Ionic Magnesium
“Ionic Minerals”
History of Modern food
Herbicides - atrazine
Why supplement minerals
Different forms of minerals
Which one is best
Functions of Macro, Micro, and Trace Minerals
Heavy Metal drive down mineral reserves
Lithium – it’s not just for crazy people
History of Modern Food?
Most people have a decent understanding that food now is not the same as the food from 50 or 100 years ago. Prior to about 1970, food prices fluctuated wildly and most Americans spent a significant percentage of their monthly budgets on food. In 1971, President Nixon appointed Earl “Rusty” Butz as Secretary of Agriculture. His task was to declare war on food prices and bring down the cost of food by any means. This began the farm subsidy programs that we still have today. These programs pay farmers to grow crops that they would otherwise not grow because they are not profitable. Most corn grown in the country is grown at a loss and is only “profitable” for the farmers because it is subsidized. Same with wheat and soy and many other commodity foods. The government is now part of your food economy and most people don’t have any idea about it. But what's wrong with low food prices? Fundamentally nothing if the food were healthy.
I hear the question right now: how is corn, wheat, and soy not healthy? They are on the food pyramid. First the food pyramid is a scam driven by lobbyists in Washington DC, but we will get into that later down the line. Secondly, fundamentally and historically, they are healthy if we were talking about historic corn, wheat, and soy. Except we are not. Ask yourself: Why is everyone in America fat and everyone in Europe skinny? That’s easy – Americans just eat too many carbs…right? Not really, no. In fact, France eats so much bread that they have national laws on how to make bread legally. We will circle back to this as well, but we need to set the stage first.
Wheat
Most people don’t think twice about wheat. It’s healthy. It’s the base of the food pyramid. Civilization has been built on wheat, or so we we’re told. What’s in a name? Wheat is wheat is wheat… right? Not even close. Historical wheat is a type of grass seed. This grass seed was cultivated into the original wheat crop called einkorn. This original wheat has 14 chromosomes as compared to modern dwarf wheat that contains 42 chromosomes. This matters because chromosomes encode for all traits of the plant including protein. Gluten is the protein found in wheat, and the gluten found in einkorn is extremely different than the gluten found in modern dwarf wheat. The extra chewy bread, pizza, and pasta we love now is not possible with einkorn. The primitive gluten is simply not strong enough to make modern breads. Einkorn has a grainy consistency much more like a cake or muffin – all of which are made from lower gluten flours. The main benefit of einkorn is that its gluten is far easier to digest than dwarf wheat gluten, therefore, healthier for people.
Then there is the problem of extra chromosomes. Wheat is the type of organism that adds to its chromosome count with each crossing. This means that if one crosses modern wheat with another strain that has one more new chromosome, it will add to the total chromosome count to give 43 chromosomes. This affects consumers because this affects the proteins and must beg the question: is modern wheat as healthy for us as historic wheat? Clinically, I can’t really answer that. I can say that it should not be the basis of your diet, for sure, but is the wheat actively harming you? Maybe, and we will see why later.
Soy
Soy makes my head hurt. The science behind soy being a healthy superfood was so faulty that the scientists may as well have been ex-cigarette researchers! For those that don’t know, several studies found that soy had many amazing health benefits including heart protection, high plant protein, antioxidant potential, supplier nutrition, etc. It was the super food of the 1990s. I know because I ate tons of it in all forms and my sister was vegetarian (as were all girls in the 1990s – it was just the thing to do), so we ate tons of soy products, trying desperately to taste like meat. The only thing that came about was that the researchers were simply all wrong. This is because they based their research on meta data from population studies of Asia and a few “test tube” studies on the potential properties of soy.
The bottom line is that soy in Asia is far different from the GMO soy we have here and is eaten far differently. Here in America, when we eat soy, it’s very concentrated. When Asians eat soy, it’s a side dish or a flavor component, and most of those are fermented in some way. This fermentation neutralizes many of the negative aspects of soy. The most notable negative about soy is that it’s basically an estrogen supplement. When you consume soy protein or a big block of tofu because you are trying to get that “super healthy plant-based protein” you are giving yourself an estrogen shot. This has led to a condition in males known as “soy boy.” This is considered a derogatory term for sure, but the symptoms are based in reality. Look around at the shape of boys and men these days, especially at the hips. In a larger portion of the population of men in America, the men have rounded hips and overdeveloped breast tissue with an extremely popular surgery being gyno-surgery or removal of excess female-like breast tissues. Is soy all that there is to blame for this? Absolutely not, but it is a significant contributor and one you can easily avoid.
Corn
This is pretty simple: all modern corn is bad. This is because all modern corn is a genetically modified organism (GMO) that contains the genes to produce the herbicide known as glyphosate internally and be resistant to it. Modern corn is an industrial additive like oil or aluminum and not food. In fact a lot of your modern plastics are made directly from components from corn. The number one plastic that is used in 3D printing is PLA or poly lactic acid, which is derived from starches which are derived from corn.
The bottom line is that growing corn uses literally tons of herbicides and pesticides which are absorbed directly into the plant, and the only reason the corn does not die while all the other plants around it do is because of the genetic modification to be resistant. This is not the corn the Native Americans gave the Pilgrims! This is something completely different.
The problem for people trying to be healthy is that corn is in everything. America produces enough corn to “feed the world”! Why? Because it’s the most heavily subsidized crop. The government pays farmers to grow it; otherwise farmers would literally lose money on every acre and would not grow it. Since corn can be so many things, it’s the most used component in some form in all packaged or processed foods. In fact, it is not too much to say that all packaged and processed food have at least one component of corn either as a sugar (high fructose corn syrup), MSG, or some sort of thickening agent. Think of corn like playdough. Once put into the mold, it will turn into anything you want it to look like, but in the end, it’s all corn. If that doesn’t sound healthy, that’s because it’s not!
Now if we remember from the first lesson on fulvic acid, the farming techniques changed as well, and we now use more and more pesticides and herbicides on our crops like never before in the history of the world. But since you are not ingesting these chemicals directly, it is ok to spray them on plants where they will be taken into the plants and you will eventually eat them. So, you are literally eating pesticides and herbicides. One of these chemical herbicides is Atrazine. The following is a block quote from the introduction of the Wikipedia article. I don’t particularly find Wikipedia to be a bastion of truthful information, but as one can see, not even they can deny the problems with Atrazine.
“Atrazine is a chlorinated herbicide of the triazine class. It is used to prevent pre-emergence broadleaf weeds in crops such as maize (corn), soybean and sugarcane and on turf, such as golf courses and residential lawns. Atrazine's primary manufacturer is Syngenta and it is one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States, Canadian, and Australian agriculture. Its use was banned in the European Union in 2004, when the EU found groundwater levels exceeding the limits set by regulators, and Syngenta could not show that this could be prevented nor that these levels were safe.
At least two significant Canadian farm well studies showed that atrazine was the most common contaminant found. As of 2001, atrazine was the most commonly detected pesticide contaminating drinking water in the U.S.: 44 Studies suggest it is an endocrine disruptor, an agent that can alter the natural hormonal system. However, in 2006 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had stated that under the Food Quality Protection Act "the risks associated with the pesticide residues pose a reasonable certainty of no harm", and in 2007, the EPA said that atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian sexual development and that no additional testing was warranted. EPA's 2009 review concluded that "the agency's scientific bases for its regulation of atrazine are robust and ensure prevention of exposure levels that could lead to reproductive effects in humans". However, in their 2016 Refined Ecological Risk Assessment for Atrazine, it was stated that "it is difficult to make definitive conclusions about the impact of atrazine at a given concentration but multiple studies have reported effects to various endpoints at environmentally-relevant concentrations." EPA started a registration review in 2013.
The EPA's review has been criticized, and the safety of atrazine remains controversial. EPA has however stated that "If at any time EPA determines there are urgent human or environmental risks from atrazine exposure that require prompt attention, we will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the status of the registration review process."
One of the major concerns with atrazine is that it is extremely estrogenic. Meaning that it can directly bind to, occupy, and activate estrogen receptor sites in both male and female mammals (humans are considered mammals). In fact, atrazine is so estrogenic that it will turn male frogs into female frogs. The alternative news broadcaster Alex Jones has a meme of himself saying, “They turned the frogs gay!!” Whether frogs can be gay or not is mostly hyperbole, but this atrazine contamination was what he was referring to. The problem we run into is the amount to turn from male to female (frogs are dimorphic and can change from male to female under certain conditions, but it’s not common) frogs is many times less than EPA standards for contamination in ground water. This is a major contributor, in my opinion, to the dropping in male testosterone levels as well and female hormonal problems.
Why Supplement Minerals?
Hopefully the picture that has been painted is the food our government has made cheap through subsidies and told the American people is healthy is in fact hollow. There’s nothing in it. I say nothing because even if there were minerals in the wheat, soy, corn, and other vegetables that produced commercially, the herbicides and pesticides are preventing the minerals from entering the body (glyphosates) and then disrupting our hormones (atrazine) so they are in fact a net negative. So what is left? We must detoxify and then supplement the deficient diet with therapeutic levels of nutrition.
As we discussed in Lesson 1 – we use fulvic acid to bind to and detoxify these herbicides and pesticides, especially glyphosate from the body and gut membranes. In my clinic, it is the number one way we heal leaky gut. The second part of this is what we will discuss now, which is mineral supplementation. Mineral regulation. Without proper levels of minerals, one can’t regulate anything. Blood pressure, diabetes, weight loss, metabolic syndrome? What do these have in common? Let's find out.
What Forms of Minerals?
When I first opened my clinic 5 years ago I thought I knew what I was doing. I soon found out that even my holistic teaching was so wrong that it was not really helping anyone. I used a meridian stress analysis device that scans the body electrically, and my goal is to balance the body so it can heal itself. The only problem is that I was hardly balancing anything with the supplements I was using. They were extremely good brands too. One mineral in particular that was extremely low in many people was magnesium. Magnesium is a major macro mineral right up there with calcium. In fact for Americans, it’s more important than calcium because our ratio of calcium to magnesium is too much on the calcium side that is causing a ton of regulatory problems for the body. Simple problem, right? Just give people more magnesium in a popular form like magnesium taurate and problem solved…or so I thought.
I am my biggest client. You can hear my story in lesson 5 when we discuss leaky gut. For this example, through the health scans I found I was low in magnesium and this was a reason why I had such restless legs and anxiety. No problem. I’ll just take a ton of the magnesium taurate horse pills and that will solve the problem. I was taking 4 tablets for a total of 400mg of magnesium taurate. There was really no change in symptoms and the scan showed no change as well. No problem, just take more. I increased the pill count to 8 per day and did that for 2 weeks (got to give it some time to work right?). Mild change in symptoms and very little change on the scan. At this point I was getting really frustrated because all I had succeeded in doing was giving myself diarrhea. My final experiment was to take 15 big pills for 2 weeks and still nothing. With this and lots of scan data from my clients, my conclusion was that somehow these chelated minerals supplements don’t work. At this point, my only option was to try and find different forms of mineral supplements. This was very disturbing for me because I had taken chelated minerals all of my life and had been told that they had superior absorption compared to other mineral forms. Something was not correct.
I knew that carbonate-based minerals were a no go just knowing basic chemistry. Anything that says carbonate is like taking microscopic rocks. They are too stable and the body can’t use them. This left mineral salts. A salt is a metal plus a halide of some kind. Sodium Chloride is table salt (NaCl) and is necessary for life. See our lesson on all the lies associated with salt and how it will help you. Upon further investigation, the mineral ions given off from minerals dissolved in water are exactly what the body requires to be able to use them for body chemistry. The ions require no conversion in the liver. This was the problem we found that was causing the chelated minerals not to work at all. The chelate must go through the liver to split them from their amino acid partner. Ionic minerals, mineral salts, don’t need to do this. So I tried them. I started with 1 teaspoon or 5 grams per day and in 5 days all of my symptoms from restless legs were gone and my scans had completely balanced. We started our clients on them as fast as we could and they had very similar results. The mineral problem had finally been solved universally.
The question in my mind was why didn’t other companies use these ionic mineral salts? They are clearly superior. Then the summer came and they started to clump in the bags. Magnesium chloride, the salt of magnesium, and some other trace mineral salts found the Ionic Magnesium Trace Minerals we sourced were hydroscopic in nature which means they absorb water out of the air. For use this was not an issue. We added desiccant packs and switched to slightly thicker mylar bags. IF you are like most supplement manufacturers, this is a major problem because it will clog your pill machines and automatic filling stations. So you use something that you know does not work as well but works in your machines, but you market it as being superior. This, for me, was unacceptable ethically. This is why we still use Ionic Magnesium with Trace minerals in our clinic sourced from natural evaporated sea beds. It’s more expensive for sure, but it works! That makes it very cost effective because it works.
One of the stand out minerals, which we discuss in much more detail in this article – “Lithium and Anxiety,” is lithium. I was always taught that lithium was a trace mineral, meaning people need less than a milligram (mg) per day. In fact, it is a micro mineral, which for our clinic is defined as needing 1-50mg of a mineral per day. Lithium for most people will regulate body chemistry and smooth out emotions to make an even mood at about 2.5mg per day. For people that have moderate to severe anxiety, when coupled with lithium at 5-10mg per day with the other Ionic minerals, our clients report that, in almost all cases, it significantly helps their anxiety and depression (mood) or cures it out right. Obviously we are not making any health claims, but the literature supports this and obviously our client feedback is very positive. For me dealing with extreme anxiety 10mg per day of lithium is night and day for me.
The Heavy Metal Problem
Heavy metals poisoning and subsequent detox could be it’s out lesson and is in Heavy Metals (link). What you need to know here is that the need for high-loading doses of minerals upfront is that heavy metals require minerals and amino acids (yes protein and lots of it) for the body to process them out. As the amount of heavy metals increases, the amount of minerals required to balance them will increase at the same rate. This is why we explain to clients at the clinic you need to take more of everything so the body can detox at a maximum rate and then eventually (depending on severity), you can decrease to a maintenance dose of all supplements or even eliminate some. Again, see the lesson on Heavy Metals for all the details on how this works.
