Doctor Links Diseases to Magnesium Deficiency

Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, and author of "The Miracle of Magnesium" states, “When I was doing research for The Miracle of Magnesium, I found that most if not all of the body's metabolic processes -- those chemical processes which turn food into energy -- require the interaction of various vitamins and minerals in order for them to even work. Many symptoms which trace back to lack of metabolism are caused by either vitamin and mineral deficiency or imbalance. So if medicine continues to focus on drugs to treat symptoms, rather than on possible causes based on deficiencies, they’ll continue to miss the boat on treating a lot of what I think are the 'chronic lifestyle diseases'.



"And beyond that, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has an office called the Office of Dietary Supplements, and at a recent conference I had an opportunity to ask someone in this office about their basic purpose. Their basic goal is to study nutrients for the prevention of disease, not for the treatment of disease. So as long as the government’s focus is just to prevent deficiency diseases by simply providing the required daily allowance (RDA) of nutrients, we’ll never get to the point where we focus on the use of dietary supplements, such as magnesium, for the treatment of today’s common diseases. There are at least twenty-two different diseases and symptoms that I outline in The Miracle of Magnesium for which scientific proof exists of being caused by magnesium deficiency. “The recommended daily allowance (RDA), is about 350 mg per day, but most researchers say you need two and three times that amount, partly because it’s not in foods. If it is in foods, if you cook and process the foods in any way, you lose magnesium.”

Carolyn Dean MD, ND