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Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!
Katie: This podcast is brought to you by Hiya for children and especially I love to talk about their new greens line for children. Now, I have tasted these vitamins and they’re delicious, and my kids are the ones who really love them though. And I love that they’re getting the nutrients they need without the sugar because most children’s vitamins are basically candy in disguise with up to two teaspoons of sugar and dyes and unhealthy chemicals or gummy additives that we don’t want our kids to have.
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This episode is brought to you by NativePath and in particular, something I have been experimenting with and really, really loving lately. And here’s what you need to understand. A lot of us think calcium is important for our health, especially for our bones. But is this actually true? Bad news. It turns out maybe not, or at least there’s more nuance here.
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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Fit Bottomed Zone Podcast. I’m Katie from fitbottomedzone.com, and I am back for round two with Dr. Carolyn Dean to talk about stabilized ions of minerals. What those are, how they trigger healing enzymes in the body that repair and protect the body in various ways.
The problems when we don’t get all of the minerals that we need, or only get certain ones out of balance, and how that can actually deplete others. How these ionic forms work differently within the body and so much more. And Dr. Carolyn Dean is absolutely incredible. She’s a wealth of knowledge with over 35 years of experience as an MD and a naturopath, and the author of literally dozens of books on all of these topics, including the book, the Magnesium Miracle, among others.
I will link to some of those in the show notes, but I always learn so much from her, even on her website. It was a true joy to learn from her in person today. I know that you will learn a lot too, so let’s jump in. Carolyn, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.
Carolyn: Thank you Katie. It’s a pleasure. It really is.
Katie: If you guys missed it, I will link to our first episode together all about magnesium, which as you know is one of my favorite topics for a very long time. Dr. Carolyn gave such practical and helpful advice and understanding around that topic. And in this episode I’m excited to delve even deeper into understanding what stabilized ions of minerals are and how they can be really uniquely supportive for so many aspects of our health.
And I feel like the perfect bridge between our last episode where we ended talking about the N of 1 study of self that we all get to undertake is to briefly touch on your stance when it comes to symptoms. Because I feel like we’re very aligned here. I’ve heard you say that symptoms are not your enemy.
They’re your body’s like communication and a way of asking for help. And that there are kind of some specific steps we can understand when we listen to our symptoms that can help us learn what to do. And I’ve said this as well, I think symptoms are messengers. They’re gifts, they’re tremendously valuable data and direct communication from our body.
So I would love to start with that as a bridge and maybe touch on some of the symptoms you most commonly see and what they might, what insight they might give us about what’s going on inside our bodies.
Carolyn: Mm. Well I think quote, patients go to doctors most often for fatigue. I’m run down. So then there’s reasons for the fatigue. I’m run down, I’m working too hard, I don’t sleep. I’m stressed from a divorce, or someone in the family just died. So there’s this fatigue that people have. But if then you say something like, and it’s making me anxious, or I’m not sleeping.
Then that gives the doctor their cue to give you a drug because that’s where the seven minute HMO doctor’s appointments have gotten to. The doctor’s waiting for some cue to give you a drug. And if you give too much information, they’ll say, well, let’s deal with this, this little constellation of two or three symptoms first, and then come back for the rest. So the doctors never put all your symptoms together in one bucket.
Because if I’m talking about magnesium deficiency, I’m talking about your scalp being sore because your muscles are tight, having eye twitching, choking on things, which can be just the esophageal muscles in spasm. You could have neck tension. And we’re all on our computers, so you know, we have to learn to drop the shoulders anyway. You have hiatal hernia symptoms or heartburn and reflux, which can be a spasming of your diaphragmatic muscles. IBS. You can have leg cramps, you can have charlie horses.
Any of your 640 muscles can be tense. Any of your 45 miles of nerves can be irritated. Because the way magnesium works with the nerves and muscles is it opens up the little gateway to allow a bit of calcium to get into your cell to create the action potential, the muscle movement or the nerve signaling. And then magnesium opens up the cell again and the calcium comes out. If you don’t have magnesium to do that function, apparently the cells kind of stay open or floppy. And calcium just rides in there and starts over exciting your nerves and your muscles. And we know that. I mean, how many times have we just felt sort of shaky and twitchy?
That’s magnesium deficiency. So we’ve got to look at, as you say, the symptom in the complete sense. We have to have someone who’s able to look at you head to toe instead of, oh, you’ve got migraines. Off you go to a neurologist. You’ve got a muscle problem, where do you go? I mean, sports medicine, who knows? But every part, you’ve got heart palpitations, cardiologist. You’ve got asthma where your bronchials lined by muscles are in spasm, you go to a respirologist. So they break your body up and you end up on 10 different drugs for symptoms that all could be magnesium deficiency.
So that’s the dilemma we’re at right now where modern medicine is run by corporations that are looking to make money off the maximum testing they can do and the maximum amount of drugs they can give you. Not giving you any advice about lifestyle or diet to keep you healthy. Because the unhealthier are, the more you come in for appointments where the corporation makes money. And that is a hundred percent true.
Back in 2005, Katie, I wrote the book, Death by Modern Medicine. And everything I said there, and I’ve updated it a couple of times, everything I said they’re talking about now in MAGA. The food dyes and the drugs and the adulterated food. Its been known for decades and some of us have been talking about it and nobody’s been listening. And we’ve been kind of brainwashed to think that, well, if my doctor thought this food or drug or experience was bad, they would tell me. No, they haven’t been trained to tell you and they don’t have time to tell you.
Katie: Yeah, that’s such a good point. I feel like even at a surface level, if we reframe the idea of symptoms and get curious about them, we can understand that, for instance, we don’t have a headache because we have a Motrin deficiency. There’s an underlying reason we have a headache, even if the Motrin temporarily takes away the headache, it’s still an opportunity to learn where did that come from in the first place?
And how can I best support my body in order to not have a headache in the future? And I say a lot on this podcast that at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And I think the best outcomes happen when we can walk alongside a really educated practitioner who can help with the nuance that we may not understand while remaining in the driver’s seat. Because we are the ones who make the daily decisions that cumulatively create our experience of health or not.
And I’d love to get a deeper understanding from you of the concept of what stabilized ions of minerals are. Because I feel like that might be a new concept for some people and how that relates to triggering healing enzymes in the body. You talked in the first episode about magnesium being related to so many enzymatic reactions and also talked about how there’s other synergistic minerals as well.
But can you walk us through the difference of the stabilized ions and that kind of cascade that’s happening in the body when we understand that and support the body?
Carolyn: Right, right. Thank you for that question because, stabilized ions of minerals is new. It’s new information, it’s new signs. It is something that no other company has. And I fortunately had enough of a problem that I had to research and find someone. I found a chemist who could stabilize ions to make them, the magnesium,especially non-laxative.
So this is, this is new information and it’s not getting out there. I’ve done some studies, but can I afford a million dollars to market the study information? It’s very difficult. But anyway, I’m not griping. I’m very grateful for the people that are working with these stabilized ions. What happens in the mineral world is, we all know minerals are important.
How many books have we seen that. I think even Linus Pauling with his focus on vitamin C, he said that mineral deficiencies are the basis of chronic disease. And on and on you go. There are so many researchers and practitioners that, yeah, minerals are very important. But what we used to get mineral wise with the high mineral waters. They talk about the long lived societies, the people who lived to be centenarians, is that how you?… over a hundred.
And they live in areas where they have a fresh water supply, usually coming from the mountains after the winter melt. You know, all this water comes tumbling down, scraping against the rocks, creating water that actually can look milky from all the minerals. So it was high minerals. There’s a lot of dynamics in that type of fluid. I could even say homeopathic, you know, it’s all shaken up. So there may be, and this is me just speculating. H2O has a 120 degree to I think a 122 degree bond. And in that little space of the angle change, it can create some sort of bonding, with either in a homopathic way or maybe minerals.
Maybe this type of water, they haven’t studied it enough. Maybe that’s the structured water they’re talking about making. So when we stopped getting our water from the mountains and the streams that would go to the oceans. When we blocked off those rivers and dammed them up so we could make farmland, we stopped getting minerals. And then we put so many toxins in in the water supply. You can test water from anywhere in the world and find toxins. You can find drugs, you can find heavy metals, you can find poisons. So we are filtering water. We’re filtering water at the municipal sites, and we’re filtering water at our own taps.
We are drinking bottled water. And if you look at the back of the label, it’s often distilled water. So that it’s just H2O and no minerals. And where are we getting our minerals? One of the first things that I say to customers and I used to say to patients, get some good sea salt. Some sea salt that has some color in it. It’s got 72 minerals. Your body needs those minerals. And you have to drink enough water as well to make your cells work. So I say, take your body weight in pounds, divide that in half, and then that half amount is the, there we are drinking. Is that water? We’re drinking half our body weight and no… yeah, half our body weight in water.
So if I’m 110 pounds, then I’m drinking 55 ounces of water a day with a quarter teaspoon of sea salt in every liter. I’m up to a little bit more than that. And that, I mean, that’s not even the RDA of the sodium that we require to support our adrenal glands even. We need sodium. People are having low blood pressure and fainting and whatnot.
They’re dehydrated and they don’t have enough salt. You put all these elderly people on diuretics that drain their blood so that they have less volume. So that there’s less blood pressure, they’re dehydrated and they’re falling over and breaking their hips. And then the side effects of all that. So with minerals we’re very deficient. And at this point, yes, we could take dirt minerals like the sea salt is a dirt mineral. Or we can take a calcium chloride. But a calcium, especially a calcium carbonate, may be only 4% absorbed. And where does the rest of that calcium go?
It deposits in soft tissues. Calcium is constipating. It doesn’t give you the laxative effect like magnesium if you take quote, too much. So calcium is the enemy these days. And if you don’t have enough magnesium to solubilize calcium in the bloodstream, then it will deposit in soft tissues. You’ve got heel spurs, kidney stones, gallstones, you’ve got the atherosclerosis. And the atherosclerosis or arteriosclerosis, the cholesterol, calcium plaques, that it’s a huge myth that calcium is the problem here.
Well, sidebar here. What happens with arteries is when they make a bifurcation and go smaller. Here’s your big artery, and then it goes smaller in this little V, it can tear a little bit if you don’t have enough vitamin C to make collagen. And if you don’t have enough magnesium to make elastin. So you get this little tear and the body says, oh, oh, oh, let’s put some cholesterol over that tear as a bandaid until we get some more vitamin C to heal up that tear.
But if you’ve got a lot of calcium in the bloodstream, which we will have because of our diet, because of fortified calcium foods, because women are being forced to take calcium. If they’re over 40, they’re taking twice and three times as much as the number they require. But in a compound form that deposits on this bit of cholesterol bandaid to eventually make a big plaque and cause all the atherosclerotic problems.
So back to minerals. Minerals don’t just work on their own either. They’re all, there’s what’s called a mineral wheel. You can look that up and you’ll see little arrows between this mineral and that mineral. If you have too much calcium, you push back your magnesium, for example. And then the vitamins come into play. You, we talked about vitamin D a little bit in our first episode. Vitamin D needs magnesium in order to become activated. Now, how crazy is that? So we’ve got vitamin D and everybody’s went, oh yeah, we need vitamin D. It’s a vitamin and it acts like a hormone, pro hormone. And it’s so important. And the covid years taught us that people with low vitamin D were more susceptible to getting infection.
We know, we know, we know. But then the studies are so equivocal because they never look at the magnesium levels in the people they’re testing. So they will never get the proper conclusion because they don’t know the interactivity. And that is, it’s rampant throughout, nutritional medicine. I was on the board of the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine back in the whatever nineties, I guess when I, when I was in New York doing AIDS research. And they were going more and more medical. They were taking funds from, or the naturopathic college was taking funds from drug companies to study one aspect of a certain herb to see if it was like a drug.
They are looking for drug-like solutions in naturopathic medicine. So with minerals, they will never really test a mineral in its family of minerals. In the first episode, I talked about the nine minerals that are necessary to make thyroid hormones. And all of them, if they are in their picometer size, and I say picometer because that expresses how tiny these are. One of our studies out of Purdue University we ran our, or they, the researchers scientists, ran our liquid magnesium, ran a laser through it. It’s called an a nano sizer.
They wanted to find the size of any particulate matter in our liquid magnesium. There were no particles. Because the ions are below the particle size, they’re below that range. So that meant… that was a bottle of our liquid magnesium that had been sitting for months that was still in a stable state, that it had no particulate matter. You take that in your body and those ions of magnesium go straight into the cells. So we’re dealing with a problem where we don’t have minerals in our water anymore, which is where we used to get them. And then that water, that water irrigated the fields and put the minerals into our food.
So since the water doesn’t have minerals, the food doesn’t have the minerals that we require, then we have to give back the minerals.
So the other, the aspect of food, I, again in the first episode I talked about all my resources go toward an organic farm here in Maui because I wanted to see, can I eat off the farm? Can we make it so that people get their nutrition and is food the best medicine? And I’m not able to eat entirely off the farm. I get my heart palpitations back because there’s not enough magnesium in the soil. We could dump Epsom salt and tons of minerals on the soil, but we really can’t afford it. And at this point, with the many stresses that burn off magnesium and other minerals, then we have to take dietary supplement. And my conclusion from being at this for 50 years is that we have to supplement with the best absorbed nutrients. Picometer size minerals, food-based vitamins, non-fish algae, omega 3s. Instead of using toxic fish liver that has to be refined with all kinds of solvents and processes that we don’t even know what we’re getting when we’re taking fish oil, omega 3s. So all these, all these things I’ve kind of put together in what I think is the best way for people to build their organic bodies.
Katie: And I’ll link to a lot of the things we’re talking about as well as so many educational resources you have around all of this in the show notes. For anybody listening on the go, Dr. Carolyn has so much information available and it seems to me such a shame that, like you talked about, if anything women are just told, take calcium. Which you made a very strong case, might be the least productive one to take.
And if it doesn’t work, they’re told to just take more calcium without understanding the interplay and the synergy amongst all of these minerals and how important they are. And I think especially when we consider the body as an electric organism. Like the ions and the electrical communication within our cells is such a beautiful harmony and a delicate balance.
And that explains also why water alone might not be the most optimally hydrating. Why we actually need this full range of minerals so the body can both biochemically and electrically and in all the ways communicate most effectively. And like I said, I know you have so many more resources available on this and books on all these topics I will link to.
But any last thoughts you wanna make sure people really understand when it comes to this mineral balance and ionic minerals and how we can best support our body?
Carolyn: Maybe I’ll go to the calcium issue, Katie, because in my age group all the women are being told to get DEXA scans, the X-ray tests to see how dense your bones are. And actually I’m doing a lecture on that here in Maui. And when I talk about my lecture all the women say, oh yeah, I just had my bone density test and it’s low, and oh my gosh, and this and that, and they want me to take this drug. It’s a serious problem because these DEXA scans… and I’m not gonna have one. I just do all the things I know to strengthen my bones and my muscles.
Because it’s the muscles that hold you together and keep your balance and all the rest of it. With the DEXA scans, you know what they’re comparing you to? A 30-year-old female bone structure. So they’re imagining that in your sixties and seventies where you have some wear and tear, where things are gonna be different, they are saying to these women that, oh, your bones aren’t strong. You are at risk. You are at risk for falling and breaking something. And what does that do? It scares people.
It makes them, you know, trepidation for even walking. Oh, what if I trip? And so I’m very concerned about that because they’re pushing testing as a way of making money. And they’re pushing a test that will allow them to, to force you to take a drug. And the drugs for keeping your bones dense, Fosamax, for example. You take that and it kills your osteoclasts. Your osteoblasts make bone, that’s great.
Osteoclasts model the bone into the right lattice work that is dense and strong. When you kill your osteoclasts and stop the remodeling of your bone, you make willy-nilly slap dap calcium on your bones that is brittle. It is so bad with these drugs that dentists will not do implants or much of any dental surgery on women who are taking Fosamax. Because their jaw bones are deteriorating and the thigh bone gets the worst of it. So when you fall, you’re breaking your thigh bone at the top.
It’s just horrendous what’s going on in the, in bone commercial, bone deterioration commercialization. It’s like a new industry. So I’m really concerned about that. Calcium itself, if women take calcium supplements at the 1200, 1500 milligrams that are being recommended, instead of getting 600 milligrams from the diet, which you can do with dairy, green leafies, nuts and seeds. Or take a picometer stabilized ion of calcium. I finally made one.
I was so avoiding calcium because I try not to take calcium, but when I got off dairy, I said, okay, then I have to, I have to have something available for myself. So with calcium, Dr. Boland in New Zealand, he did over a half a dozen studies and found that women just simply taking calcium supplements are at a higher risk for heart disease because of the calcium that they’re depositing in their arteries, like I talked about before.
Now that’s scary. That is really scary. The World Health Organization and in the UK their RDA for calcium is 500 to 700 milligrams. So that’s where I came at, like, just go for 600 milligrams. So the calcium story is very important and as our population of mothers here, as you get older, you are gonna be told, oh, take more calcium. But the balance is to take magnesium that helps keeps your bones kind of elastic and whatever. And I shouldn’t say whatever, it does so much for your bone soft tissue structure.
When they burn bone to say, well, let’s find out what the minerals are in bones so we can give them back. When they burn bone, they just see mostly calcium because magnesium burns off. So they never thought that magnesium was important, but it’s vital for the soft tissue. I had a horrendous fall, it’s a year ago now, and I didn’t break this elbow. I kind of restructured it and my arm was, well when I had the fall, my arm blew up to the size of one of my legs. And I didn’t, I couldn’t really work it for about three weeks and it went to a noodle. And when I got back to my normal exercise, I walk two hours a day and I carry a three pound weight and just one of them. And I built up this muscle from a noodle. You can build your muscles if you work them. And it’s your muscles that keep your bones in place. I wish I could find a better way of saying that, but the bones and muscles work together. You can take…and this was done…I haven’t been able to find the study since I read it decades ago.
A photographer went down to South America, took pictures of all these young women with the jars on their heads, walking up and down the hills in the Andes. And she went back 30 years later and was able to find some of these women. And took, I said pictures, but she took, scans, bone density scans. And she scanned them later. They were still carrying their loads and they were still healthy and strong, but their bones were less dense. But their muscles stayed strong. So she said this, we all agree. Common sense is that if you keep your muscles strong and you keep your body balanced, even to the point. And I’m talking to an older audience here just to finish up. When you’re putting on your socks and shoes and underwear and pants, stand in the middle of the room on one foot and put them on.
Do not be leaning up against things. You have to keep your balance because when you’re walking along and you trip, you want your other leg to keep you on stable. You don’t wanna trip and fall right over because you have no balance. So that’s my final thought there, Katie.
Katie: I love that.
Carolyn: What I’m doing is I’m giving you my talk for that I’m going to do later tonight. So I just did it.
Katie: Oh, amazing. We got a preview. Well, and it makes sense to me because if you think about like a piece of chalk that is entirely calcium and it breaks very easily. And I can understand your concerns with Dexa. I will gladly be the Guinea pig for the data perspective of this. So I have access to a Dexa, so I do it occasionally just for like to see what I’m doing and if it’s changing, especially muscle mass, because I’m trying to increase muscle.
And what I’ve noticed is my bone density is actually multiple standard deviations above what their reference point, which is the average 30-year-old. I take zero calcium, I get lots of sunshine. I take lots of magnesium and minerals. I eat a lot of protein, I lift weights and I sprint.
And I’ve seen my bone density go up in my thirties, which they tell you it will go down in your thirties. So I love all this information you have because I feel like it puts us in the driver’s seat of being able to create change and not accept these things that we’re told as statistics, as we get older. And I know you have literally volumes of work, like dozens of books that you have written, I’ll link to all of those ’cause I know you are an absolute wealth of knowledge. And hopefully we get to do more episodes in the future ’cause I could learn endlessly from you.
But for today’s episode, thank you so much for all that you’ve shared. This has been incredible.
Carolyn: Oh, thank you Katie. I appreciate it. Namaste. And what else? Mahalo.
Katie: Oh, I love it. And thank you as always for listening and for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope you’ll join me again on the next episode of The Fit Bottomed Zone Podcast.
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