In this video, Dr Mike explains how we get magnesium and why the body needs it.
Hi everybody dr mike here let’s talk a little bit about magnesium let’s talk about how we ingest magnesium through our diet and supplements and even through water and what happens to the magnesium in our body what role does it play within our body first thing is we need to look at magnesium in the periodic table with all the other atoms and elements so we have
Hydrogen helium lithium beryllium boron carbon nitrogen oxygen fluoron neon sodium magnesium now if we separate them out into their relevant rows and columns of the periodic table what you’re going to find is this if we were to count the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and 12. magnesium is the 12th atom in the periodic table and what that actually means is this
Magnesium has 12 protons which are positive things and it has 12 electrons negative things this is another thing biologically so when they’re in the earth they’re fine like this when they are ingested and they’re in our body they hate being in this form at least some of them hate being in this form this last row here they’re called the noble gases right they’re
Noble they love being like themselves they’re the high and mighty everyone wants to be like the royal society here on the very right hand side that means magnesium which is number 12 wants to be like its closest noble gas which is neon so if we’re to draw neon up it is number 10 so it has 10 protons 10 electrons magnesium wants to be like neon now the protons sit
Inside the atom right so you’ve got the atom nucleus and then you’ve got all the things floating around the protons are inside they’re non-exchangeable you can’t play around with those but outside floating around the electrons you can exchange those so for magnesium to be like neon it can only play around with its electrons if neon has 10 magnesium has 12 well
Magnesium loses two of its electrons and becomes 10. now if you have compare the 12 positive and the 10 negative and put them together you’re left with two positive protons which means biologically when you ingest magnesium as an atom it becomes this charged form this is called an ion this is its ionized form heard of electrolytes before electrolytes turn into
Ions when you drink electrolytes like gatorade parade for example what happens is the salts turn into ions and it’s ions that have biologically active roles in the body this is what does all the stuff in the body right this charged form of magnesium all right now the next thing is when we ingest the magnesium we ingest it through a number of different ways one
Way that we ingest magnesium in significant amounts is actually in water there’s heaps of inorganic salts in water there’s heaps of inorganic minerals in water and so that’s one way for us to get our biologically active ionized magnesium another way through our diet now this includes legumes nuts dairy very that’s how you spell it and again it’s going to give
Us magnesium and then we also get it in supplements now here’s the thing the way we get in our supplements and our diet is magnesium is in a salt form what’s a salt so a salt is something like sodium chloride that’s table salt we know that when you put a salt so this is basically the definition of a salt you put a salt in water and what happens is it splits apart
Sodium goes that way chloride goes that way but they become charged right positive sodium negative chloride together the charges cancelled each other out and now this inert sodium chloride separate like this because of water that’s a salt so when magnesium is in a salt form now different salt forms of magnesium that you find is magnesium citrate magnesium malate
They’re probably two of the most commonly found in supplements and in the diet or at least that we get from the soil or the earth is going to be magnesium carbonate regardless what happens is when they are in water remember most of us is water when they go into water they produce the ionized form of magnesium now we’ve got our active form of magnesium what do we
Do with it in the body all right so we’re obviously ingesting this so when we ingest it here’s our oral cavity we’re ingesting it down the esophagus once it’s in the esophagus it’s going to go to the stomach once it’s at the stomach it goes to the duodenum first part of the small intestines and the rest of the small intestines then it’s going to go to the large
Intestines and so forth all right twenty to seventy percent of the magnesium we ingest gets absorbed at the small intestines right gets absorbed at the small intestines what’s it getting absorbed into it’s getting absorbed into the bloodstream what happens to the rest of this magnesium gets pooped out okay in the bloodstream magnesium can then float around to
Different parts of the body and it’s going to jump out of the bloodstream and go to different tissues now of these tissues what you’re going to find is that greater than 50 percent of our magnesium is actually stored in bones this is a great storage area for a magnesium and most of it is exchangeable so if we need magnesium we can pull it out of our bones it’s
Actually stored in bones with calcium which is another ca2 plus it’s another charged ion a charged ion is actually called a cation a negatively charged ion so positively charged cation negatively charged as an anion so 50 there now what you’re going to find is the rest of our magnesium stores are sitting inside the cells the rest is inside the cells of our body
Right only one percent sits outside the cells of our body and it’s this one percent that sits outside the cells of our body which are really important biologically all right let’s now have a look at the cells of our body so the roles that magnesium plays first thing is this magnesium inside the cell loves to bind to atp that’s the energy currency this is what
Makes us do everything in actual fact in humans atp will only do its thing if magnesium is bound to it and present so magnesium is extremely important in atp dependent reactions this is energy production that’s one thing next thing is atp is very important so remember inside you’ve also got heaps of potassium so magnesium and potassium potassium is actually
The most abundant intracellular positively charged iron magnesium is the second most abundant really important now they’re coupled so often potassium fluxes and magnesium fluxes have an intrinsic intrinsic link to them same happens with stores of magnesium and bones magnesium and calcium have a very intrinsic link now if we look at the role of magnesium at the
Neuromuscular junction this is getting muscles to contract right what you’re going to have is a neuron which is going to fire off at a muscle end plate here’s a muscle right now inside the muscle you’ve got these little storage areas these storage pits now these storage pits are called the sarco plasmic reticulum and they are filled with calcium now what’s so
Important about calcium in muscles without calcium muscles will not contract so you’ve actually got all these filaments here inside muscle that need to shorten and they shorten by contracting sorry binding to each other and sliding across called the sliding filament theory you need calcium to jump out of the sarcoplasmic reticular go to these sliding filaments
Called actinomycin and get them to bind to each other so they can slide across great thing is what magnesium does is it helps throw so when you’ve got the calcium that’s jumped out to allow for muscles to contract magnesium takes the calcium that’s been used and throws it back into the sarcoplasmic reticulum so helps replenish the stores of lost calcium in the
Sarcoplasmic reticulum so we can have another muscular contraction so that’s really important what’s another important point is that magnesium actually seems to strangely be an antagonist to calcium at the end of a neuron so when a neuron releases a neurotransmitter for example you’re going to have all these little vesicles these bubbles filled with something called
Acetylcholine acetylcholine tells muscles to contract really important that’s the neurotransmitter acetylcholine now you’re going to have all these bubbles vesicles filled with acetylcholine they won’t release until calcium tells them to release and then you get acetylcholine floating around here that then goes to the muscle and then the muscle will contract here’s
The thing magnesium for some reason inhibits calcium doing that it’s an antagonist and this seems to be important in the sense that it helps to mitigate or control contraction that’s mediated by calcium and another thing is cell death so when our cells die it’s often due to calcium fluxes and magnesium stops this so magnesium is anti-apoptotic it’s an anti-death
Stimulating chemical in the body i think we might leave it there because that’s a lot of stuff
Transcribed from video
Magnesium By Dr Matt \u0026 Dr Mike