Magnesium: What is it?
Magnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral in your body and is essential to your good health.
Approximately 50% of your total body magnesium is found in your bones. The other half is found predominantly inside the cells of your body tissues and organs. Only 1% of magnesium is found in your blood, but your body works very hard to keep your magnesium blood levels constant.
Magnesium is needed for more than 300 biochemical reactions in your body!
It helps your body to maintain normal muscle and nerve function, keeps your heart rhythm steady, supports a healthy immune system, and keeps your bones strong.
Magnesium also helps regulate your blood sugar levels, promotes normal blood pressure, and is involved in your energy metabolism and protein synthesis. Ever feel like you’re just plain lacking energy? If your body isn’t metabolizing properly or using the protein, you can feel pretty low in energy.
Magnesium’s role in preventing and managing disorders such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes is vital for your good health.
Magnesium is absorbed in your small intestines and excreted through your kidneys.
Healthy kidneys are able to limit urinary excretion of magnesium to compensate for low dietary intake. However, excessive loss of magnesium in urine can be a side effect of some medications and can also occur in cases of poorly-controlled diabetes and alcohol abuse.
Deficiencies
Early signs of magnesium deficiency include loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and weakness.
As magnesium deficiency worsens, numbness, tingling, muscle contractions and cramps, seizures, personality changes, abnormal heart rhythms, and coronary spasms can occur.
Severe magnesium deficiency can result in low levels of calcium in your blood (hypocalcemia). Magnesium deficiency is also associated with low levels of potassium in the blood (hypokalemia). (With courtesy of https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/magnesium.asp)
It is absolutely safe to take a good quality magnesium product and everyone should be using it on a daily basis – or more than once a day.