This is the transcript of an interview hosted on Ruth’s Feel Better. Live Free. podcast.
Ruth Soukup: What if I told you that no matter how you’re feeling right now or what health issues you might be struggling with, there’s one mineral you could start taking that would make you feel noticeably better within just one day. Sounds almost too good to be true. Doesn’t it?
That’s what I thought too, until I spent some time talking to today’s podcast guest, Dr. Carolyn Dean.
Dr. Dean is one of the country’s foremost experts in magnesium and the impact it can have on your health. And I got to tell you what she has to share is pretty compelling. And the best part is it’s pretty simple.
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Today we’re going to be chatting with Dr. Carolyn Dean, who is a physician and naturopathic physician. As well as one of the country’s leading experts in magnesium and the author of the new book, Magnesium: The Missing Link to Total Health. And today she’s sharing some details about the impact magnesium can have on your health as including why so many of us are magnesium deficient and the steps that you can take to immediately start feeling better.
Like I said, it’s pretty compelling. So without further ado, I am very excited to be able to introduce you to today’s podcast guest, Dr. Carolyn Dean. Carolyn, thank you so much for being here today. I’m so excited to talk to you.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Thanks. Thank you, Ruth. I’ve been watching, not watching, listening to your podcast and you’ve been interviewed quite a few times by my friend, Michael Sandler.
So that was fun. Well, anyway, I’m just jumping in.
I’m a medical doctor and a naturopath. But I think I’m a naturopath at heart. I did my medical training first and They didn’t dissuade me from wanting to help people with lifestyle and just more positive thinking, non-drugs.
And that was back in the mid 70s when I went to med school. And there really wasn’t that much information about alternatives. There was no health food store. In the city where I did my medical training, which was Halifax, Nova Scotia. So I wasn’t deterred by what I learned in med school, although it was all drug oriented and they laughed at me cause I made my own yogurt and they laughed at me when I was, puncturing an apple with acupuncture needles, because that was my elective.
I found an anesthesiologist in the hospital, a Chinese gentleman, who was doing an acupuncture clinic after hours. So he said to me once, yeah, you know, I do all this medical stuff and kind of, you know, interfere with people during the day, but then I make up for it when I do my acupuncture. So I had a lot of support in staying with alternatives and then in my practice, it was, as I said, I practice as a medical doctor, but mostly doing naturopathic medicine.
I sincerely thought by now, all doctors would be doing nutrient based medicine, but they sadly they went to the dark side. Seriously, even more.
Ruth: Well, it surprises me to talk to hear you say you went to medical school in the seventies and it was already very much based on medication and prescriptions and just not really any alternatives even back because that’s—you know, 70s weren’t that recently and yet now you’re right. It’s gotten complete. It’s gotten completely worse and like really bad.
Dr. Dean I remember one of my clinicians saying only give a medication as long as it takes the patient to get back on their feet.
And now we’ve got these lifelong medications for diabetes, for cholesterol, for you name it. So it’s gone very medical and all the side effects from all these drugs. I mean, there are hundreds of them. And worst of all is in my world, because I’m an expert on magnesium. They deplete magnesium.
A lot of these drugs are just built in such a way. A lot of them have fluoride molecules attached to them to make them easier to get across fat cell membranes. Our cell membranes are made of fat and these drugs get through, but. In the intestines, these drugs can be broken down by the intestinal bacteria and they’ll release this fluoride.
So then we’re poisoned and the fluoride it will bind I think mainly to magnesium because magnesium is very reactive. I don’t know that for sure. There’s no studies. No one’s looking at this. It’s my conjecture that when, because chemically, magnesium will bind to fluoride, you get an MgF2, and that compound called phthalate deposits in tendons and joints and ligaments.
And what’s the black box warning on ciprofloxacin, which is a fluoride drug? It’s tendon rupture. People will take, a lot of athletes will take Cipro. They’re giving it, Oh, I’ve got a cold. I’ve got a game coming up, you know, give me a drug. They take Cipro and sometimes it’s on one, you know, one prescription.
Sometimes it’s cumulative and they end up with tendon rupture. And we see that. I mean, I’m sure you’ve had clients who’ve had tendon rupture and it could be from as A fluoride drug. So anyway, the drugs are not good. Yeah. So what we do is try to use nutrient building blocks so that the body is strong so that it can recover from illness or injury.
I had a horrible fall a few months ago. I crashed on my elbow and my knee didn’t break a thing. I swelled. People thought pictures of my arm or my leg because it was so swollen. And you recover. I’m 75. I should have broken many bones. And it’s a testament to how I live my life and my nutrients that I didn’t.
And that’s what I want people to learn. That there are building blocks and they’re the basics. You know, they’re your vitamins. A, B, C, D, E, what else? And then your minerals. And like I said I’m I’m really fond of magnesium. And what I’ve done with the mineral world is created a picometer sized, stabilized, ionic form, Of all the minerals I work with so that they’re immediately absorbed into the cells.
They don’t run out in the bowels or the urine. So the body gets what it needs and it doesn’t have to be high dose. So you get your magnesium, your calcium, of course, but in our world, we have too much calcium. Women are told to take calcium supplements to protect their bones, but they’re not told about calcium.
Or about magnesium and boron and molybdenum, all the different minerals that go to make the bone and collagen. And that means vitamin C. Whole food, vitamin C and ascorbic acid. If you want your ligaments and tissue in your body in general, you need your collagen. I mean, as we age, what gravity does to us is magnified if we don’t have enough collagen.
So there’s all, they’re just basic building blocks, but see what I’ve discovered is and I’ve written it in this book, I have 65 medical conditions that can really be magnesium deficiency. And if we don’t treat them with magnesium, then we give drugs and then the drugs make us worse. So we’ve gotten into this terrible bind and right now I’m not, as you’ve heard, I haven’t mentioned any brand names of my products that the FDA won’t let me say that my formulas can help people treat or prevent disease.
We depend on podcasts like yours for us to get the information out there for people to understand that. You know, with magnesium deficiency, you can have acid reflux, you can have Alzheimer’s and angina and atherosclerosis and anxiety. I mean, look at the anxiety in our world. Anxiety and panic attacks and even depression.
And I’ve heard your story. I know what you’ve gone through. And if I could have only had you and, you know, soaked you in Epsom salt and gave you magnesium and, you know, some B vitamins for sure, you would have You know, had an extra level of coping so that you didn’t have to face what you face. So there are brain effects with nutrients.
And instead of giving the nutrients, the minerals and the, you know, the simple vitamins and omega 3 fatty acids, and of course, vitamin D. Then we’re faced with symptoms that then we either take drugs for, or we take a whole host of herbs and, you know, whatever, ashwagandhi and herbs that, if they’re not organic.
They’re not safe to take.
Ruth: Can I interrupt you for just a second and we can maybe back up a little bit because I feel like we, we talked about a lot of things all at once. And I, so I’d like to break it down just a little more methodically for people who are listening, who for who this is like all brand new information, right?
So let’s just like understand and start with a little bit like, of like how, so you went to medical school and you were interested in like natural alternative methods from the very beginning, or was there something that happened in your own, through your own experience that really got you passionate about kind of following down this path?
Because it’s different than what they’re teaching in medical schools. And apparently even back in the 1970s, and also it’s different from the norms. So what was it that kind of got you wanting to even go down like a different, take a different approach?
Dr. Dean I guess I was just curious when I was in my teens and my then boyfriend, now husband of 58 years, we began traveling and from Dartmouth, Halifax, Nova Scotia, we ended up in California during the hippie days and we weren’t hippie, hippies, we weren’t druggies, but there was a nutrition revolution, Adele Davis, Pavarola, Jonathan Wright.
And they had a few books and the people we were staying with had a library. So I spent my time in that library and at the conventions with these original health experts. And so I just caught the bug. And I learned as much as I could, but what happened is when I tried to pass on the information, people weren’t that interested.
So finally, when I was in honors biology in university, some kids, young boys, men I knew in my classes, they just got into medical school. So I said, well, that’s for me. And I entered into the next semester. I just happened to have all the prerequisites. So I went into medicine with the thought that, hey, you know, maybe people won’t listen to me if I have a medical degree.
But as I already said, you know, that I mean, I was sort of castigated because I spoke natural things. I would say, well, I just read this paper that breast milk is better than bottled milk. And the pediatrician who was lecturing up at the front of the room, he called me bubbles. He said, well, you know, you may think.
The science is behind us. So, you know, there you go. So you’ll like this Ruth. It’s not on point, but it was so patriarchal and misogynistic or whatever words you want to say in med school. My class out of a hundred was the first class that had more than 25 women, 33 women. So we took, of course we took over the first day of school, a clinician came in and put up his slide.
It was a slide projector at the back of the theater and he was down front. The first slide was a nude female slide. The second slide was a new female. The third slide was a nude female. So that’s how it was being taught. And nobody knew each other in the class and people, you know, we were kind of. Looking around.
I did more than looked around. I went out and get a microbiology professor friend of mine who had a wicked sense of humor. And he was in the med school realm. And I got a playgirl magazine. It was probably the first edition in 1975. And I took out the male nude pictures and he made slides. So two days later, when Buddy came back To continue his awesome lecture.
We had the nude male slides in the front of his deck by the second slide, he had grabbed his little briefcase and ran out. I heard later that from my microbiology friend. Overnight, they took down every nude female picture that was littered throughout anatomy and biology.
They took everything down. So that’s direct action. That’s not standing on a picket line and whining and complaining. It’s doing something.
Ruth: So you are a trailblazer. Yeah, you’re a trailblazer. I love it. Okay. So now let’s talk a little bit more about the minerals and the vitamins and these things that right.
The pharmaceutical companies don’t want us to talk about because they want us to take the medication. And now, like you pointed out, they want us to be taking medications for the rest of our lives. They don’t, I mean, that’s the whole goal, right. Is to get us not just taking the drugs to take the drugs for as long as they can possibly get us to take them, preferably for life.
Okay. Because that’s how they make the most money, but you’re saying we actually need to make sure that we’re, if we just can get the right vitamins and minerals to actually allow our body to function properly. So what would you say are some of the most important things that women over 40 need to be focused on?
And how do you even know where to begin? Like it feels it’s, it can feel so overwhelming. So how do you like, like, what are kind of the basics?
Dr. Dean We start saying to people, I’m, and I say, we, by myself and my customer service, and I have a radio show, online radio show every Monday. And the message we put out is the worst is over because you’re here.
And what we start with is magnesium and magnesium is necessary for 80 percent of known metabolic functions in the body. All the enzymes, everything from head to foot. Magnesium is necessary to make muscles and nerves work. And how they do that is a nerve cell or muscle cell will be opened up. The cell mineral ion channel will be opened up to allow a little bit of calcium into the cell.
To allow it to fire off and create the action potential. And then, so, when that’s happening, the cell is closed down, and then magnesium opens the cell up. And the calcium comes out. If you don’t have magnesium for this function, the cells kind of get floppy and the calcium just drives itself in causing twitching and spasms and burning and irritation and tightness and brain fog, and we have 600 muscles.
We have 45 miles of nerves. So any of that can be affected, you know, the eye twitching that I used. I’m a magnesium deficiency person, you know, poster child. So I had the eye twitching and, you know, swallowing problems, heart palpitations, leg cramps, Charlie horse, restless legs. Tight shoulders, insomnia, headaches, all of those are symptoms of even migraines.
Fortunately, I didn’t have migraines. So all these symptoms of the nerves and muscles. And then you get to the metabolic enzymes that magnesium works with. And that would be the digestion. You know how our insulin is delivered to help the glucose get into cells. just how cholesterol is made. The gene statin, the cholesterol suppressing drugs, they work on the same enzyme that magnesium balances.
So statins will kill this, they, HMG CoA reductase. It’ll kill it. Whereas magnesium, if the body needs more calcium, it will manipulate the enzyme. If it needs less, sorry, cholesterol. If it needs more cholesterol, it will manipulate the enzyme and vice versa. So we’ve got a way for the body to do things properly.
So, and your next question is going to be, well, why aren’t we getting enough magnesium? We don’t get it in our food anymore. It’s been farmed out of the soil and it’s very expensive to, to put all the minerals back in the soil. So I am, you know, a lot of my focus outside my online dietary supplement company.
It’s a biodynamic organic farm. I put everything into this farm. And if I try to eat entirely off the farm with chicken eggs and all the vegetables and fruits, I get all my magnesium deficiency symptoms back. I’ve been at conferences where vegans and vegetarians will come up to me after my magnesium lecture and say, well, I have twitching and this and that, but I’m drinking 30 to 40 ounces of green drink a day.
I should be getting enough magnesium. And I say, well, obviously you’re not. And then they take my liquid magnesium and Seriously, they come back the next day and they say, I feel so much better. Because they’re basically very healthy, because they’re not eating, you know, probably not eating the seed oils, not eating straight sugars, and all the rest of it that are bad for us.
And the magnesium they were missing when they take it, it’s like, Oh, okay, my cells really like that. And you can be doing all the right things and eating all the right foods and eating really well. But what you’re saying is you’re still not getting the right amount of magnesium because it doesn’t exist in the way that our food is produced and manufactured and raised and grown anymore.
Ruth: So how do you know, is basically everybody magnesium deficient? I mean, is that just kind of across the board? And then how do you know how much magnesium you should be taking?
Dr. Dean: This gets into the problem of magnesium compounds as opposed to stabilize the ion of magnesium. But I always say that any amount of magnesium even the worst absorbed like magnesium oxide is a straight on laxative because only four percent of it is absorbed.
But people feel better when they take it. Studies have shown that magnesium oxide helps people. So if you have any magnesium in your cabinet, you know, start taking a little bit of it. But if you take too much of it, it’ll give you the laxative effect. And a lot of doctors would say well, if you get the laxative effect, then that’s enough, your body has absorbed enough.
That’s not the case. It’s just got run right through your body and become a laxative and that was my problem actually. When Random House asked me to write my Miracle of Magnesium book back in 1999, I ran, I saw my symptoms in the research I was doing. I ran out and got a bottle of magnesium because I wanted more than was in my multiple and I immediately got the laxative effect with 50 milligrams.
So I had to go on a 10 year search for a company and finally, I found a chemist who would make a non laxative stabilized ion of magnesium. And it’s the only one that’s available. And so it’s my mission to let people know about this, but like I said, any magnesium, it’s going to help. But if you’re on a half a dozen drugs and feeling all the symptoms head to foot, you need more magnesium.
That’s not going to make the laxative effect magnesium compounds. When they get into the bloodstream, they will disassociate. It’s called. into the two parts, magnesium and the citrus citric acid, the magnesium and chloride, magnesium and the glycine. And it’s only separated for a split second. And it’s only in that split second where the ion of magnesium will jump into a cell.
And do its work, but you know, there are trillions of well tens of trillions of cells in our body, so You know, there’s always something happening but we have gotten to the point now with our Chronic PTSD as a country as a world. The horrible diet that people are eating the massive stress The lack of minerals in our water that we have to supplement.
And what I’ve begun, well, it’s been years, but I’ve talked about total body meltdown that’s happening in folks where the thyroid is affected and weakened, especially in women after getting pregnant and childbirth, the thyroid is very much. depleted. And what allopathic medicine and alternative medicine both do is they wait till the thyroid is totally tanked and they give thyroid hormone replacement.
I was on armor thyroid and after I made my magnesium product, I made a multiple mineral with all the stabilized ions. And in the research and all I found nine minerals that support thyroid hormone production. Nine minerals. So I put it in amongst a total of 12 minerals. Six weeks into taking my own formula and we were testing it out.
My hands and feet got warm and I was more hyper than normal. So I realized, oh my gosh, my thyroid is kicked in. So I stopped my arm or thyroid. Now, this is what the FDA doesn’t like to hear. And I can tell you thousands of people since then have been able to get their thyroid hormone back. And we have to warn people when you take this multiple mineral, you know, be aware that your body may not need.
As much or may not need the thyroid hormone anymore. And that’s pretty powerful. When you think of the building blocks that are necessary, the adrenal glands, they depend on sodium. And what are we telling people? Don’t eat salt, depend on the B vitamins, and they’re not in our food supply either, and vitamin C and magnesium.
Simple building blocks. And there’s potassium in there as well. Potassium is important. Actually with magnesium in most cases, they help the absorption of each other. So then you have the sex hormones, you know, when the thyroid is weakened it drags the adrenals and vice versa. And then it, there’s a drag on the sex hormones.
perimenopause. I don’t think it is normal. It’s just been a name that’s been given to women who I think have total body meltdown and they’re just dragging on their thyroid and their adrenals and just feeling horrible. Yeah. But this, the boron. There’s a whole list of things. Basic minerals that the sex hormones bend on as well as cholesterol.
Ruth: So, so how does, so magnesium, you’re saying it affects cholesterol as well?
Dr. Dean: Absolutely. So the different types of magnesium, this is fascinating to me. So are what, which is the type of magnesium that people should be taking if the magnesium is causing sub deficiency? Yeah. Yes. So. The marketing of magnesium in the past, you know, 10, what is it, 15, 20 years?
I think a lot of it is based on my book, the Magnesium Miracle. It’s not this book, this is a shorter form and an update of all things magnesium. But if you look at the marketing of a lot of these magnesium compounds, they’ll reference my book or me. And what they’ve tried to do is say. Oh, you know, MagniTML308.
On the front of the label 2000 milligrams and you think, Oh, my gosh, 2000 milligrams of magnesium. I’m all set. Turn the label around. Oh, I have to take three capsules in order to get only 144 milligrams. Oh, my gosh. So that’s kind of advertising. And Then they do the magnesium L3 in a people. They did a study on rats and said it was 7 percent more absorbed into the brain than a magnesium citrate based on 7%.
They’ve convinced the public that they’re the only magnesium that can get into the brain. Any magnesium in its ionic state, you know, when I get it disassociated, it will pop into the brain. So they’ve really, you know, and it’s an expensive product as well. They’ve really done a disservice to the public.
It’s heavily marketed. It’s it’s comes out of China. We don’t know what’s going on with it. And in some instances, they try to say that threonate is like threonine, which is a an amino acid that’s good for the brain, but it’s a threonate, which is a derivative of vitamin C. So it has nothing to do with anything.
And the marketing of all the others. Oh, well, you can get a magnesium malate and that’ll help if you’ve got fibromyalgia and the tour a magnesium tour. It will help the heart and this the glycine and glycine magnesium glycinate will do help the gut. But if it’s a magnesium deficiency that you want to take care of, you want the magnesium.
You don’t want the taurate or the malate. And that’s why I have the stabilized magnesium ion, 300 milligrams per dose, straight magnesium. Whereas you take A 500 milligram capsule of a magnesium compound. The magnesium part is 50 to 75 milligrams and the rest is the add on. All the other stuff.
Ruth: So, but what you really need to be focused on. So, I mean, this is all like very technical stuff that we’re talking about and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of it. So, how do you approach this if you’re just wanting to. Improve your health, right? How do you approach this in a way that makes it really simple to know, okay, here’s exactly what I need to do, right?
Just give me, I hear this from my clients all the time. Like, ah, I like hearing about all this stuff, but then I get overwhelmed and I don’t know how to implement it. So how do I go, like, what do I do? Just tell me what to do step by step. So what are the steps? Let’s give like three steps.
Dr. Dean: Number one, get hydrated.
Okay. You need water and you need sea salt in that water. So you take your body’s weight in pounds, divide that in half, drink that many ounces of water per day. And then each quarter liter put And I’m going to add a quarter teaspoon of a good sea salt. Good sea salt means something that has color in it.
If it’s a white sea salt, it’s been too refined. But you don’t start with a quarter teaspoon. Just start with a pinch. And you’ll get, it’ll taste sweet to you. It’ll taste so much better than. Then water out of the tap and water out of the tap. It’s been filtered. It’s been chlorinated, maybe Florida.
Florida. So we do want you to have non chlorine, non fluoride waters as much as possible. So you put in the sea salt, number one, hydration with sea salt. And number two, just start taking some magnesium. Like I said, everybody’s got magnesium in their cupboard. I guarantee you, but you’ve probably put it aside because of the laxative effect.
If it’s a powder, put it in, in your sea salt water. And then sip that through the day so that you’re not just taking one, one harsh dose like that can overwhelm yourself and land in your intestine. That’s a laxative of the liquid powders, even capsules, Ruth, people could take a magnesium capsule. and put that in water and try to dissolve it and drink that through the day.
I know there’ll be binders and fillers in there, but you’re swallowing it anyway. And the third thing would be to get a hold of my book. It’s a very it’s a very easy to read, overview of magnesium, which is necessary for 80 percent of known metabolic functions. And then at the end of it, you may decide that, well, maybe I should try this.
And once people try my Pico meter magnesium, they don’t look back. And that’s what you want from nutrients. You want to feel them work. My multiple minerals brought my thyroid back and did a whole bunch of other things. And my magnesium, it took away my heart palpitations and a dozen other symptoms. So, it’s And what is it?
The proof is in the pudding. Yeah. Well, I mean, that makes it feel a lot simpler and definitely a lot more doable. Eat the water, add the salt, which is in, which is totally opposite of what people tell us. Then take the magnesium, whatever magnesium you have, just. Start taking more magnesium and getting more magnesium.
Ruth: It’s very interesting. I haven’t heard that like to spread it throughout the day and be drinking it throughout the day. So I really like that. And then definitely check out your book. We will make sure to add the link to your book in our show notes. So if you’re listening to this, then you can just check out the show notes and we can, and you can find the book and to read more Carolyn, thank you so much.