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Magnesium, Key to Health
The Importance of This Mineral and the Problems Caused by Its Deficiency
Ana Maria Lajusticia Bergasa
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eBook - ePub
Magnesium, Key to Health
The Importance of This Mineral and the Problems Caused by Its Deficiency
Ana Maria Lajusticia Bergasa
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About This Book
Our modern diet is deficient in magnesium, an element that is crucial for health. This deficiency causes problems related to the nervous system, such as anxiety and restlessness. As magnesium is involved in muscle relaxation, this deficiency is also manifested as muscle spasms, arrhythmias, tachycardia, breathing difficulties and sometimes hypertension.Magnesium is essential in the synthesis of our body's proteins, and is therefore a key factor in the manufacture and repair of wear in our cartilages, bones, tendons, stomach walls and blood vessels. Furthermore, when there are lower levels of it in the blood, less of it is eliminated by the urine, which leads to the formation of kidney stones.This book, which was published by Ana Maria Lajusticia Bergasa to great acclaim, includes the latest studies carried out which confirm the enormous importance of magnesium for our health.
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Introduction
Some of the passages in this book are repetitive; it is not a question of it âturning outâ like this, but instead, I have taken a conscious decision to stress the areas that I have seen as unclear or giving rise to more doubt during my work. I apologise to those people who only need to read a piece of writing once to obtain a clear idea of it, as I have made these repetitions for the benefit of people like me, who need emphasis and for what we are trying to learn to be hammered home to us. The literary style â which is not my strongest suit â undoubtedly suffers from the repetition of some concepts, but given how new the subject matter is to many people, I present it as if I were a teacher, attempting to clear up doubts instead of dealing with the issue as a writer.
Consequently, I apologise to anyone who, because of their knowledge or ease of understanding, finds that I have repeated myself in some places.
Thank you.
Magnesium in the Human Body
As our understanding of biochemistry and molecular biology improves, we have discovered the role that this element plays in our body, which I am going to explain below.
Magnesium is involved in the functioning of the nervous system
- In the formation of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators.
- In the restoration of membrane potential when it has been electrically depolarised after synapses or connections between the neurons.
- In maintaining the action potential.
Since our mental balance depends on the right brain chemistry, and we cannot manufacture the neurotransmitters we need for it to work properly without the right amount of magnesium, a deficiency is one of the causes of a great deal of uncompensated stress, which leads to restlessness, discomfort, poorly controlled nerves, and even almost constant anxiety; as well as irritability, unfounded fears, phobias, such as the fear of being in confined spaces, or the opposite, agoraphobia, which is anxiety caused by meeting people or being in open spaces.
A shortage of magnesium can cause tremors around the eyes, giving the sensation of a twitching eyelid, or tingling around the mouth. Nervous tics become aggravated, or new ones appear. Sufferers sleep badly, waking up in the early hours of the morning almost every day. They dream a great deal, and the person sometimes wakes up with the feeling that they are falling, with the consequent shock; they may also kick out, or stretch out their arms.
They may have a feeling of tightness in their chest or a âlump in the throatâ, as well as arrhythmias and tachycardias which make them more anxious and inconsolably sad, because when the person who is suffering from these heart disorders goes to have an electrocardiogram, it cannot find the reason for their problems, and they are told that they are ânervousâ tachycardias.
Because spasms can also affect the muscular tunics of the arteries, often leading to arrhythmias, the person experiences chest pains as if they were suffering from angina pectoris, in addition to the other problems. The patient goes to the doctor seeking a diagnosis for the illness that is making their life a misery, and they return home sad and disappointed because the doctors can find nothing to account for their discomfort â only their ânervesâ.
Meanwhile, family and friends begin to suggest they are hypochondriacs, and to some extent, suggest that they are to blame for their own discomfort because âthey listen to themselves too muchâ, and they tell them: âYou have to help yourself, because you can see how the doctor canât find anything wrong with you.â
As a result, the life of a person with spasmophilia, which is the scientific name for these processes, experiences difficulties both at work and in their family relationships, as they begin to be marginalised because âthey have become impossible to deal withâ, and partly also because they themselves do not feel like socialising, because they do not know when they will begin to feel ill.
Other symptoms are closely related to these processes, as:
Magnesium is involved in muscle relaxation
As a result, a deficiency of magnesium causes cramps in the legs, feet and thighs, and all kinds of spasms in the neck, back and respiratory muscles, leading to pain and stiffness. It also creates a feeling of tightness in the chest and difficulty in getting air into the lungs, which the sufferer attempts to overcome with deep breaths, which sound like sighs in women.
If the spasms affect the diaphragm, this causes hiccups; at other times, the individual might yawn a great deal, and when it mainly affects the intestine, it leads to an irritable bowel, and the personâs daily bowel movement can range from constipation involving passing hard stools like those of a goat, to spending days with loose stools resembling diarrhoea.
Sometimes the spasms affect the common bile duct and the gall bladder or the vocal cords, giving the person the feeling that they have lost their voice or as mentioned above, of having a âlump in the throatâ, or they see moving images when they are reading, with the letters appearing to move up and down on the page, or buildings appearing to wobble slightly, as a result of spasms in the muscles that control the lens in their eye. This is what French doctors call âflou visuelâ.
Sometimes the spasms affect virtually the entire body, and the characteristics are similar to epilepsy, with a loss of consciousness but no biting of the tongue; however, there is no leakage of urine as experienced by sufferers of that disorder. These people also sometimes get dizzy in church or collapse in certain situations.
Magnesium deficiency, which is also related to spasmophilia, can cause ringing in the ears, trembling in the hands and elsewhere in the body, dizziness or a feeling of instability when walking, spinal pain, pale fingers and above all, fatigue â a fatigue that the sufferer is unable to find any reason for; itâs very common to wake up in this condition, and Iâve heard the following phrase many times: âIâm more tired when I wake up than when I go to bedâ. At other times, while they are living a normal life, they suddenly experience physical and mental exhaustion, which is like the individual becoming overwhelmed. They to lose control of their life, and when they emerge from what seems to be the bottom of a well, they experience tachycardias or extrasystoles, or lights appear when they close their eyes.
Since the function of magnesium in relation to the nervous and muscular systems is so important, as I have explained above, there are other symptoms, since:
Magnesium is involved in the formation of all proteins in the human body
What are proteins?
Chains of amino acids.
And what are the proteins in our body?
- All the enzymes, like those which used to be called âdigestive fermentsâ. In other words, pepsin, trypsin, erepsin, lipase, amylase, lactase, sucrase and maltase, which are the molecules we use to help us digest food. Enzymes are molecules which can considerably increase the speed of specific chemical reactions. Each enzyme only catalyses a certain reaction, and there are currently more than a thousand known enzymes.
- Antibodies, i.e. molecules that neutralise the toxins of viruses or bacteria that cause disease, are also proteins. So are white blood cells, which are our defence against those viruses and bacteria, and red blood cells, platelets and many proteins carried in the blood, some of which regulate blood pressure with sodium.
- Proteins are specific neurotransmitters that act as neuroregulators. They are also called neuropeptides, since in chemistry a short-chain protein (usually those with 12 to 60 amino acids) is called a peptide.
- And all the tissues in the human body, such as muscles, blood vessels, cartilage, tendons, and organic matter in bones, are proteins.
Today we know the amino acid composition of many proteins, and interestingly, the most abundant in our body is collagen, which accounts for about 40 % of all the proteins in it, and basically forms connective tissues such as cartilage and tendons, as well as the organic matrix of our support tissue which is our bones.
It is important to have as clear a picture as possible of the make-up and workings of the human body, because of course, the better our bodyâs chemistry functions, the better our mental and physical health.
Taking into account that magnesium is involved in the formation of all proteins, it is obvious why people with magnesium deficiency:
- have difficulty with digestion, with a tendency to build up gas in both the stomach and in the intestines.
- are prone to infections, including colds, cystitis, bronchitis, etc.
- have problems with their nervous system: they suffer from anxiety, sometimes fears, poor reflexes ... Re-read what I have written about magnesium and these problems in the first part of this chapter.
- When there is a shortage of magnesium, our tissues do not regenerate as much as they should. This leads to our cartilage becoming worn out, our tendons weakening and a shortage of organic matrix in our bones. This in turn leads to osteoporosis, because if our bones have a problem with collagen neoformation, because collagen is the medium for calcium salts, the amount of minerals in our bones declines. But above all, the most important point is: the bones lose the flexibility that collagen provides (which is the gelatine in cooked bones) and consequently, in bones which cannot be deformed because they lack gelatine, which is what made them flexible, our femur or neck fractures when we stand up, or any of our bones â the arm, leg or wrist â break when they receive a blow.
The human body is undergoing constant destruction and neoformation, except for the neurons in the nervous tissue.
Four hundred grams of proteins are destroyed every day in resorpt...