if they’ve been under a lot of stress and then they suddenly start to take a lot of magnesium, it may weaken their adrenals because the adrenals, again, are regulated by the relationship between sodium and magnesium. And when the magnesium builds, the sodium doesn’t. So we just have to be very sensitive to adrenal support.
To me, it’s the most important gland in the body. It’s way more important than the thyroid because the thyroid makes one hormone, the adrenal glands makes 50 every day. It’s much more metabolically sophisticated, it’s much more affected by stress. And to me, it’s so important to bring adrenal health front and center. If people can focus on that and really begin to address the needs of the adrenal glands, it pays off in huge dividends downstream.
Wendy Myers: I agree with you. I think adrenal fatigue is the root cause of all disease. It begins there. People’s health regimes need to focus on taking care of those adrenals, feeding them and detoxing them, et cetera.
Morley Robbins: But the thing is allopathic, conventional medicine focuses on three things – calcium, iron and the thyroid. Now, let’s walk through those. What does calcium do? It shuts down magnesium metabolism. What does iron do? It shuts down copper metabolism. What does focusing on the thyroid do? It shuts down the adrenals.
And so I think it’s a perfectly orchestrated campaign to render the individual basically defenseless because when your calcium is too high and your iron is too high and you’re obsessed with your thyroid function, you can’t breathe or even find time to think about, “Maybe the biological antagonist to calcium is out of whack or maybe the biological [inaudible 00:53:16] of iron, which is copper is out of whack or actually maybe the adrenals are what makes sure that the copper is available so that my thyroid works.”
Wendy Myers: And what people don’t realize is taking thyroid medication fatigues your adrenals.
Morley Robbins: That’s what it is.
Wendy Myers: You’ve just got that foot on the gas and it fatigues the adrenals, which makes the thyroid problem worse.
Morley Robbins: A famous research in the late fifties coming out of Harvard Medical School that when you increase thyroxin, you put a metabolic burden on the body and you need to increase magnesium. It’s right there on the literature. And what doctor ever tells their client to increase your magnesium essentially? Silence. Why? Because they don’t know. They’ve never been trained in mineral metabolism and that’s a really –
I think at this point in the conversation, your fans that are following this conversation have two questions going at the back of their head. One question is, “What if it was this simple? Why didn’t I know this? And if it was this important, if magnesium is this important, why didn’t my doctor ever tell me?” And the truth be known, the answer to both of those questions is the same answer. There ain’t no money in the cure.
Wendy Myers: No.
Morley Robbins: The whole engine of allopathic medicine is designed to keep you just sick enough to keep coming back, keep that turnstile going. That sounds really crass, but I was in the system. I know how the system works. I know that 40% of the profit of hospitals comes from their heart program – profit, not revenue. It’s the cash cow of the allopathic industry.
This is what I find fascinating. Heart disease has been the no. 1 cause of death for a hundred years. Today, four 747’s have crashed with all the passengers dying of heart diseases at the end of the day and the day after that. Now, what I find fascinating is that in the early 60s, 1963, John Kennedy gave a speech at NASA that said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to the moon.” And in less than a decade, actually 8 1/5 years, they had a lunar module all the way up to the moon and I think that’s a pretty amazing technological feat.
Here we are a hundred years later and the physicians are still leaning their hands trying to figure out, “Oh, what’s causing heart disease? We don’t know how to measure magnesium in the human body. It’s too complicated.” We can get up to the moon and back, but gosh! It’s like this mineral, we don’t know what to do. I don’t buy it. It’s by design and that’s the only explanation that makes to me. It’s just very tragic that the masses aren’t ready to challenge the status quo and start really saying, “These medications you’ve got me on, what are they doing to my minerals?”
And that’s really what they’ve got to start doing. The masses have got to start challenging them and say, “It’s not working.” What I could say (and I’m sure that you’ve had this experience with your client base), everyone I’ve worked with knows the system is broken. We’re not getting the answers and they don’t know how else to do it and to work with alternative therapy.
Wendy Myers: And so you use hair mineral analysis. What is the value in hair mineral analysis?
Morley Robbins: It’s everything. It’s what allows me to understand the mineral profile of the individual and to really begin to see what the key ratios are that are in the body and get a metabolic picture of what’s working and what’s not working. Where the hair test is so important is it tells me how much stress is this individual under and what are the challenges to producing energy in this body? It’s profoundly important in both of those respects, but then you can get down into many different levels if we find heavy metals and all these other imbalances between minerals. To me, it is just a phenomenally critical tool to understand how the body is in fact working or not working as the case may be.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think it’s sad that a lot of doctors, they’re not really very well trained in the interpretation. They look at it and it’s just, “Oh, this is the mineral levels or this is the heavy metal levels.” There’s so much research behind using a hair mineral analysis, there’s so much information that can be gleaned from it. Number one, how to supplement someone correctly for their individual biochemistry.
Morley Robbins: Absolutely! And it took me about two years before I felt comfortable with interpreting it. It’s not an easy tool to understand and it’s certainly not – I guess it’s like golf. It takes the rest of your life to really perfect it. It’s very powerful, but it’s a very challenging tool to work with.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about your upcoming book, The Starved Heart and how magnesium feeds it? I’m sure they’ll be very, very interested in that.
Morley Robbins: Well, I have another attempt at writing a book. I was going to do it with a cardiologist and that didn’t work. The editorial direction wasn’t right. So I have to settle on my own. My goal is to have this wrapped up probably the first quarter of next year. It’s a labor of love. It’s one thing to run a Facebook group, it’s another thing to run a wellness practice. And then oh, my gosh! Now, it gets right up to write a book.
Wendy Myers: It’s impossible. I’m trying to finish mine. It’s so hard.
Morley Robbins: Yeah, it is very challenging. It’s a great way to increase my magnesium burn rate.
Wendy Myers: Yes, exactly.
Morley Robbins: But it’s a labor of love and what I’m really trying to do is just make sure that people understand the truth of why the heart doesn’t work properly and why it’s starved. Clearly, it’s a magnesium issue, it’s copper, it’s zinc. It’s a bunch of nutrients that are missing. I intend to make people aware of that and try to debunk some of the mythology along the way. So that’s on target for early 2015. I appreciate the opportunity to pitch that. I want to thank my buddy, Larry Trivieri who’s a genius. He’s a very gifted writer. He’s actually the one who came up with that title, The Starved Heart.
Wendy Myers: It’s a very good title.
Morley Robbins: Yeah, and it says it all. So I’m very excited to bring that out into the ethos in a few months.
Wendy Myers: And so why don’t you tell the listeners where they can find you, all about your Facebook group, et cetera.
Morley Robbins: Oh, my God! More?
Wendy Myers: More.
Morley Robbins: The Facebook group is called Magnesium Advocacy Group. I’m humbled by how quickly it’s growing. It’s almost up to 20,000 people now. [Inaudible 01:01:06] everyday trying to keep the thousands of people with having info. It’s not thousands, it’s actually several hundred people who are really active. A lot of people who have gone to that site, they benefited from that.
Wendy Myers: I’m a member. I enjoy the group a lot. I enjoy it.
Morely: Well, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun to do. So the Magnesium Advocacy Group on Facebook. I have a website called GotMag.org. It’s a play on words. Got milk? Got mag? I don’t have a regular blog, but there’s a lot of material there for listeners or for the viewers to read up on different topics.
I should warn them that I’m counter-culture. I don’t buy all the conventional B.S. out there and my pet-peeve is around what I call ‘hormone D’. I won’t go into it now, but I believe it’s a great myth that we need to supplement with that. It’s not a vitamin. It is a hormone.
Wendy Myers: With vitamin D, yeah.
Morley Robbins: And I think it’s causing a lot of harm, but we’re not going to see it for another ten years. So I’ll rest my case. We’ll talk again ten years.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, we are going to do another podcast on vitamin D and another one on copper.
Morley Robbins: Oh, good!
Wendy Myers: I would love, love, love to do that. And maybe one on calcium.
Morley Robbins: [inaudible 01:02:35]
Wendy Myers: …just to cover all the nutrients.
Morley Robbins: That would be a lot of fun. I would look forward to that.
Wendy Myers: Well Morley, thank you so much for coming on the show. Stay tuned! Listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to the Live to 110 Podcast. You can learn more about me, the Modern Paleo Diet, detoxification, my Mineral Power program all on myersdetox.com.
Be sure to go to my Facebook, iWillLiveto110 and Twitter, iWillLiveto110 and the YouTube channel, WendyLiveto110. Join in on the fun and learn about alternative ways to heal your health. Thank you, again, for tuning in to the Live to 110 Podcast.
Morley Robbins: Thanks so much.
