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Kristen:
Welcome to episode 337. Today we are talking the basics of magnesium and to do that I brought my husband in. Who knew that we would need to have an understanding of the soils to understand why our body needs magnesium. Because think of it, our grandparents did not have to soak in magnesium to be healthy. It’s crucial to say current on what we need. We need to hold onto the grandma wisdom and stay current with what our bodies currently need. We need magnesium. Let me introduce you to one of my favorite people, not one of my, the actually favorite person ever of mine, my husband, Morgan.

So Morgan, welcome to Living the Good Life Naturally, so glad that you’re here.

Morgan:
I’m glad to be here.

Kristen:
Talk to me and explain, it used to be we could go to a grocery store and buy a red bell pepper and that red bell pepper had our entire day’s worth of magnesium in it and now that red bell pepper, even if we buy it organically, it doesn’t have magnesium in it, not even trace amounts. What is happening to our food supply?

Morgan:
Well it depends on where you’re getting your organic from too. There’s a problem and we’ve got to do a little brief history of agriculture in the last hundred years or so and during World War II there was a big, big, big buildup of bomb making. It was factories all over America make bombs and one thing they used to make these bombs were nitrogen. Now nitrogen we know is a key element in producing great, green plant growth. It’s, all plants need nitrogen. Most nitrogen prior to that came from natural sources. They would use manures and composts and things like that.

But after World War II they had all this synthetic nitrogen and no place to use it because they weren’t bombing like they were so they decided to put it onto the fields. Well the problem with synthetic nitrogen was, was that not only was it good for bombing, people and buildings during War II, but also bombed biology and the life in the soil. It started killing off the life in the soil. What we really came to find out was is you got to have a good biologically active soil to pick up the magnesium in the plant. The plant can’t uptake the magnesium without good biology.

Kristen:
Okay, wait, wait, wait. I’ve got to stop you. I’ve got to make sure I understand that. Nitrogen is going on the soil, makes a massive plant. But it’s messing up the soil biology?

Morgan:
Yes, the synthetic nitrogen’s killing off the soil biology.

Kristen:
And that’s making it where it locks the magnesium and the plant can’t uptake it.

Morgan:
That’s right.

Kristen:
Is that what’s happening?

Morgan:
Well yeah. What happens is with good soil biology, the soil biology’s allowing the microrhizae on plant root system to pick up and absorb up the magnesium. It can’t do it …

Kristen:
The villi, that’s the same thing like the villi in our intestines. That’s what picks up the nutrients.

Morgan:
Absolutely.

Kristen:
And so the nitrogen is messing up that process.

Morgan:
Yes. The synthetic nitrogen.

Kristen:
Those massive apples and those massive red bell peppers actually have less nutrition.

Morgan:
Yes.

Kristen:
Right?

Morgan:
Yes. Especially if they’re grown in a conventional way. We call conventional, which is actually unconventional, but it’s conventional for the last 100 years was pouring on mass inputs of synthetic nitrogen for green growth response of the plant.

Kristen:
So a short term benefit is you get this massive plant.

Morgan:
Yes.

Kristen:
Huge red bell pepper.

Morgan:
Yes. We get cosmetics. Great cosmetics with modern agriculture.

Kristen:
Plants and food that looks really nice.

Morgan:
Looks beautiful but nutrient, it’s not nutrient dense.

Kristen:
Okay.

Morgan:
So you’re basically pushing it to look really good but, and your great cosmetics when you’re on the store shelves but your not getting the nutrition in the plant because of the way the modern practices are.

Kristen:
It’s interesting, you just can’t, I want to be efficient and I like it when I can cut corners but there are some things we just shouldn’t be cutting corners on. That’s the nutritional quality of our foods. So is what started happening is as that happened and our food got less and less magnesium in it, people turned, and so our health started to go down because magnesium is crucial. It’s the mineral of movement. It cleans up the cells, it moves things through your body. It starts thousands of processes in your body. If you don’t have enough magnesium those processes aren’t going to happen.

Then fast forward to our current day lifestyle because magnesium is, it’s this mineral that’s delicate in a way because if you eat tons of sugar, if you eat, drink lots of sodas, if you have white flour, processed flours, you’re stripping the magnesium from your body because it takes so much magnesium to move that nutrition through your body. You take a plant and foods that don’t have enough magnesium and then you take a person who’s drinking soda, eating more sugar, eating processed foods, that’s depleting their magnesium and then you take that same person and you add stress on top of it. Because when people’s stress level goes up, the cortisol level spikes and it pushes the magnesium out through their urine.

We’ve got this triple whammy trifecta of issues happening that’s walking us away from being healthy and one of my pet peeves is people come in the shop every single day and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, I’m doing this for my hormones,” or, “I’m doing bioidentical hormones and it’s not working.” Or, “I’m doing this for my thyroid and it’s not working.” We have to start at the beginning and build a strong foundation and then add those other things on top. Magnesium is where you start. You start with magnesium.

Morgan:
I think there’s a double whammy if you’re looking at this modern history of ours since World War II. You got this high input agriculture, high output cosmetic, very efficient, you can get all kinds of things now in grocery stores. You can get any kind of fruit any time of the year which wasn’t the case 75 years ago. It was fruit within season, it was produce within season. The other thing is with the modern society which we have is we are stressed out. We’re working longer hours.

Kristen:
Sitting in front of computers.

Morgan:
We’re stressed out because …

Kristen:
Which we’re doing right now.

Morgan:
But we are stressed out too I think just in general lifestyles. You’re running around with kids, you’re trying to take care of kids or take in this event or that event or this thing or that thing.

Kristen:
I didn’t grow up going to all the different activities.

Morgan:
I walked to my baseball games and practices. My parents didn’t take me. When they came to games sometimes. That’s something I went and did whereas now the parent is like this little shuttle for the kids all the time.

Kristen:
Here’s the thing, I like some of the benefits of our modern lifestyle.

Morgan:
I do too.

Kristen:
I like flushing the toilet, I like running water, I love my iPhone, I love those things.

Morgan:
If we took away your hot water for your shower, oh boy, wow. It would be bad. You would hear your scream throughout the mountain west. It would be horrible.

Kristen:
It’s a balance. I guess it comes down to finding that balance and recognizing that everyone has their own individual magnesium burn rate. For example, what I’d like to do if you’re okay, is talk about you and I.

Morgan:
Okay.

Kristen:
I tend to stress out about our kids and the decisions they’re making, all of our children are launched and they’re raising their own families now and living on their own and I worry about them. Oh what about this and what about that? I tend to stress. With that stress I burn through my magnesium faster than you do. What’s your philosophy basically on life?

Morgan:
Things work out.

Kristen:
Do you hear that? This voice, it’s gonna work out.

Morgan:
Eventually. If it’s going bad, I’ll turn around, if they’re going good, it could get better, it might get worse and that’s okay.

Kristen:
And that right there helps you hold onto your magnesium better than I do. I have to say, would you agree I’ve gotten better at managing my stress and not worrying as much? Have I gotten a little bit better?

Morgan:
Yes you’ve gotten better. You’ve gotten much better.

Kristen:
Good. So constant gradual improvement. Now let’s talks about autoimmune because people who have autoimmune disease burn through their magnesium faster. I was diagnosed at a young age with several autoimmune diseases and then more autoimmune diagnosises just kept happening the older I got. That makes it that I burn through my magnesium faster, you don’t have any autoimmune disease.

Morgan:
But I’ve got other things I deal with too.

Kristen:
People who are on medications. Specific medications will, if you’re on that medication that medication will eat up the magnesium in your body. I’m not on any medications so I don’t have that as a factor. Do you see how different lifestyles can be and how that will affect your magnesium burn rate because people will say, “Kristen, how often do I soak?” I don’t know, I can’t tell you that. But understanding your magnesium burn rate is crucial in creating that strong foundation. And here’s the beautiful thing though, that’s how I went from sick and tired in a wheelchair having seizures to the life that I experience now, waking up in the morning with energy because I built that strong foundation.

Let’s talk about what you need to do to have a deeper understanding of your magnesium burn rate. You start very simply with the 30 day magnesium challenge. That’s where you get a jug of magnesium and you put a quarter cup in a bowl or in the tub. A bowl of water that you soak in, no plastic, no aluminum, we want it to be glass of stainless steel and you soak. 20 minutes minimum, 45 minutes ideal. During the 30 day challenge your goal is to soak every single day, realizing you’re gonna miss a couple days. No problem. But we want 70% of that hit.

At the end of the 30 days, go online to walkinlabs.com. Pull that up on your computer and then on walkinlabs.com, search for magnesium RBC. Which stands for red blood cell because there are other magnesium tests that they tell you your blood serum levels and magnesium is so crucial for your body to function that if you don’t have enough magnesium, your body will pull it from your heart, will pull it from your pancreas, will pull it from your bones, will pull it from your digestion. Will tank your peristaltic action, will tank the blood sugar, will have heart palpitations and all of those things will happen but your body will hold that magnesium constant at 1%.

The blood serum, I don’t think is a valuable test because we want to know what’s happening around every cell. I don’t want to know survival, I want to thrive. So that magnesium RBC will give you a number and that will tell you what’s happening around every cell. We want that to be between 6.3 and 7. That’s optimal. Now, most people come in between 2 and 4-1/2. Now sometimes over that sometimes a little bit lower. So then is what we do is we continue soaking, maybe two or three times a week. Track, determine. Okay, in this 30 days I’m soaking twice a week. Then retest your number. Then you will able to evaluate and you’ll have concrete evidence if your magnesium stayed the same, if it dropped or if it got higher.

Now if it dropped, soaking two times a week is not keeping your individual magnesium strong enough. If it stayed the same, hooray, if your number was strong to begin with. If you we’re between that 6.3 and 7. Now if it moved awesome, but do you need to move? If you’re at 6.5 we don’t need your numbers moving, you’re in that range where you’ll feel amazing. So you really have to evaluate, do I want my numbers moving, do I need to increase my numbers? Are my numbers dropping? Then you’ll have an understanding on that second 30 days of what your specific magnesium burn rate is.

Morgan:
Let me get this straight. To get the test, you don’t go to your regular doctor, to get the test. How do you get a test?

Kristen:
Because he’ll do a blood serum. And it’s very expensive for the blood serum and most insurances don’t pay for it. It’s just, it’s not the filter we need to be looking through. We don’t want to know if your body’s, because it won’t tell us, like for example, you’ve had heart issues, that was a heart that didn’t have enough magnesium. I don’t want to know what your blood serum’s doing I want to know what your red blood cell count is doing. You go just go to walkinlabs.com, you order the test, you pay for it, it’s $49, then you put in your zip code and it will tell you the closest lab around you.

Morgan:
They’re like an affiliated lab that you can just go to and they’ll draw the blood.

Kristen:
Yeah. Right.

Morgan:
Okay, gotcha.

Kristen:
Then you go to that lab. For example here in Cache Valley, we don’t have a lab for walkinlabs so we have to drive to Ogden. You drive to Ogden, they draw your blood and then they upload it to your online profile and you can see where your specific magnesium RBC is.

Morgan:
Take the 30 day soak challenge, soak for 30 days, you don’t do oral magnesium you do soaking magnesium.

Kristen:
Can we talk about oral magnesium?

Morgan:
Yeah, let’s talk about the difference between the two because some of you might not know the difference.

Kristen:
Oral magnesium is not my favorite.

Morgan:
No.

Kristen:
In fact I call it poison.

Morgan:
Yeah, and if you take a lot of it, it can give you some serious digestive problems too.

Kristen:
Here’s the thing. Let’s go back to a little bit of grandma wisdom in the fact that magnesium should be utilized through our food. That’s where we should be getting our magnesium from is through our food. Plan A fell apart. Plan A doesn’t work. You cannot get enough magnesium through your food. A lot of people turned to oral magnesium. Super inexpensive, super inexpensive to ship, you can buy it pretty much anywhere. Here’s the problem though, and understand the filter that I’m coming from in that when my health crashed and I had to rebuild my health I realized I was doing short term bandaid fixes and it wasn’t getting me where I wanted to be. One of my short term bandaid fixes was slugging down mass amounts of Diet Coke. It was a payoff for me because I drank the Diet Coke and get a little bit of energy. But the long term consequences, it was crashing my health. It was depleting the magnesium from my bones. It was making everything worse but I was only looking at the short term benefits.

That filter, once I learned that and recognized that concept of how I wasn’t making long term decisions, I was doing short term bandaids and I was just getting sicker and sicker. I made the decision, everything I do is looked at through the long term consequences for my health. So oral magnesium, yes, especially those of you who take it in powder form, with loads of citric acid we’ll talk about the citric acid later and the black mold and the issues in your gut that it causes. You will get short term benefit, you’ll feel your shoulders relax, you might even sleep better that night but please I beg of you, look at the long term consequences. The long term consequences are oral powdered magnesium in a pill form and in a powder form is decreasing your body’s ability to uptake nutrients from your food.

If you’re okay with that, run with it. I’m not. Food is our medicine. I’ve seen food change my husband’s life. I’ve seen food heal my body. I do not want to be taking a cheap synthetic supplement and be uptaking that and decreasing my body’s ability to uptake all the nutrients from the good food that I put in my body. For me oral magnesium is just not acceptable. Especially when it comes in powdered drink like form that you mix in a drink, because they’ve loaded that with citric acid. Citric acid is made from a black mold that pokes holes in your gut. We need a strong gut lining to have strong health. So for me it’s just, I just won’t use it. I look at it as the rat poison that it really is.

Morgan:
Let’s talk a little bit about the way to prime the pump a little bit with the magnesium. You put your feet in a foot soak.

Kristen:
Yeah, I’m a bath girl.

Morgan:
I like a bath too.

Kristen:
I do mine in a bath and I just put a quarter cup. You do not need to put more in the bath than you do a foot soak. A lot of people think they need to put more and we just don’t have to. A quarter cup. When I’m taking a bath, and I put my quarter cup of magnesium in, I make sure I have 20 minutes to soak because it takes 20 minutes for your body to uptake about 80% of the magnesium that’s in the magnesium chloride. You can soak up to 45 minutes and get even more. After 45 minutes it’s just teeny, teeny amounts of magnesium that you’re uptaking. I always tell people between 20 to 45 minutes.

Some of our adult kids would not take a bath, especially the guys in our family. So if you’re not a bath taker, you don’t have to soak in a bathtub. You can get a pot of water and use glass or stainless steel, so I’ve seen you use a lasagna, casserole dish.

Morgan:
If you’ve got long feet.

Kristen:
You’ve got a size 13 triple wide so you use that casserole dish.

Morgan:
It’s glass.

Kristen:
I can use a Pyrex mixing bowl, a crock pot insert, I’ve seen some people go to PetSmart and get the Great Dane stainless steel watering bowls that are great big. You only need enough water to soak the bottom of your feet. Sometimes I’ll see people just struggling to carry this great big heavy bowl of water and they’re getting it clear past their ankles. It’s the bottom of your feet that act like a pump and they start pumping that magnesium.

Now go back to our grandparents’ day. They had to prime the pump. And when they primed the pump, the water would come faster. There’s a way we can prime the pump in your body and we found through thermal imaging that when you take your finger and you dip it in the magnesium chloride and then you rub it right underneath your armpit, there’s a lymph node right there. It’s like priming the pump. Then when you put your feet in the water and the magnesium to soak, your body will pump it up faster to get up to that magnesium that you’ve rubbed underneath your armpit.

Morgan:
And just for the listening audience I want you to know that she’s actually putting her finger in water that’s not really there and then priming the pump underneath her armpit. Just to get a visual.

Kristen:
Just in case.

Morgan:
Just to get a visual.

Kristen:
Create a visual.

Morgan:
Create a visual, it’s very good.

Kristen:
I want to create a visual for you. But you do have to be careful because magnesium is a salt. And so ladies if you’ve recently shaved you can burn and tingle. We always want to do a little test patch.

Morgan:
Any open cuts.

Kristen:
And make sure.

Morgan:
It will burn.

Kristen:
It will burn.

Morgan:
An open cut, it will heal it really fast. But it will burn really fast.

Kristen:
Remember that time that you …

Morgan:
I lacerated the front of my hand really, really bad.

Kristen:
What kind of tool was that.

Morgan:
It was a metal cutter and I cut a very thin strip of metal off and it acted like a little whip and it whipped my hand right open.

Kristen:
It was so like …

Morgan:
Right down to the bone actually.

Kristen:
Right down to the bone.

Morgan:
Actually I was rubbing some magnesium on my arm and I spilled it down on the wound. The wound clinic guys was so impressed because he thought, I never thought that was going to come back together so well. But the magnesium actually acted as a …

Kristen:
It did burn though.

Morgan:
Oh yeah.

Kristen:
But it also facilitated healing.

Morgan:
Healing, yeah.

Kristen:
Would you do it again? Knowing that that helped?

Morgan:
On a little wound or something I would be okay with it. Does sting so just be careful.

Kristen:
You have to be careful.

Morgan:
Some people are very sensitive to that until they get their magnesium levels up.

Kristen:
Let’s talk about sensitivity to magnesium. I’ve been talking about magnesium for years. I’m seeing something currently happening that used to not happen very often and now it happens more and more often. Morgan you hit on the subject that we’re living a world that we just expect more and more and more of ourselves, we’re working longer hours, we’re under artificial light, we’re not sleeping as well, we’re eating more fast food, we’re eating more sugar, we’re drinking soda, we’re not exercising. Because of that we have adrenal stress. In fact you can look down at your stomach and if you’re putting weight on, like a spare tire around your stomach, that’s adrenal weight. And so a lot of times is what can happen is when someone goes to soak in magnesium they want to build their foundation strong, they soak in the magnesium and they become exhausted. So incredibly tired.

What’s happening is, those adrenals are so over the moon, this is very simplified way of explaining it, but it’ll make sense to you. Those adrenals are so over the moon that they got magnesium to utilize and to work that they will actually drop the potassium that you have and if you’re stressing out, your adrenals, the potassium gets low and our bodies need about 4,700 milligrams of potassium every single day to function and heal. If you’ve got adrenal stress and your adrenals are already having a hard time holding onto the potassium and then you’re not getting enough potassium in your diet, and you soak in magnesium and it tanks you, it’s because you’re adrenals dropped their potassium in their excitement to pick up the magnesium.

There’s a couple things that you can do. You can take some coconut water because that’s a great source of potassium, very easily absorbed, you can even bump that up, add a little bit of cream of tartar because cream of tartar is a good source of potassium. You can eat a banana, you can also change the alkalinity of your body by taking a teaspoon of baking soda, mixing that in a glass of water and drinking it. There’s a couple things that we can do to help people prep their adrenals if you’ve already got adrenal fatigue, magnesium it looks like it makes it worse, it’s not though. It’s just shining the light on what’s happening in your body and we just need to course correct.

I’m seeing that happen more and more. Do you think your stress levels are more from 10 years ago?

Morgan:
It just depends on some levels yes, on some levels no.

Kristen:
I do see that happening more and more where before, three years ago that was rare. I never even had to talk about it. Now I really have to help people understand it’s not that you had a reaction to the magnesium it’s that your body needed it so desperately it dropped the little potassium that it had and your body needs potassium to function, it’s crucial.

Morgan:
The one thing that I was thinking too is just what are some things that people started on magnesium soaking regimen, what are some things they’ll expect as far as just how they’re gonna feel and maybe …

Kristen:
It’s different for every person and I’ll share a couple of those reactions of what I hear people say. “Kristen I soaked and it did nothing. Just nothing, I didn’t feel anything and I soaked.” To those people I say, “Hang on, keep soaking because the level of inflammation in your body also determines how fast you can uptake the magnesium.” Typically I see the people who don’t feel anything when they’re soaking in magnesium it’s because they’re pushers. They push and push and they do a lot and so they can push through pain, they can push through that inflammation in their body and so I tell them, “Hang on and keep soaking, I promise you it’s getting to your telomeres.” Which is our goal with magnesium because we want beautiful long telomeres so that we age with grace and our minds intact and our bodies healthier.

In some people feel that immediate, like I did, I just felt that immediate, it’s like an internal pulse. This little internal massage in a way. I felt that immediately, I feel that pretty much every time I soak. Some people have a huge increase of energy in the fact that if they soak at night, they can’t go to sleep. Some people get super relaxed.

Morgan:
We’re doing an info video once and the girl that was our model, she was like, bonk!

Kristen:
She had never soaked before and we hired her to be our model and she need the magnesium and it was just relaxing her.

Morgan:
She just about conked out when we were filming.

Kristen:
She was having a hard time sitting up. It was like, note to self we have to make sure anyone we hire to help us with videos has already soaked in magnesium and gotten …

Morgan:
You’ve done live demos with vic crowds, you’ll get a couple people sitting up there soaking and they’ll, some will be feeling good, some will be …

Kristen:
I always wonder if it’s my class is boring. But I get more of it on magnesium classes because it can be very relaxing.

Morgan:
Especially if you’re on stress mode all the time.

Kristen:
Usually in the beginning it will be very relaxing and then as your adrenals start to heal it starts to become a source of energy. You have to change when you’re soaking. You can’t soak at night anymore because all of sudden it’s waking you up and so then you have to change in the morning.

Morgan:
Yeah.

Kristen:
You have to really, magnesium shines the light on your body into what’s happening and what needs to happen and where it needs to go. It’s just understanding that communication.

Morgan:
Yeah.

Kristen:
So I hope you’ve learned some things about magnesium. Remember, listening to a podcast does not create health. You going out creating action, that’s what will create your best day ever. Thanks for joining us.

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