Magnesium is key to good health, scientists find
June 28, 2002

By SUSAN FERRARO
New York Daily News

NEW YORK — Five years ago, migraines were making Nelson Zotelo miserable.

“I am a waiter. Can you imagine, when you have a headache, how hard that is?” says Zotelo of the bad old days. “The pressure is that when you are busy you have to be always in a very good mood, feel no pain, with your head not being bothered by anything.” Seeking relief, Zotelo, 46, went to Dr. Barbara Levine, a nutritionist at Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical Center. She suggested he take 200 milligrams of the natural mineral magnesium daily.

“Just taking the magnesium, that’s it,” says Zotelo. “I used to have heavy pain. Now I feel very good.”

So does a small cadre of top-flight scientists who, despite years of laboring in the shadow of calcium, the “sexy” mineral that builds bones and settles stomachs, are proving the importance of magnesium with first-rate research.

“Magnesium is essential for keeping everything in the body working well — cells, muscles, nerves, organs, bones,” says Levine, who has set up the Magnesium Information Center, a national hotline. Studies show that not having enough magnesium can promote and even bring about heart disease, stroke, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis.

Yet few doctors talk about magnesium with patients and Americans rarely get enough. “We are not even taking in the minimum!” says Dr. Lawrence Resnick, an endocrinologist and expert in hypertension at Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“The average intake is 200 milligrams a day. The requirement is around 400.”

Magnesium is a mineral of motion. “It activates every enzyme that produces energy, new protein, almost all the energy in every single cell in the body,” says Dr. Mildred Seelig, who has studied it for decades.

Minerals work together — “I don’t have a favorite,” Resnick insists — to achieve a delicate, beneficial detente in the body. The other top guns are calcium, potassium and sodium. But magnesium is especially relevant, Resnick suggests.

More than 300 enzymes — proteins that tell cells what to do — need it to function. Without it, cells “can’t do a lot of things automatically” — whether it’s contract the heart muscle, line a blood vessel or make bone.

Magnesium, Resnick says, is a “cell buffer” that monitors physical needs — external heat or internal hormonal commands — and activates the proper response. “Magnesium sits in the cell asking, ‘How impressed am I supposed to be with this?”’ Resnick says.

Without enough magnesium, Resnick says, cells grow “hyper”: “Whatever that tissue does, it will overstimulate or underdo it.” Eventually, the cells and the body stop reacting as forcefully as they should.

Moreover, most life-threatening diseases that start in middle age — except for cancer — are connected, Resnick says: “getting overweight and progressively so, tending to diabetes and getting it, high blood pressure, gout and accelerated atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which leads to strokes and heart attacks.”

Elegantly designed studies in Resnick’s lab show that magnesium deficiency underpins this entire constellation of ills — what is known as Syndrome X, or insulin resistance, a term coined by Dr. Gerald Reaven.

Magnesium works “very closely” with potassium, says Dr. Michael Brodsky, a cardiac arrhythmia expert at the University of California at Irvine. Arrhythmias — erratic heart contractions — can kill.

“If potassium gets too low, the heart gets irritable, and if it gets too high, the heart can stop,” Brodsky says. And potassium levels may depend on the magnesium, because “magnesium is driving the potassium process.”

Magnesium “can treat dramatic attacks,” he says. In one patient, nothing helped, not even an implanted defibrillator, which kept shutting off, or oral magnesium supplements the patient could not absorb properly.

“I told his doctor we needed to give him intravenous magnesium,” Brodsky says, and they began infusing him with magnesium three and four days a week. “His implanted defibrillator started working, and now he is down to one infusion a week.”

Inadequate levels of magnesium also contribute to making blood platelets sticky, causing “micro clots in important vessels,” says Dr. Kenneth Weaver, a gynecologist who has done magnesium research for more than 25 years.

A deficiency can actually induce atherosclerosis (the buildup of vessel-narrowing plaque) in lab animals, “which is not easy to do,” says Resnick, and which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

Resnick’s own careful work on hypertension finds that:

People with high blood pressure have a deficiency of free magnesium available and active in their tissue. The less magnesium available to tissues, the thicker the heart muscle and the stiffer the walls of blood vessels.

Dr. Jerry Nadler, top endocrinologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a diabetes expert, says simply of magnesium: “We believe in this.”

Different studies show a link between low levels or intake of magnesium and increased risk of getting Type 2 diabetes, the form that develops over time but is increasingly striking children as young as 8 or 10.

Nadler studied Zucker (zucker means sugar in German) rats, which all develop diabetes in time. “Put the rat on a high magnesium diet before they get (diabetes), and they are highly protected,” Nadler says.

In another study, he gave healthy people a liquid diet with everything except magnesium. “Within about three weeks, they were deficient, and most became insulin-resistant,” an early sign of encroaching diabetes, he says.

Preeclampsia — a sudden rise of blood pressure in pregnancy — is also related to magnesium. Doctors began using magnesium sulfate to forestall the convulsions and death of full-blown eclampsia at least 80 years ago.

As a young physician, Weaver — who practices in Johnson City, Tenn. — wondered why the mineral worked so well. “It occurred to me that perhaps magnesium, which stopped the final convulsions, was decreasing the basic problem in preeclampsia and eclampsia — relaxing the arteries and decreasing the stickiness of the platelets.”

His blood work on women already ill bore him out. To test his theory further, he fed 12 pregnant Finnish ewes — which have multiple births and so more physical stress — diets with and without magnesium. The six that got magnesium were normal. Of the six that did not, one died and the other five were hypertensive.

Chasing 200-pound pregnant ewes around a corral in the heat of summer is taxing, and Weaver developed migraines. He measured his sweat and found it contained excessive amounts of lost magnesium.

He dosed himself with magnesium and knocked out the headaches. His theory: The replaced mineral was able to control the cellular affairs involved in “the vascular spasm and platelet interaction” of migraines, Weaver says.

Seelig’s work also shows that a lack of magnesium contributes to heart disease in babies and young children, as well as the brittle bones of osteoporosis — it’s the soft, regenerating matrix of the bone that breaks down and builds up, providing “elasticity, the ability to flex a little,” she says. Less brittle bones don’t break as much and heal faster.

Is magnesium one of nature’s magic potions? Can it cure or prevent serious disease? Maybe, says Resnick, but “you can’t necessarily cure yourself, because not everybody is magnesium-deficient.”

In some, supplements cause remarkable changes, just as enforced deficiencies will disorder the body’s metabolism. In others, for unclear reasons, “tissue doesn’t know what to do with it,” Resnick says, even when plenty is given.

Finding out why is a frustrating process, because in standard, widely respected American science, the demand for randomized, double blind trials means researchers don’t separate those who are simply magnesium-deficient from those who can’t absorb it.

“Clinical trials that are uninformed about the (participants’ individual) physiology are destined to be irrelevant or nonsense,” Resnick says, because averaged results cancel each other out.

Meanwhile, independent researchers forge ahead. “We are not hustling anything, we are altruistic,” says Brodsky. “Magnesium can save lives. There is no question about it.”