Episode Overview
Episode Topic
In this episode of Holistic Health Habits, host Surani Fernando sits down with Dr. Carolyn Dean, a renowned expert in holistic health and the CEO of RNA Reset. The discussion delves deep into the importance of magnesium in maintaining overall health, the pitfalls of modern nutrition, and the challenges posed by the supplement industry. Dr. Dean shares her extensive knowledge on how magnesium plays a crucial role in various bodily functions, including energy production, sleep, and cellular health. The episode also touches on the obstacles presented by regulatory bodies like the FDA, highlighting the need for consumer education in the often confusing world of supplements.
Lessons You’ll Learn:
Listeners will gain a comprehensive understanding of why magnesium is often referred to as the “miracle mineral.” Dr. Dean explains how magnesium deficiency is linked to numerous health issues and why it’s critical to choose the right form of magnesium to avoid common side effects like the laxative effect. The episode also offers practical advice on how to incorporate magnesium into your daily routine, the importance of hydration, and tips for selecting high-quality supplements. Additionally, Dr. Dean shares insights into the broader landscape of holistic health, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that includes both nutrition and supplementation.
About Our Guest:
Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor, naturopath, and the CEO of RNA Reset, a company dedicated to promoting optimal health through innovative natural products. With over 45 years of experience in holistic health, Dr. Dean has been a pioneer in the field, advocating for the integration of nutrition and lifestyle changes into mainstream medical practice. She is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Magnesium Miracle, which has been a cornerstone resource for those seeking to understand the role of magnesium in health. Dr. Dean’s work extends beyond her company; she is also a prolific educator, hosting radio shows, webinars, and writing extensively on topics related to health and wellness.
Topics Covered:
The episode covers a wide range of topics, starting with Dr. Dean’s unique journey from traditional medicine to holistic health, and how her early interest in nutrition shaped her career. Key discussions include the role of magnesium in maintaining cellular health, the importance of selecting the right type of magnesium, and the challenges posed by current dietary supplement regulations. Dr. Dean also shares her views on the modern diet, the impact of environmental toxins, and the shortcomings of the medical industry in addressing these issues. The episode wraps up with practical tips for listeners on how to navigate the complex world of supplements and take control of their health.
Our Guest: Dr. Carolyn Dean
Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor and naturopath with over 45 years of experience in the fields of integrative and holistic health. She has been a trailblazer in advocating for the incorporation of nutrition and lifestyle changes into mainstream medical practices, recognizing early on that conventional medicine often overlooks the critical role of diet and nutrition in preventing and managing chronic diseases. Dr. Dean’s journey began with a deep personal interest in health and wellness, which led her to pursue an MD degree, followed by further training in naturopathy. Her unique combination of medical and naturopathic expertise has made her a sought-after voice in the health community, particularly in the areas of mineral supplementation and holistic health.
As the CEO of RNA Reset, Dr. Dean is at the forefront of developing innovative natural products that address the nutritional deficiencies prevalent in modern diets. Her work is heavily focused on the role of magnesium, a mineral that she has extensively researched and championed through her best-selling book, The Magnesium Miracle. This book, now in its third edition, has become a key resource for understanding the essential role of magnesium in the body, including its impact on energy production, sleep quality, and overall cellular health. Dr. Dean’s research and product development work emphasize the need for high-quality, bioavailable forms of supplements, particularly in an industry that is often criticized for its lack of regulation and transparency.
Beyond her role as a product innovator and author, Dr. Dean is also a prolific educator. She hosts a weekly radio show and conducts regular webinars, where she shares her insights on health, wellness, and the latest developments in nutritional science. Dr. Dean is committed to empowering individuals with the knowledge they need to take control of their health, particularly in an era where misinformation is rampant. Her dedication to educating both the public and healthcare professionals has solidified her reputation as a leading expert in the field of holistic health, making her a trusted source for anyone looking to improve their well-being through natural and scientifically-backed methods.
TRANSCRIPT
Surani Fernando: Welcome to another episode of Holistic Health Habits, the podcast where we explore best practices, innovations and insight into holistic health. I’m your host, Surani Fernando, and today we have an incredibly knowledgeable guest who has made significant strides in holistic health. Joining us is Doctor Carolyn Dean, the CEO of RNA reset, a company dedicated to promoting optimal health through innovative natural products. Doctor Dean has an extensive background in holistic health, and she’s here to share her expertise with us. Welcome to the show, doctor Dean. Gerani.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Please call me Carolyn.
Surani Fernando: Okay I will. It’s really great to have you on. And I’m really excited about this conversation. , but just to start off, you know, you have a really interesting background and journey going back many decades. Can you tell us a bit about your beginnings of, you know, getting your MD and what led you to steer your work more in the direction of nutrition and holistic health?
Dr Carolyn Dean : So it’s interesting because unlike a lot of doctors who they go into medicine, they come out, they’re writing prescriptions and they’re. .
Dr Carolyn Dean : It’s been an interesting journey. When I was a teenager, I was very interested in nutrition and health. And that is going back to the 60s. I’ve been at this a long time. I read all the books that there were to read on health and nutrition. Then there weren’t that many, but people wouldn’t listen to me and I happened to be in an honors biology course, class degree, and some of my fellow students all of a sudden got accepted into medical school. And I was outraged. So I went to the dean of medicine’s office, found my guidance counselor from high school there, and gave her a dressing down because they said, you told me I should be an executive secretary or a nurse. I should be a doctor. So the next semester I got into med school and I had all the prerequisites it was meant to be, but I’d never thought of it before. And seriously. So I thought back then, in the mid 70s, that within ten years all the doctors would be practicing nutrition and lifestyle because it was ramping up and becoming very important. And that never happened. When I finished my internship, I, I began my sort of a post grad naturopathic training and got my naturopathic degree. So when I was in practice, I was mostly practicing as a naturopath, and I could see the benefits people were flocking to my to my practice. I had to close it down after a year. I was so fully booked up. So I mean, that was really revelatory.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Just my experience. And then in terms of dietary supplements, personally, when I when I finally got to Manhattan and was doing a clinical trial on Aids and chronic fatigue in the early 90s, I realized that that it was a supplement problem with a lot of people. It was a toxic problem, a diet problem, and the lack of nutrients. So I began working with with people and, well, more with the very sick people using the same things I’d done with, you know, healthy people or people with chronic fatigue, for example. Chronic fatigue is now long Covid. So the work that I was doing back in the early days of chronic fatigue, I’m still using now and then because I was in Manhattan, I did a lot of media and, , random House asked me to write a book on magnesium out of the blue. And when I started researching for the book, I realized that my my headaches and eye twitching and neck pain and heart palpitations and mild IBS, leg cramps, , Charley, horse leg cramps in the middle of the night. They were all magnesium deficiency. And I was shocked. So then I started taking magnesium, only to realize I’m one of the people who gets a laxative effect with any amount of magnesium. So my book came out. That was the first one, the magnesium Miracle. This is an update, the 2003. Now this is fascinating because it was supposed to come out in 2001, the day of 911, and I was living in Manhattan. Everything shut down in the whole, you know, city.
Dr Carolyn Dean : And it shut down in publishing for two years. So the book that was supposed to come out fall of 2001 didn’t come out until 2003. So that was quite interesting, but at any rate. So I didn’t have a, you know, the tour that we planned, you know, I was going to go around the country talking about magnesium. Quite interesting. But for ten years after the book was published, I was looking for a dietary supplement company that would make a non laxative magnesium. Because what I was seeing with magnesium and it’s been well, there’s been a lot of research that that people can look up, but it doesn’t get to the clinician, it doesn’t get to the doctors. And what we know now about magnesium that 80% of known metabolic functions require magnesium, and that could be up to a thousand enzyme systems. They talk about 300 or 325. It could be a thousand. So from head to foot for anything to do with muscles and nerves, anything to do with 80% of enzyme processes involves magnesium anything to do with your energy. When you make energy, either through the glycolysis cycle and then into the Krebs cycle. A lot of those steps require magnesium. Atp itself. Adenosine triphosphate binds to magnesium to activate it. So we don’t have energy if we don’t have magnesium. And ATP is used throughout the body to create energy in all our cells to, again, you know, make the biological processes work. So I mean, serendipitously, I because of my deficiency, I, I created this, , reason to look for a non laxative magnesium.
Dr Carolyn Dean : I couldn’t find a company that would make it for me. I finally found a chemist. We worked together and I had to create my own company to make a magnesium that you can take in enough quantity to deal with 80% of non metabolic functions, but not get the laxative effect. So it’s a huge breakthrough and it’s kind of low key. I have to keep it under wraps because the FDA has, , you know, they’ve come down on a lot of supplement companies. But, you know, I’ve been targeted to the point that I can’t say I’ll never I won’t mention the names of my products on this podcast, because if I say that and if any supplement company says that their dietary supplement can help a disease or cure a disease, then we’re told, okay, you’ve just you’ve just named yourself as a drug. And in order to make a drug claim on a disease, you have to have the billion dollar medical clinical trial. So the public is in such you know, they’re squished into this box of the doctors telling them to take drugs. And then now on the internet, there’s so much information and there’s a lot of misinformation, you know, the, the, the biohackers or the, the lifestyle people who say, well, you know, I’m eating 16 bananas a day and I feel great. And then people follow that. So we’re in a situation where we depend on podcasts like yours to give out good information so people can make their own choices.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, that’s really interesting about the FDA. I mean, I can imagine I actually covered the well, I’ve covered the pharmaceutical industry for many years, over 15 years. And, you know, know about like the claims that they have to there’s a lot of red tape. But you know, like in terms of something like just talking about magnesium. So you can talk about like the, the, the nutrient which, which could be in food as well as, you know, supplements. But, but you’re not allowed to, , talk about a pill that does it right.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Or my website. We had to take down any testimonials I had of people who’d say, oh, I had this horrendous condition and I took your such and such and now I’m better and I don’t have to take drugs. See, that’s what the that’s what they’re afraid of is, , drugs. , drugs will be, , displaced by nutrients. And they can’t be because, you know, most of what we’re going through now is poor diet, toxic environment and lack of nutrients. And if we had the right building block nutrients, that would allow our body to be detoxifying all the time as it’s supposed to. You know, if we have the building blocks, our body can do most of the, the heavy lifting and and I guess what? And you may get to the point of asking me this, but I’ll say right now that the breakthrough with, , making a magnesium that’s not laxative is that it’s, , a stabilized ion in a picometer size, and being a stable ion of the size, that’s the same size as the cell mineral ion channels these minerals can get directly into cells and do their work. And when minerals are inside cells, water follows. It’s the the osmotic effect. So the water goes in, you’ve got your minerals and you get your, your activity. And , there’s a lot of talk now about mitochondrial dysfunction. Oh it’s a mitochondrial. What do we do with them? And what happens in the mitochondria? I already said, , many of the the steps in the cyclic cycle of making ATP require magnesium. So magnesium is very important for mitochondria. And I think a lot of mitochondrial dysfunction is caused by magnesium deficiency, 80% of the population is not getting even the the low RDA amounts recommended dietary allowance amounts of magnesium.
Dr Carolyn Dean : And that to me is horrendous. So we’ve got a situation where the blood tests are aren’t giving us an accurate reading. The ser magnesium. It’s only measuring 1% of the total body magnesium. Now, my company was one of the many, many things we’re doing is university research, where we’re showing that the ionized magnesium blood test is what we need to be doing. And I’m working with magnesium ions. The magnesium ion test tells us how much magnesium ions are available at any one time, because what happens with magnesium compounds is you’ll have the magnesium and then it’s added added to citrate or glycinate. Glycine or malate or L3 and eight. And it’s a compound. But compounds are not absorbed through the cell. Mineral ion channels, they’re too big. They’re just not going to go in there and they’re not going to have any effect. So what the the body does in the bloodstream, the liquid bloodstream mineral compounds. So we’re talking about magnesium. magnesium compounds will disassociate into magnesium. And the other part and the other part is usually the predominant part. Like in a 500 milligram salt of a like a magnesium citrate, you may have 50 to 75 mg of magnesium, and the rest 425mg 450 is the citric acid. So you’re not really getting magnesium. So with the disassociation that occurs in a split second is especially with magnesium, which is very hyperactive, it’ll join right back up to the citrate or something else. It’ll join to fluoride, you know, fluoride drugs in the water, , fluoride in dental products. It’ll it’ll attach to fluoride and make a a brittle compound that finds its way to joints and tendons. So many, many sidebars there. No.
Surani Fernando: Definitely very like complex because, you know, a lot of magnesium that’s out there. First of all, you know, you hear things of, you know, magnesium glycinate for, you know, if you’re having trouble sleeping, you know, need to be calm and then citrate to boost levels of energy. , that’s what that’s what I have heard, you know, because there’s also magnesium. Like, I bought a magnesium from a pharmacy, a well known pharmacy brand, not really knowing much. You know, I think that’s the problem with these supplements that, you know, people are buying them, but then we don’t really know how to differentiate between, you know, what is a good supplement and what what is possibly, , you know, not so effective supplement. And what you’re saying is that so? I mean, I’ll let you comment on, you know, those two, but yours seem to your theory is that it’s a mix of them.
Dr Carolyn Dean : No, my theory is that, , the breakthrough with having a stable ion of magnesium is what people need, right? But I’ll also say that because magnesium is so necessary in the body, any amount of any magnesium is going to help a person. Yeah. And what you have to do to avoid the laxative effect is you don’t take a full dose all at once. That’s why liquids and powders are better. Because then, like a mine’s a liquid, for example, you put it in water along with sea salt. Because if you put some sea salt in your water, you’re getting the 72 or so minerals that are found in in sea salt. And you, you drink sea salt water through the day. You put your liquid minerals in the water and you sip it through the day. You don’t take it all at once because that that will encourage the laxative effect, because your cells are overloaded. And then you’ll dp it out either through the urine or through the stool. Yeah. And what’s your.
Surani Fernando: Opinion on those two that seem to be popularly talked about like, listen for one thing and citrate for the. So to recap glycinate for trouble sleeping more of a muscle relaxant relaxant and then citrate for boosting overall energy levels.
Dr Carolyn Dean : It’s the magnesium does both. magnesium ions help with your sleep? They help with your energy. They help with, , keeping your blood sugar under control. They work with your DNA and RNA. They work with protein synthesis. It’s a magnesium all the way. I don’t know that, , the citrate one. It’s more laxative for sure than the glycinate one. Glycinate is promoted more for the non laxative effect. But in the marketing world, you know when you look at someone, oh, our product has seven different magnesium’s and you know every they’re all going to help you. Well if your body is magnesium deficient as so many people are, you want magnesium. You don’t want the malate or the tour aid or the whatever. He says they’ll be helpful. But if you look up and I have it in my mail. Magnesium miracle book, a list of citrate. As I said, it’s like 50 to 75mg in a 500 milligram capsule. Magnesium l-threonine is the worst offender. , whatever. , marketing half truths. Because on their bottles they’ll say magnesium, L3 need 2000mg and you think I’m buying a magnesium? So yippee, I’m getting 2000mg of magnesium. You turn the label over and they say, oh, well, actually you have to take three capsules to get 144 mg of elemental magnesium. So that’s outrageous. Three capsules. So one capsule is, what, 45 or so when I was working on my atrial well, I had heart palpitations.
Dr Carolyn Dean : I can’t say they were atrial fibrillation. They didn’t test for atrial fibrillation, but I required 1200mg of my liquid magnesium for about a year before I was totally rid of my palpitations. So before that, with the magnesium compound, I could only take 50mg and a little more and I’d get the laxative effect. So it all depends on absorption. But you have people. I mean, what percentage of our population is constipated and needs to take a laxative? So those magnesium’s are going to be magnesium oxide is hugely, , laxative. It’s only 4% absorbed. And I can say that because there’s been a study on that, but we really haven’t studied all the other other magnesium. So I mean, eventually I hope to be able to do that with our studies comparing, you know, my magnesium with other magnesium for absorption. At this point, we’ve done a produced a couple of studies, but our Purdue studies showed that taking 300mg of my magnesium within two hours, it showed up as ionized magnesium in the blood. And that type of absorption is unheard of. So we are now depending on on dietary supplement companies to do this research, because the drug companies are not going to touch nutrients except if they want to, you know, bash them or put them down.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, definitely. And I’m also interested in your background as, as a, as a medical doctor, you know, I think I’ve talked with other experts about this and the fact that, you know, Western medicine is really focused on treating symptoms and not not that focus. I’m sure. You know, there is some baseline level of nutritional education, but it’s not really focused on nourishing the body. And like, sort of in an effort to prevent certain diseases. What would you like tell me your experience of that, because obviously you had the light bulb moment as a doctor too, to go into this area knowing that it’s so important with the disease world. , and I’m curious to know, you know, your journey as a doctor, going through your continuous education.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Right. , as I said earlier, I, I thought doctors would all adopt a lifestyle nutrition focus. So they didn’t though. I mean we started to because I, I did my naturopathic training. I was, I was doing, , conventions and having lectures about nutrition. So I was well into it as soon as I began my practice. But for example, I remember one instance where a group of medical doctors were asked to get together to have a roundtable about nutrition. And one of the young doctors said, well, you know, I can’t really tell my patients not to eat at these fast food restaurants because there’s no study to support what I’m saying. So common sense is was out the door. I saw that another thing that I saw happening is in the in the beginning stages. I start my practice in 1979, in Toronto, Canada, in a family practice, but I was doing mostly naturopathic work. You know, first, do no harm, find the root cause, you know, treat with natural substances. And what I saw happening in the supplement world, because my practice helped open up the health food store industry in Toronto, because I would send people to these small, little health food stores, and then they’d grow bigger and bigger. There used to be just food based nutrients, and then over time, the I guess the drug companies got into making the synthetic vitamins especially. So we’ve got synthetic B vitamins that you have to give and higher and higher doses to make any difference in the body. And when the oral doses don’t work that well, let’s give it intramuscularly or intravenously.
Dr Carolyn Dean : So the synthetics are, , I don’t know, it’s a generalization, but as I understand it, there’s two rotational forms of of vitamins. I don’t know if it’s all of them. So there’s a right turning or a left turning. So you see the position of my thumbs if you have a natural substance that needs a receptor site where you go in like that, okay, it’s going to happen. But if you have a, you know, the other side and you’ve got your receptor site over there, it’s just not going to go in. And it’s not until you have higher and higher doses of these synthetic vitamins that you’ll get any reaction in the body. So that really I observed that. So that’s that’s stuck with me. And when when I finally was forced to make my own dietary supplement company, I had all this knowledge, all this information from like in 45 years of being in medicine to make sure that my b-vitamins were methylated and food based and my vitamin C was food based. Plus I do, , an ascorbic acid powder because there’s enough evidence of intravenous ascorbic acid being miraculous, , for a lot of infectious conditions. Even cancer I work with, , omega three algae instead of a fish oil because the the fish livers now are so contaminated with the heavy metals and drugs and toxic pollutants that fish livers have to be sent to a special processing plant in Europe to get rid of all the contaminants and what’s happening? Well, is there any life force left in that type of fish oil besides the fact I.
Dr Carolyn Dean : I live in Maui and we have the whales down here for many months through our winter, and they feed off krill up in the Arctic. They come down, they don’t eat anything. They give birth and they go back home. And if we’re, if we’re fishing all the krill to put in our little capsules, what are the what are the whales going to do in another decade? And then with vitamin D, it has to be vitamin D3. And it has to have K2 along with it so that whatever calcium the vitamin D is helping to absorb, the K2 will direct the calcium to the bones and teeth. So there’s very basic rules in dietary supplements. And there’s also just very basic dietary A and E I put food based , e and beta carotene in my omega three algae. So what I managed to do, because it’s what I’ve learned over the past now, 55 years, that you need basic nutrients in well absorbed forms that the body will take in and help, you know, create the detoxification pathways you need. I have I use a couple of sulfur based amino acids taurine and methionine. Methionine. , it’s the precursor to glutathione. So you want your glutathione to be working. You want your you want some methyl groups to help the methyl methylation detoxification pathways in the liver. You want some sulfur groups to help sulfur detoxification. And instead of doing the basic building blocks, , and one huge example is the thyroid needs nine minerals to make thyroid hormones.
Dr Carolyn Dean : What do we do in, for the thyroid? We wait until it’s completely dead and we give thyroid hormone replacement, which is either synthetic or it can be natural, but it’s not the whole picture. So the building blocks are so important. And what do we do instead? Oh, well, we have to detoxify. We have to flush out the intestines. We have to flush the liver. And when you do that, you’re forcing the body to make a priority that it’s not ready for. The liver stores a lot of viruses to protect us from having a viral infection, and it waits for an opportunity to detoxify them and remove them. If we flush the liver on someone who’s already toxic and weak, then we create more problems. We have people who say, oh well, let’s give you a loading dose of Dmsa or EDTA to see how much heavy metals you excrete in your urine. Well, you’re allowing those toxic heavy metals to come out of the cells into the bloodstream, circulate through the brain, perhaps, and cause all kinds of symptoms. I’ve had so many people come to me who say, who say I’ve done the detox, even a sauna detox. People will get dehydrated with a lot of sauna therapy, and especially if they’re not replacing their minerals. Chelation, intravenous chelation, it pulls out more than heavy metals. But in my experience, what I see with the proper mineralization of your cells is the cell, the receptor, sites that hold the minerals or whatever. They’re all happy because they’ve got their minerals. And there’s this play in the body where the minerals go off to do their cofactor work.
Dr Carolyn Dean : But if you have empty receptors and you’re exposed to heavy metals, you could be breathing lead based gas, which hopefully is not so much in the environment, but it’s on the farms. You could be having mercury in your dental treatments or mercury fillings. Those heavy metals will make their way to those empty receptor sites and become toxic. Just because you don’t have enough minerals and that to me is huge. I have people who’ll take my magnesium for 2 or 3 months, just just doing the magnesium and they’ll start to detoxify. And if it’s a rash and a coated tongue in women. Vaginitis, then we know they’re detoxing yeast. Their immune system has finally caught up, has enough nutrients in order to dp the yeast or and the heavy metals. So it the basics are just that: their basics we see in them the newly commercialized supplement industry is websites that have 100 products, and each one of them has a big story about how it’s vital that you take that product. It’s just become so, as I said, commercialized a lot of people from the hospital world and the pharmaceutical world, , they see the huge growth in the supplement industry and they’ve they’ve jumped on. So they’re doing the marketing in the same way that they used to market drugs, find the disease and here’s the cure or even create the disease and here’s the cure. You have this symptom. You need this supplement. But that’s not the way the body works.
Surani Fernando: It’s definitely a huge minefield for people, you know, just hearing, hearing you talk, it’s like, I feel like I might not be the only one, but we’re all just thinking, oh, crap, you know, like, what am I taking right now? Like, you know, we just sort of might read reviews or someone’s recommended it or, you know, it’s just there. It’s the option. And, , I mean, it would be amazing if there could be more labeling, , more regulation, more, , more allowance for there to be more confidence amongst consumers. But is that changing? Is there is there a, you know, push to get some of the some of some better regulation on, on this industry?
Dr Carolyn Dean : Well, I mean, the regulation that the FDA wants is to stop supplements and just have them all be prescribed by doctors who don’t know a thing about supplements, so they want to stop it. I mean, if you I’m sure you’re aware of, you know, Codex is the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization that tries to standardize foods that ship from country to country and dietary supplements. So in 2005, I attended a couple of meetings, one in Bonn, Germany, and one in Rome. And man, it just was frightening because the the people who were were promoting Codex, which was the German delegation, they wanted to allow as much toxic chemicals in the food as possible, and they wanted to make all dietary supplements low potency and synthetic and their stated mission. And I you know, I’m not. I don’t think, , this was even under the table, but they said they don’t want dietary supplements to interfere with drugs. And they probably meant and and would, you know, market that well you know these dietary supplements they can stop you drugs working and then you’ll die. Whereas what the hidden message is, while if you take dietary supplements, your body may not need the drugs, one of the things that I worked on in in my magnesium books is looking at over 65 health conditions that are really magnesium deficiency and misdiagnosed as diseases and treated with drugs. And then you look at all the drugs that deplete magnesium. So you’ve got a terrible, vicious cycle where the more drugs you take, the more magnesium deficient you become. Yeah.
Surani Fernando: And you know, it’s not a case of we should be able to get this all from food and from our diet.Right?
Dr Carolyn Dean : No, no, that ship has sailed. When I first moved to Maui about 14 years ago, I immediately got in touch with an organic farmer. He does organic biodynamic. I support him heavily because food is so essential. But even with everything that he does, I cannot live on the farm food alone. I’ve done the experiment. I can’t just eat all the vegetables and we have chickens, we have eggs, we don’t do meat. I’m not a vegetarian. So maybe that’s that was part of the reason I couldn’t follow through. But my heart palpitations started coming back when I was just eating, you know, excellent organic food. We farmed out the soil so much that it’s not in in the vegetables and fruits anymore. We we’ve over processed our food 70% of the US diet is processed and ultra processed foods. There are no nutrients in ultra processed foods. So when when I see now a lot of the bloggers and biohackers all you have to have a good diet, even even the allopathic medicine is saying yes, nutrition is important. Well, no, we just can’t get enough.
Dr Carolyn Dean : You do not see a label in the grocery store on your food. Well, how much magnesium is in here? How much? How much zinc? How much copper? That’s just not even considered. And doctors don’t learn anything about nutrition. So they. I mean, they’ll sit across from a kidney dialysis patient who’s twitching at all, tied in their blood pressure is high and they won’t even know it’s a magnesium deficiency. And in the kidney disease world, somehow the word has gotten out that you can’t take magnesium if you have kidney disease. So these people on dialysis are just loose. They lose magnesium during dialysis. I have a story in my magnesium Miracle book about a customer who is on dialysis, and she finally talked to her dialysis team into taking a blood test for magnesium before and after her dialysis. And it fell, and they finally agreed to let her take my I think she was taking it on the side anyway. But these dialysis patients, they have severe magnesium deficiency, and they’re not being treated with magnesium. Yeah.
Surani Fernando: And what is your like advice to those patients that are, you know, speaking with their medical doctor. And they’re also taking your, , supplements. Like what is the advice that to ensure that, you know, they’re not interacting in a bad way?
Dr Carolyn Dean : Well, the thing about magnesium, it’s supposed to be in our food. 100 years ago, we were supposed to get 500. We supposedly got 500mg of magnesium. Now we’re lucky to get 200. So all you’re doing when you’re taking 300, 600mg of magnesium is getting what you should be in your food. So when you take I was going to say low potency dietary nutrients, which is the way I am focused on my nutrients because Codex, it’s going to stop us taking high dose supplements first. So I just went for low dose and with the magnesium, a dose in my product is only 300mg, which is lower than the RDA. So they’re not going to attack my nutrients. But then people can take more as their body needs them. But if your diet was supposed to have 500 and you’re getting 200, then you need to take a supplement. The fail safe of magnesium is that if you take too much, you get the laxative effect. It is the safest mineral or nutrient to start with. And , in my case, I, I have meant I just mentioned to you a while back that I took 1200mg for a year, but now I only need 300 to 450mg. So your body gets saturated and then it stays. It stays, , replete. And if I were to take more than that, I’d get the laxative effect. Then my body would tell me. But, see, that’s that’s very difficult because it’s difficult because people will say, well, I took this magnesium and it immediately called the laxative effect. So I must be saturated. I must already have enough Because doctors will say that to their patients.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Take this magnesium. And when you get diarrhea, then you’re probably have enough. No, there’s so many people with sensitive guts now, the leaky gut. And in my world, that’s caused by yeast overgrowth. But that could be for another time. So with the sensitivity, the toxicity, the fact that we’re so deficient in magnesium, people can react. You can take a magnesium at bedtime and it could keep you awake where, as you’ve heard, oh, it’s supposed to make me sleep. That has to do with your own biochemistry. So most people probably have magnesium in their cupboard. I’ll just say to people, start taking it. If it’s a capsule, open it up, put it in water and sip it through the day. If it’s a powder liquid, then you’re in better shape. It’s harder with pills. You’d have to crush them. But the whole thing is to spread it out through the day. And then with the water, my water got guidelines are take your body weight in pounds and divide that in half and drink that many ounces of water a day. And in every liter of water, put a quarter teaspoon of a good colorful sea salt. The sea salts that are pure white, they’ve been processed and the minerals have been reduced or taken out. So that’s my you know, if we’re looking for a basic message to start with, get your water in order. Take some magnesium. If you feel you need more magnesium, look me up and see about, , this, , pico meter stabilized ion of magnesium.
Surani Fernando: Yeah. Great. And just, just, you know, a final word on that when people are choosing their magnesium, is there anything that they should watch out for? I mean, you did mention the powder and the liquid, but is there anything like any warning sign that you shouldn’t pick that particular magnesium.
Dr Carolyn Dean : It’s not so much a particular magnesium, but look on the label and see how many added ingredients there are, you know, binders and fillers and whatnot. Yeah, that’s what happens with pills. Often they you have to have something to, you know, force them to all play well together in a tablet. So again, that’s why powders and pills are better. But no, there’s the contraindications for magnesium are more like higher dose. magnesium are bowel blockage. So , kidney failure? , they say myasthenia gravis. But then I’ve had patients who’ve told me that they needed magnesium to get rid of the toxicity that created their myasthenia gravis. So it’s important for practitioners to get educated about magnesium. Right now, I’m, , I’m producing content for an online naturopathic university. Know your wellness is the name of it. And, , when when young people say to me, oh, you know, should I get my medical degree or naturopathic degree, I say, get an online naturopathic degree from an accredited university, and then you’ll have your diploma, and then you can tell people to take my product and and you’ve got it covered. I mean, it can be that basic, except, you know, we’ve just gone through this crazy, , pandemic and quarantine, and we don’t even know what long Covid or long vaccine is. You know, we have to be very vigilant and we do have to take care of our health. And. And maybe I’ll just say this one final thing is with food. It is important to eat good food, organic food if you can, but it’s actually more important what to avoid.
Dr Carolyn Dean : And you really want to stay away from processed sugars. Some fruit is okay, but sugars are toxic. Like we’re starting to see about alcohol being toxic. Sugar has so many downsides, and it’s used to trick our taste buds into eating more. Vegetable seed oils are really, , not good for us, like sunflower, safflower, certainly canola oil, which is genetically engineered, but those oils are omega six predominant omega six fatty acids and that they are pro-inflammatory. A bit about omega six. We need too much. Seriously, when I get into an organic snack a while back and after a while I couldn’t bend my fingers. This is my test for toxicity. If you can bend your fingers and get them to touch the top of your palm and they don’t hurt, that’s a sign that you don’t have fluid retention. And fluid retention means toxicity. So all of a sudden I couldn’t do this. Now I looked, I finally looked at the label. There was sunflower oil. So you look at your labels, you avoid the sugar. , maybe gluten as well. For a lot of people, especially over here in North America, they’ve really over gluten eyes, the wheat. So people can be sensitive to it and even caffeine. I’m because I work so much with, , the heart, the heart palpitations. People who drink a lot of coffee do tend to have heart palpitations. Not happy to hear that one.
Surani Fernando: As I did. I mean, I don’t need I’m not desperate for my coffee in the morning, but I do enjoy the aroma, you know, of, you know, good coffee, , every now and then. But , of course.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Lots.
Surani Fernando: Of food for thought there. , and we have run out of time. But, you know, I could talk to you, you know, for ages. And I wish you all the best with, , you know, RNA, , RNA research, your company and your books. , and hopefully we can possibly do this again. So thank you. Of course, on, , and sharing your incredible insight, , to our.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Oh, thank you.
SuraniFernando: To our listeners. If you want to learn more about RNA reset and their innovative products, be sure to visit their website at what RNA reset? Is that right? There’s the link will be in the show notes.
Dr Carolyn Dean : And yes that’s right. And my educational site is Dr. Carolyn Dean. Com I have a radio show and webinars and blogs. So it’s all about education. It’s opening people’s minds. Yeah. And thank you so much.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, I definitely have been on that website. And I think that your blogs are great and I think that you need, you might need to log in to, to read more. , yes.
Dr Carolyn Dean : Because the FDA has been so crazy with, , you know, the information that we share, we’ve had to put ourselves behind, behind a wall. But most of my information is freely available. But, . For my 20 ebooks , people will have them to the membership site, because in my books I talk about my products and apparently I’m not supposed to do that. This book, which is on Amazon, it’s, , I can’t even talk about my products in here, but it’s the magnesium.
Surani Fernando: That’s magnesium.
Dr Carolyn Dean : That magnesium. The missing link to total health. So this is a condensation. What happened with my magnesium miracle book? It became 600 pages with each new edition, so it’s just too much for people to read. But this is wonderful. And it’s on Kindle as well. And it’s, you know, it’s not priced very high. So that’s the type of book you mentioned earlier about doctors. People will take my books into doctors and say, look at all this research. You know, there’s in my magnesium book, I have 600 references for what I’m talking about. So the information is there and people just have to, you know, I guess, get educated and get confident that their body will know what to do when they take the right nutrients. That’s what I’d say.
Surani Fernando: Definitely. Well, thank you so much, Carolyn. And to our listeners, don’t forget to follow or subscribe to Holistic Health Habits for more episodes and leading experts in the field. Until next time, stay healthy and stay informed.