Tag Archives: Supplements

Intensive natural healing

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It is always very difficult to find out what’s wrong, to find out what’s causing our health problems, to find out what is the reason for the stroke or the heart attack we just had, the diabetes or the cancer we were just diagnosed with. It is always very difficult as long as we think of the body in terms of a collection of separate parts pieced together; as long as we think that it is possible for the arteries supplying the brain or the heart to have a pathology that is not shared by every other organ and tissue; as long as we think that it is possible for the pancreas, the prostate or the mammary glands of the breasts to be defective in their function independently of every other cell throughout the body. The moment we see this, we recognise the absurdity of this point of view and the obviousness of the inter-relation of every cell to every other cell, tissue, organ and system.

There is only one whole body mind, and everything that happens to it affects everything else that takes place within it.

Looking at things from this new perspective, there are always only two possible alternatives: healthy or diseased, ranging from one to the other on a continuous scale with every possible point in between along the line. From this perspective, every medical intervention or treatment that is not intended to correct or remedy something acute—to fix a broken bone, to save someone whose kidneys or liver just failed, to stitch up a wound to prevent the loss of too much blood—but instead attempting to address a chronic disease condition—treating heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, etc—is bound to fail.

The failure comes from the misunderstanding that stems from the misguided premise that views the body as a collection of parts working to specific ends more or less independently of one another. If we are to ever overcome our health problems and thrive throughout a long and happy life, it is this basic premise—this misguided and erroneous premise—that must be thrown out and replaced by the clear understanding that there is only one whole body mind, and that everything in it affects and is affected by everything else.

We are sometimes, maybe most often, faced with a major health issue that is acute because it is an end point to a degenerative disease condition that has been developing over decades throughout our entire life. Stroke and heart attack are good examples. Sometimes, maybe most often, it is these events that shake us up enough to move us into action, and if we have the luck to have been exposed to sensible information, we can have the chance to begin anew and change the course of the rest of our life, steering it towards recovery and optimal health.

When an event of this kind happens—when we have a stroke or heart attack—we must act fast to recover as quickly as possible and reduce as much as we can the possibility of having another one within weeks or months, something that could easily be fatal. The fact is that this is usually quite likely to happen, and it’s therefore important to take it to heart.

How can we take the most important and extreme measures to reverse this course of progressive degeneration and set ourselves on the course to recovery as quickly as we can? What would I suggest should be done with the greatest sense of urgency based on the understanding that it is our life that is at stake? What are the most important and effective ways to help the body heal and repair itself?

Cleanse, detoxify, heal the gut because everything that circulates in the body comes and goes through what circulates in the bloodstream, and everything that circulates in the bloodstream comes and goes through what enters the intestines. It is in the gut that everything about our health starts and ends, where all nutrients are absorbed and most metabolic wastes are discarded. This is why it must be the foundational focus of the healing process.

There is no better way to cleanse, detoxify and heal the gut than to drink fresh green vegetable juices while at the same time getting a series of colonics: the hydro-colon therapy cleans stuff out of the gut, the juice cleanses, alkalises and nourishes the blood and body. Doing these separately is very good. Doing them together is great. Give yourself two weeks—fourteen days—during which to do this. Every day drinking between two and three litres of fresh green vegetable juice, and every other day getting a colonic (on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example).

For the juice, you can make it or buy it, but it must be cold pressed in a slow masticating juicer, and it must be free of sugar, i.e., containing only green watery, fibrous and leafy vegetables. Any amount of sugar will fuel the proliferation of pathogenic bacteria and yeasts like candida, and one of the most important aspects of this gut cleansing and healing is the elimination of the candida which undermines the function and health of our gut and our entire organism. In many modern cities there are small cold pressed juiceries where it is possible to buy very good quality all-organic green juice. Doing it at home is less expensive but requires you to do the work. You can also make some yourself and buy some as well (that’s what I tend to do).

In addition to the juicing and hydro-colon therapy, there are three kinds of supplements that should be taken: probiotics (Prescript-Assist is what I take), L-Carnosine (Paradise Herbs is what I take), and enzymes (I’ve used pHi-Zymes by Baseline Nutritionals and Heal-n-soothe by LivingWell). The probiotics replenish and heal the flora, carnosine helps heal the lining of the gut and glycated tissues, and the enzymes promote accelerated repair of damaged cells. They should all be taken three times a day, morning, noon and late afternoon, always on an empty stomach. Take each time one capsule of probiotics and two of L-Carnosine.

To avoid being too hungry, but also to ensure an important intake of the miraculously healing coconut oil, you should have a coconut milk based smoothie, pudding or ice cream: a small glass, two or three times per day. And to make sure you have a good intake of salt and minerals, you should either put unrefined salt in the green juice or eat cucumber and celery sticks with salt, as much as you feel like depending on taste, once mid-morning and once mid-to-late afternoon. Sometimes you may want to drink salty green juice, and sometimes you may prefer to eat salty, crunchy veggies. Just follow your inclination.

(See the work of Dr Norman Walker for more details about the importance of colonics and juicing.)

Enzymes are proteins with specialised functions. They are the things that do stuff in the body. Most of us have heard that enzymes are made in the pancreas and are needed for digestion because they break down the nutrients into their constituents: starches are broken down into glucose by amylase, fats are broken down into glycerol and free fatty acids by lipase, and various proteins are broken down into amino acids by various proteases. These building blocks of foods can then be absorbed from the gut into the bloodstream and carried all over the body to where they are needed. But enzymes also do practically everything else that needs doing, and, in particular, heal and repair damaged cells and tissues.

All raw foods contain enzymes, some more than others. Fresh juices which contain a high concentration of minerals and nutrients, also contain a high concentration of enzymes. Because the more enzymes are available, the better it is for the body to heal and repair itself. Hence, our strategy for recovering from this stroke, heart attack we just had, is to flood the body with enzymes. The fact is that in western countries, most people live on processed junk food that is not only totally devoid of minerals and micronutrients, but also completely dead and devoid of enzymes. If we don’t survive on processed junk food, then we typically hardly ever eat anything raw. Therefore, even if the food we eat is not as bad as processed fast food, it is still cooked, dead and devoid of enzymes.

Eating this way leads to two major problems. The first is that the pancreas is continuously manufacturing enzymes in a desperate attempt to cope with the digestion of cooked and dead food, and over time, like within a few decades, begins to get exhausted and eventually becomes unable to produce any enzymes. It typically also stops being able to produce insulin at the same time, just because it is simply exhausted. The second is that because all enzymes are used for digesting processed and cooked dead foods, there are hardly any enzymes available for anything else that needs doing, healing and repairing.

In our healing programme, to flood the body with enzymes, we—in addition to drinking all this juice loaded with enzymes of all sorts—will supplement with more enzymes. There is no upper limit to the amount we can take, and the more the better. It is really just a matter of what we can afford and are willing to take on a short, medium and long term basis. It is important to start slowly and increase gradually. This is to allow the body to adjust to the presence of more enzymes, but also because they will immediately start their cleanup of the body, breaking down scared and dead tissues that inevitably accumulate over time, as well as both benign and cancerous tumours. The breakdown products are toxic and need to be eliminated quickly. Hence part of the importance of the initial 14 day juice cleanse with intensive hydro-colon therapy.

The amazing thing about enzymes is that they know exactly what to do, what to break down, what to build up, what needs help repairing and what needs help healing. This can be considered a miracle of nature. But it is just life: the self-organised life of living organisms that has been evolving and having its means and methods refining themselves over the 4.5 billion years of evolution on the planet. Self-organised, synergistic and symbiotic co-dependent emergence and evolution. Miraculous and amazing, but from the perspective of an enzyme, a chloroplast or mitochondria, it is utterly simple, obvious and straight forward: adaptation for improved survival.

(See the work of Drs Cichoke and Gonzalez for more on enzyme therapy.)

Iodine is an element that is needed in every cell. According to statistics from the WHO, 97% of the world’s population is iodine deficient. And according to David Brownstein, M.D., a physician who has spent a good portion of his medical career studying iodine, testing for it, and treating his patients’s deficiencies of salt and iodine, the figure is probably closer to 98 or even 99%. In any case, this means that we can conclude that everyone should be supplementing with iodine to ensure the body an appropriate supply.

Iodine is found in the highest concentration in the thyroid gland, mammary glands, and then other glands of the body. For all glands, but especially for the thyroid and breasts, it is simply crucial. Brownstein has treated with total success a large number of women suffering from fibrous cysts or cancerous tumours in the breasts, and a large number of both men and women suffering from thyroid-related dysfunctions using basically only iodine supplementation and dietary modifications (including, most importantly, increased unrefined sea salt intake). He states his belief that most if not all cystic breast disease and cancers, and that most if not all thyroid problems, regardless of whether they are hypo or hyper thyroid dysfunctions, are caused by iodine deficiency, and are always corrected with appropriate supplementation.

One of the reasons why iodine deficiency is so problematic is that because it is so important in its role in every cell, and because it is part of the halogen family of elements (F, Cl, Br, I, At), it is replaced in the cells by other much more abundant but toxic halogens like fluorine, chlorine and bromine. All of these being common industrial chemicals far too abundant in our environment, water and food, and that find their way into the body, slipping into those slots in the cells intended for iodine. It is only by supplementing and providing the body with the adequate amounts it needs, that these other halogens can be gradually replaced by iodine and excreted from the body.

Brownstein recommends using Lugol’s solution, which is sodium iodine and iodide dissolved in water. It is generic and inexpensive, as it has been around for almost 200 years (first made in 1829), and it is a safe and effective way to replenish iodine stores. For most people (as it was for Brownstein himself and for me) it will be necessary to take 50–100 mg per day for about a year. It should be taken in water or juice on an empty stomach. I took it with water for many months before starting to put it in the green juice, in which the taste cannot be detected. I use a 15% solution (18.75 mg per drop) and took between two and four drops per day (37.5–75 mg; two drops at a time, once or twice per day).

After almost a year, I felt two days in a row an immediate surge of energy and light butterflies in the stomach, which I knew were caused by the iodine stimulating the thyroid because I had read about it. Therefore, reacting to it with such sensitivity, I knew that I had finally replenished, after all these months, the iodine stores. Now, I take one drop in my green juice, which sounds like an infinitesimally small amount, but it is important to maintain supplementation because iodine is needed every day by all cells and it is water soluble making it easily excreted with the urine. It has been estimated by iodine researchers that the body needs a minimum of 12.5 mg per day. Therefore it is best to take a little more than that; one drop of 15% solution which provides 18.75 mg. Iodine is of fundamental importance. Supplementation with it is essential, especially in a detoxification and healing programme.

(See Brownstein’s book for more on iodine, and The Guide to Supplementing with Iodine, for additional details about supplementation)

Magnesium and sodium bicarbonate support the cleansing, detoxification and—very importantly—alkalisation of the gut, blood, tissues and organs of the body. The easiest and most effective way to get these into the tissues is to have a 60 minute bath with one cup of nigari flakes and one cup of baking soda. You should do this every other day (Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, for example) for the first two weeks. This will help pull out accumulated acid, chemical toxins and heavy metals. It is very pleasant and relaxing to lie in a hot bath for an hour reading a book, listening to music or just lying there quietly, adding hot water to maintain a comfortably hot temperature. It is also an essential part of the detoxification programme. After the first two weeks, you can reduce the number of baths to one to two per week.

(See the work of Drs Dean and Sircus for more on magnesium chloride and sodium bicarbonate.)

Eating for rejuvenation and optimal health is a matter of choosing between health and life or sickness and death. After these first two weeks, you will start to eat more solid foods, keeping the juice as the pillar of your new way of nourishing and taking care of the body. In fact, every day the focus of the first half of the day will be to hydrate, cleanse and alkalise by drinking green juice, one litre in two 500 ml portions, at around 9–10 and then 11:30–12:30. Lunch around 14 will be a green smoothie made of avocado and/or coconut milk, together with other green leafy veggies (kale, celery, cucumber, spinach, etc), and coconut water for the liquid part. You can add salt, black pepper and/or cayenne, other spices, superfood powders or extracts, making the smoothie as nutritious and tasty as you can using your resourcefulness to come up with new ideas and recipes.

Having a smoothie of this kind provide lots of enzymes and nutrients, essential oils and excellent fats, together with the naturally occurring fibres but because they are chopped up and blended smooth, they are very easy to digest and thus cause very little digestive stress; this is second to juicing which removes all the fibres for maximum absorption of nutrients and minimum work by the digestive organs.

In the late afternoon, have another green juice if it’s possible. You should drink one to two litres of alkaline water per day, whenever you feel like it. (You can either buy it, making sure the pH is above 8, or you can add alkalising drops to your high quality filtered water. I use Young pHorever’s PuripHy.) Remember that water and juice intake must be balanced with salt in order to hydrate well and not dilute the blood sodium levels and causing the kidneys to excrete more water. We want to drink lots and eat lots of salt in order to super-hydrate. For each litre of water/juice you need about half a teaspoon of salt.

Stop drinking around 18 or so, approximately 45 minutes before dinner: a big leafy green salad of your choice (baby greens, baby spinach, romaine, oak leaf, kale, mixed lettuces and greens) with some nuts and seeds, plenty of cold pressed organic olive oil or some kind of nut or seed butter dressing, and with this big salad, have a small amount of grass fed meat or wild/organically raised fish every other night (one day on, one day off).

That’s it. This is how you should eat for all the months during which you are recovering until you are in perfect health and perfect shape. You can eat like this for the rest of your life. This is more or less what I do. Some variations, will include creamed vegetable soups with coconut milk in the winter (cauliflower, brocoli, celery, spinach), cold soups like gazpacho in the summer, different kinds of salads (celery-fennel, red cabbage, white cabbage, chopped up cucumbers, tomatoes and red peppers in the summer, soaked nut and seed parsley salad, etc), and different lightly steamed vegetables like brocoli, romanesco, cauliflower and green beans. Of course, you are welcome to experiment in this way depending on the season and on personal taste, mood and circumstances.

Supplements that you should take as soon as you start eating, some with lunch and some with dinner, are the following.

With lunch:
(2) Liposomal Magnesium (L-Threonate; Mercola)
(2) Liposomal Vitamin C (Mercola)
(2) Krill oil (Mercola)
(1) Astaxanthin (Nutrex Bioastin 12 mg)
(2) Turmeric extract (Gaia Herbs)
(1) Cinnamon extract (Stop Aging Now)
(1) Tulsi extract (Source Naturals)
(1) Vitamin B12 (Thorne Research Bio-B12)
(2) A-D-K (DaVinci)
(2) Niacinamide (Thorne Research)
(2) Synergy7 (Stop Aging Now)
(2) Zinc (Source Naturals OptiZinc)
(1) Ubiquinol (Mercola)
(1) Huperzine A (Source Naturals)

With dinner:
(2) Liposomal Magnesium (L-Threonate; Mercola)
(2) Liposomal Vitamin C (Mercola)
(2) Turmeric extract (Gaia Herbs)
(1) Cinnamon extract (Stop Aging Now)
(1) Vitamin B12 (Thorne Research Bio-B12)
(1) A-D-K (DaVinci)
(2) Niacinamide (Thorne Research)
(2) Zinc (Source Naturals OptiZinc)
(1) Ubiquinol (Mercola)
(1) Iron bisglycinate (Thorne Research; depending on blood test results)

You will have noticed the obvious absence of some classes of food products that are eaten by most people most of the time: there are no sugars of any kind and no starches, both of which are known to increase the probability of cardiovascular events by their instantaneous triggering of more than 300 inflammatory pathways, all of which cause the blood to thicken and become more viscous; there are also no dairy products, which are highly acidifying and usually the cause of negative immune responses from mild to severe intolerance or allergies; and there are no commercial foods or drinks, all of which should simply be avoided by everyone for their lack of nutrition and chemical toxic loads. These are detrimental to our health in several ways and therefore have no place in a healing programme or in a diet for optimal health and longevity.

You will also have noticed that there is a strong emphasis on green juices and green vegetables, coconut fat from coconut milk, and just enough healthy and clean animal protein and fats to provide the body with everything it needs to thrive. It is perfectly fine to have berries either on their own or with coconut milk, as well as 80-85% organic chocolate once in a while (and not later in the day than about 15). You can have organic green tea in the morning (until about 12), but stop drinking coffee (if you’re a big coffee drinker, you have to do this gradually). The adrenal glands—the very important stress and sex hormone producing glands—in this day and age are almost always overstimulated from our busy and stressful lifestyles, and therefore usually dysfunctional to a greater or lesser extent. They also need to be healed and for this, they need a break.

You should continue the probiotics, L-carnosine, and enzymes as long as necessary to regain total health. You can continue indefinitely. You should continue the iodine supplementation with 50–100 mg per day for a year (might be anywhere between 8 to 12 months), after which you should reduce to one drop of 18.75 mg, and maintain this indefinitely. You should continue all supplements for as long as the healing process continues, and will benefit from taking them to the end of your days, reducing the quantity to once per day instead of twice (dropping the evening supplements with dinner), and remembering that there are only benefits from taking more depending on the circumstances in your life and your body’s needs. Of course there are plenty of other supplements that we can be of benefit, but the ones listed are those that I consider most important.

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Why you should start taking magnesium today

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Because magnesium is maybe the most important mineral for plant and animal life on Earth. Because magnesium is certainly one of the essential minerals most deficient in our food. And because we are all magnesium deficient.

Magnesium was the key element in the evolution of plant life on Earth as it is the heart, the central ion of chlorophyll—the plant’s photosynthesising lifeblood. I was amazed when I learnt that chlorophyll and haemoglobin have identical molecular structures, only that chlorophyll has magnesium at its heart, while haemoglobin has iron. This does indeed seem amazing at first, but upon reflection, it seems quite natural, as we can be pretty sure that this is not an evolutionary coincidence since simple cellular life came first, then plant life—obviously dependent on the simplest forms of life, and then animal life—which is completely dependent on plant life.

The human body is about 70% water by weight, with about 2/3 inside our cells and 1/3 outside; the dry weight of a 70 kg person is about 20 kg. So we can say that the rest of our weight is various arrangements of naturally occurring elements. But of the 92 naturally occurring elements, a mere 7 of them make up 99% of the body’s total mineral content. These essential macrominerals are, in order of abundance: calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium, magnesium, and chloride (chlorine gas dissolved in water).

Calcium is the most abundant and it must be in balance primarily with phosphorus for proper physiological function, but also with magnesium. Phosphorus is the second most abundant, and, present in every cell of the body, it plays a role in almost every chemical reaction. Potassium and sodium work together in their most notable function to transport nutrients into cells and metabolic waste out of them. And hence, potassium is the most abundant element inside the cell, in the intracellular fluid, while sodium is the most abundant element outside, in the extracellular fluid. Sodium is also the primary element on which rely the kidneys for regulating the amount of water in the blood and bodily fluids in general. Chloride works with its siblings potassium and sodium in their role as fluid and acid-base regulators, but it is also the essential element in hydrochloric acid secreted in the stomach to break down proteins into amino acids. Sulphur is necessary for the formation of hair, nails, cartilage and tissue. It is needed for metabolism and a healthy nervous system, plus it aids bile secretion in the liver.

Why so important?

Among these 7 macrominerals, however, magnesium is king. It is second most abundant element inside cells after potassium, and even though it totals only around 25 g in the average 70 kg human body, (more than half of it stored in bones and teeth, and the rest in muscle and soft tissues), it plays a role akin to that of a conductor in regulating the absorption and excretion of many of its sibling macrominerals, both in the intestines and in our cells. Of the multitude of functions it plays, magnesium is involved as a necessary co-factor on which more than 300 essential metabolic enzymatic reactions depend; it is crucially needed for structural function of proteins, nucleic acids and mitochodria; it regulates production, transport, storage and utilisation of energy in cells; it regulates DNA and RNA synthesis, cell growth and cell reproduction; and it regulates nerve function throughout the body.

But certainly most noteworthy, and indeed very important for the vast majority of us magnesium-deficient humans, is that magnesium is what allows muscles to relax: every single muscle cell in our body depends on magnesium to release a contraction instigated by calcium, magnesium’s antagonist brother. Going further, only magnesium can inhibit calcium-induced cell death: only magnesium regulates entry, and can thus prevent calcium from flooding a cell to trigger apoptosis (programmed cell death). It is for these two reasons that magnesium is so much more important than calcium. Sadly, we are as over-calcified—caked stiff with calcium from the inside out—as we are magnesium deficient. And that’s bad news because the more over-calcified the body grows, the more magnesium deficient it becomes. In addition, as important as it is to optimise vitamin D status, it is now clear that this cannot be done without at the same time optimising magnesium status (1).

And in practical terms, what does this mean for you? It means that most modern diseases and conditions are either a direct consequence of or severally aggravated by magnesium deficiency. It means that of all the heart attacks and strokes that claim the lives of most people in industrialised countries, it’s estimated that more than half are caused by magnesium-deficiency. It means that hypertension, poor circulation, water retention, osteoporosis, kidney stones and kidney disease are all caused or severely aggravated by magnesium deficiency. It means that arterial plaque buildup (atherosclerosis), arterial wall thickening and stiffening (arteriosclerosis), cardiac arrhythmia and palpitations, headaches and migraines, anxiety, irritability, insomnia and depression are all caused or severely aggravated by magnesisum deficiency. It means that from the seemingly most benign, occasional involuntary twitching of the eye, or the cramp in your foot, calf or hamstring that just seems to you as a brief nuisance unworthy of attention, to the cardiac arrest or stroke caused by a prolonged spasm of a coronary or cerebral artery that can claim your life in a few instants or leave you paralysed and debilitated for the rest of your life, to chronic anxiety, occasional panic attacks, recurring depression, bipolar or schizophrenic disorders, all of these health problems and hundreds more are caused or severely aggravated by magnesium deficiency. Insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes are also intimately related to magnesium deficiency as it is this mineral that allows insulin to transfer its cargo of glucose from the bloodstream into the cell.

Like many other realities of our world in the realm of medical sciences and treatment of disease, that this can be so—that we can be in such a dire situation of global magnesium deficiency—is truly mind-boggling given the ease with which it can be both prevented and remedied. But for this one as well as so many other such logic-defying realities in today’s medical and health sciences, ignorance is the major hurdle, but the power of the politics of profits cannot be underestimated, and should not be ignored or overlooked.

Why so magnesium-deficient?

Very unfortunately for us, agriculture is not, and to a great extent, never has been as it should rightly be—feeding and enriching the soils and the land, while at the same time producing from it, foods with the perfect balance of minerals, vitamins and phytonutrients in an amazing and unique positive balance process, ultimately based on a remarkably efficient harnessing of the Sun’s energy by the grass and soil. Instead we have an agricultural system that globally pollutes the waters with toxic runoffs, depletes the soils with chemical herbicides, pesticides and Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium or NPK fertilisers, all of which help to slowly but surely sterilise the earth’s surface.

Now, to give you a sense of the scale of the problem of soil mineral content depletion, as far back as 1936, a hearing was held in the 74th US Senate Congress where the following statement was made:

“Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from which our food comes are brought into proper balance? The alarming fact is that foods now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us—no matter how much of them we eat. Our physical wellbeing is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon the calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume (my italics). Laboratory tests prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, and even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago. No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his stomach with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health.”

And you can be sure that the situation has gotten worse since then—much, much worse. Just to illustrate the point, all chemicals, whether they are those found in fertilisers, in herbicides or in pesticides, contribute to magnesium wasting. Pollutants in the air that fall back down in the form of acid rain waste magnesium stores because it is simultaneously a potent acid buffer and the most water-soluble of the macrominerals. Therefore, it is also the most affected by acid rain and runoffs saturated with agricultural chemicals.

To make matters worse, any processing of a food in its natural form, will most effectively deplete its magnesium content. Here again this is due to magnesium’s super water solubility. Such that with every step of processing, more magnesium is lost from the already magnesium deficient food. The result is that all processed foods are basically devoid of it. Fluoride, the reactive industrial by-product and poison that is put into many municipal drinking waters under the false pretence that it is good for the teeth, seeks out minerals like magnesium, and by binding to them makes it impossible for the body to absorb or use. (This is just one of the many, well researched and well documented negative effects of water fluoridation. See the Fluoride Action Network for plenty more details.)

And the last straw in this magnesium-depleting scenario is our own evermore stressful lifestyle. Always more stress: stress related to the economic situation in our country; stress related to the stability of “The Market”; stress related to the economic stability of our company; stress related to the security of our own job; stress related to our professional and therefore social status; stress related to worries about our kids’ wellbeing, happiness, social development, about their future; stress related to all those deadlines we have to meet, and to those that we set ourselves for our personal projects that somehow always slip to the bottom of the pile of books sitting collecting dust next to your bed; stress about how to save money for hard times, and about where we will go on our next holiday; and on and on and on. Incredible but true: the more time passes, the more technological advances are made, the more stuff we are able to make and use and buy, the more stress there seems to be in our lives.

And what does stress have to do with magnesium? Very simply: stress depletes magnesium and magnesium deficiency magnifies stress. How do we know this? By doing a simple experiment where adrenaline is introduced in the bloodstream intravenously, and seeing the levels of magnesium drop immediately, together with those of calcium, potassium and sodium. Stop the adrenaline and they start to make their way back up, but unfortunately, is takes magnesium the longest to recover to physiological concentrations. But the fact is that every time we feel any kind of stress, adrenaline triggers our fight-or-flight response, in which the heart starts pumping, digestion is stopped as blood is diverted from the digestive system to the arms and legs, blood also thickens by the release of clotting factors to prevent excessive blood loss in case we get injured, glycogen stores are released from the liver to be made available as glucose for immediate energy use in the heart, lungs and muscles, and yes, all of these processes are intensely magnesium-dependent, and at the same time, intensely magnesium-depleting.

In short, almost all soils on agricultural land everywhere are magnesium deficient, some totally depleted, others just greatly depleted. All foods grown in these soils are inevitably also magnesium deficient, and in some cases even more due to the excess potassium in the chemical fertilisers that prevent the plant from taking up magnesium. All processing of food further depletes magnesium, and our crazy and sickly addiction to stress delivers yet another blow—a final blow. We—all of us—really are magnesium deficient. And many of us severely so. For this reason we all need magnesium supplementation. And the sooner we start, the better off we’ll be. If you want to know how magnesium deficient you are, order an RBC Mg test (red blood cells hold about 40% of the body stores of Mg): the lab’s reference range can be anywhere from 3.5 to 7, but you want to be at 6.5 mg/dL.

Remarkably easy, extremely safe and incredibly inexpensive

There are several forms of magnesium supplements. Magnesium chloride is the most  completely ionised (with a stability constant of 0), and therefore the most easily absorbable in its ionic form by our cells. This also means that it is super hydrophilic (water-loving) and dissolves instantly when in contact with even a drop of water, so it needs to be kept very dry in a well-sealed bag or container. All the better for us, it also turns out to be very inexpensive (about 6 euros/kg) in the form of white, brittle flakes called Nigari, which is used to make tofu.

To drink your magnesium, dissolve 20 g (4 teaspoons, and 10 cents worth!) in a 1 litre bottle or 30 g (6 teaspoons) in a 1.5 litre bottle. (This makes a 2% solution of magnesium chloride.) Take 50 ml on an empty stomach when you get up in the morning, and again at bedtime. You can dilute this in as much water as you want because it is the total quantity of magnesium that counts, not the concentration of the solution that you drink. At first or when you feel you need more (stressful day, weakness, cold coming on), you should take another 50 ml in the late afternoon when the body is most in need of it. This will supply 360 mg if you take it three times, and 240 mg if you take it twice per day (magnesium chloride is 12% magnesium by weight. Dissolving 20 g in 1 litre gives 2.4 g of ionic magnesium, and dividing this litre in twenty 50 ml doses yields 120 mg per dose. Therefore 3 doses gives 360 mg and 2 doses gives 240 mg).

To absorb your magnesium through the skin, dissolve 20 g in 80 ml of water. (This gives a 20% solution of magnesium chloride—ten times more concentrated than the drinking solution.) Naturally, you can dissolve more magnesium chloride in more water, keeping the same proportions, and storing the solution in a spray bottle. With just 6 sprays on each arm and leg as well as on 6 on your chest and back, you can take up as much as 600 mg of magnesium every day. This is a much more effective way to absorb magnesium because instead of going through the digestive system from which as little as 25% up to 75% of the magnesium will be absorbed depending on many factors but primarily the state of health of your digestive system, which in most of us is appalling, almost all the magnesium is absorbed through the skin and into the bloodstream in about 30 minutes. We use both methods at home.

Finally, supplementing with magnesium is extremely safe for the simple reason that it is extremely water soluble: it binds so tightly to water that the magnesium ion forms a hydration shell around itself resulting in a radius 400 times larger than in its dehydrated form. This is unlike any of its macromineral siblings. And for this reason, it is also excessively easy for the body to excrete any excess magnesium either through the urine or in the stools. Therefore, there is virtually no chances of overdosing on magnesium, and no possible negative side effects.

So please, for your own good, for the good of your sons and daughters, husband or wife, ageing mother and father, buy some Nigari at your local natural food store, and start magnesium supplementation for all of them. And for the good of your friends and colleagues, tell them about it and send them this article if they need convincing. (In France, Spain and probably other European countries, we find the Celnat brand 1 kg bag of Nigari. I’ve bought is at Bio-coop stores in Paris, and at Eco-centro in Madrid)

Conclusion: Main points to remember

  1. We are all magnesium-deficient, and many of us, dangerously so. This is due to the severe lack of magnesium in soils everywhere and therefore in the foods we eat, due to the fact that processing of whole foods strips most if not all the magnesium that is present in the unprocessed food, due to the fact that our diet is excessively rich in calcium that must be balanced with magnesium in order not to accumulate in our tissues and stiffen everything from our organs to our arteries and to our brain, and finally due to the excessive stress that we all know to be the most remarkable feature of our modern lifestyle.
  2. Magnesium is absolutely essential for relaxing muscle cells including—and maybe most importantly—the endothelial cells that line our blood vessels. Stiff blood vessels cause high blood pressure. This puts great stress on the kidneys and causes a chain of negative consequences that mould into a vicious cycle in kidney deterioration that eventually leads to failure. In addition, stiff blood vessels causes them to suffer much greater damage, especially at bifurcations where the arteries split into finer and finer arterioles. This damage leads to the buildup of plaque, and then to cardiovascular disease, heart attack,s strokes, Alzheimer’s and dementia.
  3. We all need magnesium supplementation, and fortunately it is easy, cheap and safe because Nigari is an inexpensive, food grade magnesium chloride salt easy to buy in natural food stores, and because magnesium’s ultra water solubility makes it very easy for the body to excrete in the urine and eliminations, which guarantees that that it cannot accumulate excessively. On the other hand, this also means that it takes several months to replenish intra-cellular magnesium levels, and that we need to take it daily.

Healthy and lucid from childhood to old age

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So you’ve been around for 70 years, and you’re still well enough to read this. Have you actually made it past 75, 80 or even 85? This is really great! Through a combination of different factors, various reasons, personal habits and choices, you have made this far.

Maybe because of your genetic makeup: Your parents and grand-parents all lived well into their 80’s or 90’s by following a kind of innate, traditional wisdom based on the understanding that we really are what we eat, in a very real sense, and you’ve done more or less the same, following in their footsteps.

Maybe because you have always been moderate in your eating habits: You’ve never been overweight; you’ve never eaten much sweets or deserts; you’ve never eaten much preserved meats and canned foods; you’ve never drank much alcohol; you’ve never drank sweetened soft drinks, juice or milk—mostly just water, always paying attention not to drink too much coffee or strongly caffeinated tea.

Maybe you have made it this far because you have also been moderately active throughout your life, never exercising too much or too intensely, but always quite regularly: Walking; doing light exercises for your joints (rotations of the arms for your shoulders, stretches for your neck and back, and exercises for your knees); riding a bike a couple times a week in the good season, not getting off the bike but instead riding up those hills; maybe you went skiing a week or two most years; went for long walks or even hikes in the mountains during holidays; or did a little swimming in the sea or in lakes when the occasion presented itself.

The golden middle, as my grand-father called it: everything is moderation. And he almost made it to 90 years of age! But no matter what the reason is, it is truly wonderful that you have indeed made it this far. Then again, you might be young or middle aged, but interested—maybe somewhat, maybe highly, but nonetheless interested—in being healthy and lucid for as long as possible, and hopefully well into your old age.

Either way, young or old, you live in this modern world like most of us. You live in a city, you drive a car, you work in an office, you fly or flew often on business trips, maybe even several times per week. You eat meat and fish; bread, potatoes, rice and pasta; fruits and vegetables, all from the supermarket.  And so you have, throughout your life, been continuously exposed to increasing amounts of chemicals, heavy metals and various other toxins in our environment, most of which have been accumulating in your tissues. You live in the modern world like most of us, and so you have taken medication on various occasions during your life: antibiotics a few times, maybe some pain killers, maybe some sleeping pills, maybe simple anti-histamines when you had a cold. Maybe you are and have even been taking medication on a daily basis for some “minor” but “chronic” condition.

You live in this modern world and so you have been told to drink plenty of fluids and that salt is bad and should be avoided. You’ve been told that fat in general, but especially saturated fats and cholesterol, are bad because they cause heart disease: they cause your arteries to clog up with fatty plaques that eventually block them to give you a heart attack. You’ve been told to avoid them as much as you can, and instead to consume polyunsaturated vegetable oils, plenty of whole grains and cereal products, legumes, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and so you have done that: you have decreased or almost eliminated your intake of butter, eggs, fatty cheese, fatty yoghurt, red meat—never ever eating the fatty trimmings, and also of the fatty skin on chicken or fish.

Consequently, you have increased your intake of morning cereal—but only sugar-free whole grain cereal like muesli; increased your intake of bread—but usually whole grain bread; increased your intake of rice—but usually brown rice; increased your intake of pasta—but usually also whole grain pasta; and increased you intake of potatoes—but never fried, only baked, steamed or boiled potatoes.

Maybe your total lipoprotein levels are around 220 or 240 mg/dl, and you have been told that this is too high, and for this reason you have tried to further reduce your fat intake, and are even taking statins or other cholesterol-lowering drugs, every day, just like hundreds of millions of other people in this modern world.

Unfortunately, you have not been told that you should be drinking water; not fluids in general, and that there are many reasons water, ageing and disease are intimately connected—the lack of water, that is. In addition to that, you have not been told that it is not enough to drink some water sometimes: it is essential to drink water before meals. Unfortunately, you have not been told that sodium is one of the most important minerals for health: why else would the kidneys, without which we cannot live for more than a few days, go to such great lengths to prevent its excretion in the urine, and keep it in the blood if it wasn’t? But even more unfortunately, you have not been told that minerals in general, are essential for health, and that unrefined sea salt contains all naturally occurring trace minerals is proportions that closely match those of several of our bodily fluids. And that furthermore, proper bodily function depends intimately on the balance of the minerals available, and that our salt-phobic and calcium-phillic society has led to most of us becoming completely over-calcified while growing more and more deficient in the rest of the trace minerals, and in particular magnesium. The link between generalised magnesium deficiency and minerals, ageing and disease are now everywhere painfully obvious.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told that cholesterol is absolutely vital for life and good health: that it forms the membrane of every single cell in your body and in that of every animal, that your entire nervous system and especially your brain are built using cholesterol and depend intimately on the availability of plenty of cholesterol, that your hormonal system relies completely on cholesterol for building hormones, and that your best defences against infectious and inflammatory pathogens are in fact the lipoproteins carrying around the precious cholesterol throughout your body. You have not been told that cholesterol is so important that it is manufactured continuously by our liver to keep up with the body’s needs, and that therefore, the cholesterol we eat does not in any ways raise lipoprotein concentrations. You have not been told that in addition to cholesterol, fat is also essential for building hormones, essential for absorbing minerals from the intestines into our bloodstream, essential for the binding of these minerals into the bones and teeth, essential for energy production in every cell of our body.

Furthermore, you have not been told that saturated fats like those found in animal products and coconut oil are molecularly stable, whereas unsaturated and particularly polyunsaturated oils such as those that make up all vegetable oils are molecularly unstable, some more than others, for the double bonds between carbon atoms in the chain that forms the fat molecule are weak and readily broken to permit some other unstable molecule seeking a free electron to attach in order to make the final molecular configuration stable. But that those unstable compounds are actually scavenging around for any electron to bind to, and unfortunately most of the time if not always, these free-radicals will attach themselves to healthy tissue without proper enzymatic action to guide them in the proper place and position, thus damaging our tissues.

In fact, you have not been told that all large studies that have been conducted to evaluate the “health-promoting” properties of polyunsaturated fats have not only failed to do so, but instead have shown that the more polyunsaturated oils we consume, the more atherosclerotic plaques develop in our arteries, and therefore the more likely we are to suffer a heart attack or stroke. And that on the contrary, the more saturated fats we consume, the less plaques we have, and consequently, the less likely we are to have a heart attack or a stroke (see any of the books about cholesterol in Further readings).

You have not been told, that for millions of years our species has evolved consuming most of its calories in the form of saturated fats from meat and animal products—in some cases exclusively from these, from coconut and palm oil (where these grow), and to a much lesser extent from polyunsaturated fats, and this only in whole foods such as fish, nuts and seeds—never concentrated into vegetable oils.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told that we were never meant to eat simple or starchy carbohydrates: that eating such carbohydrates always triggers the pancreas to secrete insulin in order to clear the bloodstream of the damaging glucose in circulation, that chronically elevated glucose levels lead to chronically elevated insulin levels that in turn lead to insulin resistance—first in our muscles, then in our liver, and finally in our fat cells—which leads to type II diabetes, to heart disease from the buildup of plaque in the coronary arteries and vessels, and to Alzheimer’s and cognitive degradation from the buildup of plaque in the cerebral arteries and vessels.

Unfortunately—and indeed very sadly—you have not been told and have not considered that all the multitude of chemicals and heavy metals that we are exposed to in the medications we take, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the soaps and shampoos we use, and in the household products we employ to keep our house sparkling clean and bacteria-free, accumulate in our bodies. They accumulate in our fat cells, in our tissues, in our organs, in our brains. They burden, disrupt and damage our digestive system, our immune system, our hormonal system, our organs, tissues and cells. Sometimes they reach such concentrations that we become gravely ill, but none of the doctors we visit in seeking a solution and relief understand why. Most often, however, we don’t get gravely ill but instead start developing different kinds of little problems: we get colds more often and take longer to recover, we get mild but regular digestive upsets that we can’t explain and that seem to get worse with time, we get headaches and have trouble sleeping, we feel depressed, tired, alone, helpless, not acutely but enough to disturb us enough that we notice it.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you have not been told how truly essential vitamin B12 really is, but how, for a variety of different reasons, blood concentrations B12 decrease with age, and eventually dwindle to very low levels. That B12 is essential most crucially to preserve the myelin sheath that covers all of our nerves healthy, and thus crucially important for everything that takes place throughout the nervous system, which means, everything in the body and brain. Levels of B12 should never go below 450 pg/ml, and ideally should be maintained at 800 pg/ml throughout life, from childhood to old age hood.

Can we do anything about all this?

The most fundamental point to understand is that everything about your health depends on the state of health of your digestive system. All absorption of nutrients and elimination of waste happens in the digestive system. Since our health depends on proper absorption and efficient elimination, the digestive system should be our first as well as our main concern.

The first step is to rebuild and establish a healthy intestinal flora of beneficial bacteria (breakdown and absorption), and at the same time begin to detoxify the body and clean out the intestines (elimination). This is done by taking high quality probiotics to supply beneficial bacteria on a daily basis, high quality chlorella to both supply a lot of micronutrients and pull out heavy metals, and water-soluble fibre like psyllium husks to clean out the intestines by pushing out toxins and waste products. If you are not already taking these, read Probiotics, chlorella and psyllium husks.

The second step is by far the most important, and in fact, crucial dietary change necessary to achieve optimal metabolic health. It is to eliminate simple and starchy carbohydrates from you diet, and replace them with more raw vegetables—especially green and leafy salads and colourful vegetables such as red and yellow peppers, more nuts and seeds—especially raw and soaked, more good and efficiently absorbed protein—especially eggs, fish and raw cheeses, and much more saturated fats—especially coconut oil (at least 3 tablespoons per day) and butter. Doing this is  essential for the systemic detoxification, rebuilding and then maintaining a healthy digestive system. Everything should be organic: you obviously don’t want to be adding to your toxic load while trying to detoxify.

And the third step is to supplement our now-excellent, health-promoting diet with a few essential and very important nutrients that are, for most of us, difficult to obtain. The only such supplements that I believe to be essential, and that my family and I take daily, are: Vitamin B12 and vitamin D3—the most important supplements to take for overall health, but in which we are almost all deficient; Krill oil—a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat with its own natural anti-oxidants, highly absorbable, and particularly important for proper brain function; Ubiquinol—the reduced and thus useable form of coenzyme Q10, critical for cellular energy production, and a powerful lipid-soluble anti-oxidant that protects our cells from oxidative damage, but both of whose synthesis as CoQ10 and conversion from CoQ10 to ubiquinol drop dramatically after about age 30-40; Vitamin K2—essential for healthy bones but very hard to get other than from fermented foods, which we typically eat little of.

In addition to these, we usually always take Astaxanthin and turmeric—very powerful antioxidants with amazing general and specific anti-ageing health benefits, and also sometimes take a whole-foods-multi—basically dehydrated vegetables and berries made into a powder and compressed into a pill for extra micronutrients. (You can read about all of these supplements on Wikipedia or any other page you will find by doing an internet search.)

I tend to buy our supplements from Dr Joseph Mercola, (whose website also provides a lot of info about these and other supplements, as well as about a multitude of other health-related issues and conditions), because I trust that his are among if not the best on the market: there’s really no point in buying cheap supplements at the pharmacy, and risking doing yourself more harm than good, as would happen with a rancid omega-3 supplement, or a synthetic Vitamin D, for example.

Staying healthy and lucid is, in reality, quite easy and simple. Unfortunately, most of us, including, and maybe especially our medical doctors, just don’t know how. And so, medical diagnostic and high-tech treatment technologies continue to improve and develop, and medical expenditures continue to rise throughout the modern world, but we are sicker than ever: more obesity, more diabetes, more strokes, more heart attacks, more cancers, more Alzheimer’s, more leaky guts, more ulcers, more liver failures, more kidney failures, and on and on. There is more disease, more pain, more suffering and more premature deaths. And all of it is completely unnecessary and avoidable by such simple and inexpensive means as those outlined herein. The only critical point is that only you can do it; nobody else can do it for you.