The Rise of Magnesium Deficiency and How It Affects You
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After a cruel, long day at work, I threw myself onto the sofa, sinking deeper into the soft leather folds. Gripping my hot tea in one hand, I opened my NHS app to check my blood test results from the blood work I had requested days prior. While scrolling through the results, a few abnormalities piqued my interest, namely my low magnesium levels. I half-heartedly googled the symptoms for low magnesium, but let’s be real, you never particularly hear about magnesium or its effect on the body, So it can’t be that serious… right?
Wrong.
I fell into an ever-deep rabbit hole of research of what low magnesium can mean for the body, its prevalence in today’s society, what the main symptoms are, and how horrid it really is to have low magnesium. So let me break it down for you.
What would happen if you had no magnesium in your body?
Let’s be real, if you had absolutely no magnesium in your body (which is practically impossible), you wouldn’t survive long. But assuming you had close to zero, there is a lot there you would notice.
Magnesium is an element on the periodic table; a metal and mineral. But that’s outside the body. Inside the body, it is an essential nutrient. A nutrient is something that your body cannot produce on its own and can only receive from food or supplements¹
To personify magnesium, she’s like the busiest assistant in a huge company who has to personally carry every single message between every staff member. No communication can be done without her. In more scientific terms, magnesium is a cofactor for over 300 metabolic reactions in the body², which means she essentially sticks to enzymes to activate them and help them do their job.
One of the reactions that you may not know that magnesium has a huge involvement in is anxiety. Magnesium assists and controls neurotransmitters (your brain chemicals that control how you feel), more specifically, the neurotransmitters that calm you down, like GABA³. Without magnesium, GABA can’t do its job properly, and instead of feeling grounded, your brain stays in fight-or-flight mode.
Magnesium also blocks certain stress pathways in the brain³, kind of like a bouncer. Without her there, those pathways get triggered way too easily, and you end up feeling anxious, jittery, overwhelmed, or like you’re constantly on edge, even if there’s nothing actually wrong.
To top it all off, because magnesium is involved in calming your nervous system and balancing your hormones⁴, having no magnesium would mean your body is going to constantly feel like it’s under threat. Your heart might race, your muscles stay tense, your mind spins, and you have no internal blocker (magnesium)to stop it.
Another aspect of magnesium is her collaboration with ATP (your body’s energy supply). Magnesium needs to bind with ATP to form a stable complex, and without that, ATP can’t properly react with enzymes for things like muscle synthesis⁵. Magnesium plays a huge role in controlling the energy balance of cells, especially in the mitochondria (the cell’s powerhouse). She personally helps power ATP production by being essential for processes like the electron transport chain and the TCA cycle, which are both needed to make ATP.
This means you will be incredibly fatigued, have heavy brain fog, and be unable to move without the worst cramps in all your muscles. The reason for the cramps would be that magnesium wouldn’t be there to help regulate the movement of calcium in your muscle cells⁶, so calcium would just flood in and cause the most painful spasms ever.
This is only a small fraction of what magnesium does for your body.
Prevalence of Magnesium deficiency in today’s society
‘Hypomagnesemia is a relatively common occurrence in clinical medicine. That it often goes unrecognized is due to the fact that magnesium levels are rarely evaluated since few clinicians are aware of the many clinical states in which deficiency, or excess, of this ion may occur’⁷.
Hypomagnesemia (magnesium deficiency) can be found in 84% of postmenopausal women with osteoporosis, 42% of seemingly healthy university students in brazil, and 20% of 381 elderly men and women⁸.
Over the last century magnesium intake has been falling rapidly due to chemically processed foods filtering out magnesium, changes in farming techniques which have lessened soil mineral content, including magnesium, by up to 30% over the past 60 years, modern fertilizers can reduce plant uptake of magnesium and calcium, and the consumption of leafy greens and magnesium rich vegetables have reduced significantly⁹.
What does this mean for you, and what can you do?
‘If so many people have it now, then does it even matter if I do too?’- that is what my sister replied when I shared these mind-blowing facts. I was disappointed to say the least. ‘But just because something is common doesn’t mean it’s harmless,’ I replied.
If your quality of life is being negatively affected, why does it make it okay just because other people are suffering too? The mindset of my sister is very common, and I want to fight against it because although, as humans, we are a community, you’re your own person, and your health and wellbeing should always come first, regardless of if what everyone else is doing makes it seem normal to ignore it.
The next steps for you should be to book a blood test, and consult with your doctor on the results, the specificities, and ensure that magnesium supplementation does not affect any current medications you are taking. Again, talk with your doctor and openly communicate your health goals.
References
National Institutes of Health (2022). Magnesium. [online] National Institutes of Health.
Available at: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Magnesium-HealthProfessional/. [1]
Medline Plus (2016). Magnesium in diet: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia. [online]
Medlineplus.gov. Available at: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002423.htm. [2]
Cuciureanu, M.D. and Vink, R. (2011). Magnesium and stress. [online] Nih.gov. Available at:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507250/. [3]
Harcourt, L. (2024). How Magnesium Impacts Hormonal Health & Sleep | Holland & Barrett.
[online] www.hollandandbarrett.com. Available at:
https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/the-health-hub/vitamins-and-supplements/minerals/magn
esium/magnesium-benefits-hormones/. [4]
Ko, Y.H., Hong, S. and Pedersen, P.L. (1999). Chemical mechanism of ATP synthase.
Magnesium plays a pivotal role in formation of the transition state where ATP is synthesized
from ADP and inorganic phosphate. The Journal of Biological Chemistry, [online] 274(41),
pp.28853–28856. doi:https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.274.41.28853. [5]
Dai, Q., Shrubsole, M.J., Ness, R.M., Schlundt, D., Cai, Q., Smalley, W.E., Li, M., Shyr, Y.
and Zheng, W. (2007). The relation of magnesium and calcium intakes and a geneticpolymorphism in the magnesium transporter to colorectal neoplasia risk. The American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 86(3), pp.743–751. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/86.3.743. [6]
Henzel, J.H. (1967). Significance of Magnesium and Zinc Metabolism in the Surgical Patient.
Archives of Surgery, 95(6), p.974.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1001/archsurg.1967.01330180122022. [7]
DiNicolantonio, J.J., O’Keefe, J.H. and Wilson, W. (2018). Subclinical magnesium deficiency:
a principal driver of cardiovascular disease and a public health crisis. Open Heart, [online]
5(1), p.e000668. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/openhrt-2017-000668. [8]
Cazzola, R., Della Porta, M., Manoni, M., Iotti, S., Pinotti, L. and Maier, J.A. (2020). Going to
the roots of reduced magnesium dietary intake: A tradeoff between climate changes and
sources. Heliyon, 6(11), p.e05390. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05390. [9]