Category: Health tips

Studies show that some 48% of American’s consume less than the required amount of magnesium. Low magnesium levels have been associated with a truckload of troubling conditions, including type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome,  hypertension, atherosclerotic vascular disease, sudden cardiac death, osteoporosis, migraine headache, asthma, and colon cancer. This is something worth talking about.

During some continuing education last week, the StoneTree docs were reminded of a little something regarding magnesium supplementation: the importance of taking it long-term. Before we get to the reason why, it’s important to understand a little about magnesium testing.

How To Test Your Magnesium Levels

Testing for magnesium deficiency is not perfect.

In part, this is because of where magnesium is used in the body. Serum magnesium, the magnesium in the blood, is easy and cheap to measure, but magnesium has no value in the blood–it’s an intracellular mineral, meaning all of its usefulness is inside a cell. A test might suggest you have enough magnesium in your blood, but is there enough in your cells?

To measure the intracellular levels of magnesium, you can do an RBC magnesium level–this is the amount of magnesium inside a red blood cell. But, again, this isn’t a perfect test, because magnesium is most useful in muscle tissue, nervous tissue, and bone. You can have “enough” in your red blood cells, but still have low levels in other tissues.

Measuring magnesium in those other tissues, however, is much harder. For example, most patients wouldn’t willingly succumb to a muscle biopsy to determine their magnesium status.

What to do? The best/easiest measure can be to look for magnesium deficiency symptoms that improve when you start taking magnesium. These symptoms include:

• Inability to sleep or insomnia
• Irritability
• Sensitivity to noise
• Mental disturbances
• Anxiety, depression or restlessness
• Muscle soreness or spasms
• Period cramps

Which brings us to why it’s important to take magnesium long-term.

Magnesium For Months vs. Weeks

Around 60% of your body stores of magnesium are in your bones. When someone suffers from symptoms of magnesium deficiency, like muscle cramps, their body will work to mobilize the magnesium from the bone stores to deal with the deficiency. But without enough magnesium intake, they’ll slowly but surely deplete that store.

When we treat a patient with a magnesium deficiency, they’ll notice an improvement in their symptoms, but it’s not uncommon for that improvement to plateau. That’s because the immediate cellular issue has been solved, and the body is changing gears, now trying to “refill” the supplies in the bones.

However, if those patients continue with the supplementation, they’ll notice that after 4-5 months there’s another level of improvement when the bone stores have been repleted, and the cells can take in even more for more optimal function.

The take-home message is this: If you feel better when you take magnesium, keep taking it for the long haul to feel even better!

The ketogenic diet is the new, sexy diet that everyone is talking about. Many companies are jumping on the “weight loss miracle” bandwagon with “exogenous ketones” that will solve all your weight loss problems.

But what is a ketogenic diet? What is it good for? How do you do it?

A ketogenic diet is one that is high in healthy fats, low in carbohydrates, and low to moderate in protein.  When you eat this way, your biochemistry can enter what is called nutritional ketosis. That means your cells are burning fat (in the form of ketones) as their primary fuel instead of carbohydrates/sugar (in the form of glycogen).

For the most part, your body likes burning sugar. It’s easy to get at, and easy for the body to use. Fat, on the other hand, is super-efficient for storage, but less easy to access. Given a choice between the two, your body will typically take sugar (in the form of glycogen) over fat (in the form of ketones).

Plus, the standard North American diet is generally so high in simple carbohydrates, the body never gets a chance to actually burn the fuel we have stored as fat. A highly processed, high sugar/simple carb diet tips the biochemical balance AWAY from fat burning toward carb burning. The ketogenic diet is a way of tipping the scale back again by reducing the carbohydrate supply in the body.

What do we mean by high fat, low carb, and low/moderate protein?

Generally, the macronutrient ratio varies within the following ranges: 60-75% of calories from fat (or even more), 15-30% of calories from protein, and. 5-10% of calories from carbs

What does that mean for you?

Here is a handy little calculator:

• https://ketodietapp.com/Blog/page/KetoDiet-Buddy

What are healthy fats?

What to we mean by “healthy fats”? Not French fries and deep-fried food.:)

Healthy fats include things like:

• Ghee
• Coconut oil (MCT)
• Lard/butter
• Olive oil
• Avocado oil
• Nut oils
• Fatty fish
• Grass-fed animal proteins

Is it safe? Should I do it?

For us, the upside of a low-carb or ketogenic diet is that it guides people toward simply eating food that is less processed. By default, when you lower your simple carbs, you end up cutting out a lot of packaged food and added sugars. As a general rule, we always support eating “real food”–things your grandparents or great-grandparents might have actually recognized and eaten.

The idea of a “diet”, especially for weight loss, can be troublesome. Diets are almost always temporary, and when people return to the way they habitually eat, their bodies follow along. The same health issues return, the same body fat distribution returns.

For most people, the goal should be a long-term, sustainable shift toward a healthier lifestyle. That generally means gradually changing to whole foods, a more active lifestyle, and improved emotional health.   Expecting a ketogenic diet to transform your life forever is probably the wrong recipe. Diets come and go–what doesn’t change are the fundamentals of health.

Most people can safely eat far fewer simple carbohydrates than they do, but as always, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor!

Additional Resources

• Ketogenic Diet Food List
• Printable “low-carb-food list”

Last week, a story circulated in the UK about a woman with multiple myeloma—a blood cancer that is very difficult to treat—that was seemingly successfully treated with curcumin, the active medicinal ingredient in the spice turmeric.

Multiple Myeloma is a blood cancer that will affect just under 3000 Canadians annually. The disease does damage to bones, the immune system, the kidneys–because it’s a blood cancer, symptoms can crop up all over the place. The prognosis for patients with multiple myeloma is fair at best, and the median survival rate is 3 years.

Although her recovery may sound sensational, her case was actually written up in the British Medical Journal. That led us to ask our resident cancer guru, Dr. Ehab, about curcumin.

Curcumin is derived from the yellow curry spice, turmeric (curcuma longa) or Yu Jin.

Taking curcumin in your diet can be protective from various cancers, but the medical dose would be 90 grams a day of the root. The turmeric root has about 3% curcumin, so the biggest challenge with dietary curcumin is poor absorption–it’s hard to get that much into your blood by diet alone, so we use the capsulated curcumin concentrates.

How curcumin helps in cancer care

There are a number of very interesting ways in which curcumin can play a role in cancer care. For example, curcumin:

• Induces apoptosis (i.e. programmed cell death, so cancer cells stop dividing indefinitely and stop growing) in tumors of the liver, kidney, sarcoma, and colon.
• Reverses liver damage from fungal aflatoxin.
• Inhibits cancer initiation, promotion and progression.
• Is highly chemoprotective, blocks tumor induction by chemical carcinogens.
• Is very useful for improving safety and efficacy in radiation therapy.

If you want to get deep into the weeds on this, you can read some specific studies:

• Curcumin Analog DK1 Induces Apoptosis in Human Osteosarcoma Cells In Vitro through Mitochondria-Dependent Signaling Pathway
• Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance, smoldering multiple myeloma, and curcumin: a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over 4g study and an open-label 8g extension study
• Phase II trial of curcumin in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer

But you can also have any questions answered about our cancer program by booking a complimentary meet-the-doctor visit online, or by calling the clinic at 705-444-5331.