July 29, 2024 • 13 mins
In this episode, Dr. Paul Anderson explores the crucial role minerals play in maintaining and optimizing health. He covers:
4o
- Importance of Minerals: Understanding how minerals support various bodily functions, including bone health, nerve function, and energy production.
- Key Minerals:
- Calcium: Vital for bone and teeth health, muscle function, and nerve signaling. Sources include dairy products, leafy greens, and fortified foods.
- Magnesium: Supports muscle and nerve function, blood sugar control, and bone health. Found in nuts, seeds, whole grains, and green leafy vegetables.
- Iron: Essential for the production of hemoglobin and oxygen transport in the blood. Sources include red meat, beans, lentils, and fortified cereals.
- Zinc: Important for immune function, wound healing, and DNA synthesis. Found in meat, shellfish, legumes, and seeds.
- Potassium: Helps regulate fluid balance, muscle contractions, and nerve signals. Sources include bananas, potatoes, beans, and spinach.
- Selenium: Acts as an antioxidant and supports thyroid health. Found in nuts, seafood, and meats.
- Deficiency Risks: Discussion on common mineral deficiencies, their symptoms, and potential health impacts, such as anemia from iron deficiency or muscle cramps from low magnesium.
- Supplementation: When and how to use mineral supplements, including guidelines for safe supplementation and avoiding toxicity.
- Dietary Strategies: Practical tips for incorporating mineral-rich foods into your diet to ensure adequate intake.
- Integrative Approaches: Combining dietary sources with lifestyle factors to enhance mineral absorption and utilization, such as maintaining gut health for better nutrient absorption.
4o
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome back to medicine health doctor Paul Anderson. That's me.
I'm doctor Paul, and this section is going to be
on minerals. So we're doing a series on natural treatments
or integrative treatments, et cetera that maybe somebody like a
nature pathic physician, integrative physician of some type, or maybe
your chiropractor or maybe some other type of healthcare provider
(00:25):
might recommend to you. And I get a lot of
questions on the various social media platforms about this particular
supplement or that one, or why do we use it?
So I thought i'd do some little short takes on
different types of supplements. So minerals most people understand, or
things like say calcium and magnesium are very commonly taken
(00:47):
as a supplement, or you find them in a lot
of multi vitamins for example. So you kind of have
a couple of groups of minerals. So there's the what
we consider maybe the larger used, higher quantity in the
body minerals, which might include iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium.
(01:10):
All of these are very very important for all of
your body's processes. Now, just like with a vitamin or
an amino acid, or any other thing. You can have
too low or you can have too high. And so,
as I say, with all of these supplement things, you
should be getting most of your nutrients that you can
from your diet, but a lot of times people don't
(01:31):
get enough. And that's fairly clear in the research if
you look around. Now. Obviously, when we get to things
like calcium and magnesium and bone health and all that,
you've got other things involve as the fat soluble vitamins
we'll talk about in a separate little vignette. But on
the face of it, calcium and magnesium live on the
(01:56):
outside and inside of your cell. Sodium and potassium live
on the outside and inside of your cell. If the
cell is what we call an excitable tissue, meaning it's
going to do something like a nerve tissue, it's going
to create an action potential or something in your brain,
et cetera, the calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium will have to
(02:18):
trade places in order to create this electrical potential. So
what happens is your excitable tissues have a suppressed it's
a negative electrical potential, and then you open up the
gates and you let the stuff inside the cell go out.
And the stuff outside the cell go in through these
(02:39):
channels and it changes from a negative milli volt to
a positive milli volt, and it creates what we call
an action potential. Now action potential will say for your
skeletal muscles rather quick. Action potential for your heart's a
little bit elongated by about one hundred times actually, but
there's still a millisecond, so it's not like they're sitting
(03:00):
around activating forever and ever. A calcium, magnesium, sodium potassium
are really responsible for those movements, okay. Also, of course,
calcium magnesium are responsible for a lot of your bone health,
not all of it, but a lot of your bone health.
And sodium potassium are very critical nutrients. And what you
(03:23):
see is if your calcium, magnesium, sodium or potassium go
either too high or too low, the first thing that
can happen is that you get a dysrhythmia sometimes called
an a rhythmia where your heart changes its rhythm, which
we don't want. If they go too far, you can
go into a fatal dysrhythmia, etc. So that's why one
(03:44):
of the common tests that are done by your doctor
just checking on your health is the electrolyte panel part
of the metabolic panel, and that looks at sodium and
potassium and calcium. Magnesium usually is an add on for
a variety of reasons. Now, the other big one in
(04:05):
high volume is iron. And again, like all things, you
don't want too little and you don't want too much.
Too much iron and you are sort of pro oxidizing.
It's not great for your body. Too little iron and
you don't make energy anymore. Right, you've heard of people
or maybe you've been iron deficient anemic, most common form
(04:26):
of anemia, and you can feel not only very tired,
but you have brain fog and all kinds of things.
Not enough iron. So iron is one of those things,
like all the other minerals, where you supplement it or
eat it into a particular range and we want to
keep it there. So with mineral supplementation where it's sort
of low level, you're just adding into your diet what
(04:49):
you're eating, et cetera. Usually that's not going to shift
your lab values around. If you start taking a lot
or let's say you're anemic and your doctor says, okay,
we're going to give you, you know, oral iron supplements
or a hematinic supplement, and we're going to do it
until your labs get to this certain place. What they're
saying is we're going to let your body process this
(05:12):
at the rate it can, and then once we get
enough stored iron in your system, which there are lab
tests for, then we're going to stop giving you that,
or lower the dose, or recommend you eat in a
certain way. Just like I said with the vitamins, you
can look up online very quickly high calcium foods, high
(05:32):
iron foods, high magnesium foods, et cetera. So again, the
concept always is get everything you can out of your diet,
but a lot of times you might need extra of
these things. So the big ones calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium.
You know, sodium is very easy to find in the diet,
in the modern diet, so you're going to have to
supplement that potassium. You may be good calcium magnesium, you
(05:57):
may have enough to run your excitable tissues, but you
might want some for other reasons such as bone health,
et cetera. And sometimes, then, as I was saying, you know,
some healthcare provider like a nature pathic doctor or integrative doctor,
or some other health care provider might say, well, we're
going to give you some extra magnesium iause your muscles
(06:22):
or tight or something of that nature. So they might
have a sort of a recommendation or a prescription for
extra of something, just the same as if you're low
and iron, you might get more of that. So those
are possible. But then there's the other group of minerals
that usually see like at the bottom of the list
on a multi vitamin mineral, that are called trace minerals,
(06:43):
and these are these are at trace levels, so you'll
need a little bit. So when you're thinking about trace minerals,
we think about things like copper and zinc, chromium and molybdenum,
and you know, vanadium and other things that you see
on a multimineral or a multi vitamin. When you are
(07:05):
looking at trace minerals, the biggest thing to remember is
that just like calcium and magnesium balance each other, and
sodium potassium balance each other a little bit, the trace
minerals have some balances too. The most famous one is
zinc and copper. So what happened a lot during COVID
is because people heard that zinc was important for anti
(07:28):
viral effect, which it is, and we talked a lot
about that on the show. You know, over the last
few years, people might have, you know, mistakenly just taken
a lot of zinc for a long time, and now
we're seeing people, you know, who have real high zincs
and some copper depletion. Now you don't want a lot
of copper. It's like iron can be a prooxidant, but
(07:50):
you don't want no copper or your body will not work.
You need copper to help with a number of neurological functions.
You need copper to help the formation of your you know,
red blood cells, et cetera. So copper is important, but
you just need tiny amount. So what I tended to
tell people and to this day through COVID was you know, yes,
(08:14):
you know, for a month or two, you could take
extra zinc, but really you're a smart move would be
if I think you need extra you know, zinc and
some other nutrients like selenium is important, et cetera, you
want that to be in a multi mineral. So again,
kind of like I said, you might take a multi
vitamin that has B vitamins in it and low amounts,
(08:35):
but your doctor might say you need more B vitamins,
so you take a B complex alongside it. It's kind
of the same with the minerals. You might get a
multi vitamin in your diet that kind of covers little
trace amounts, but it during you know, cold and flu season,
et cetera, you might be on a little extra of
a multi mineral. And the reason the multimineral is usually
(08:56):
a little safer than all a cart prescribing is because
if like I said, you know it happened a lot
during COVID, you're really banging on the zinc and taking
a lot of that, and then your copper levels start
to drop. That can create trouble within your system. Now
there are times where medically we might manipulate these things
(09:20):
such as copper levels and maybe zinc, et cetera. But
for general, you know, good health, again, you want to
start with diet, and a lot of that diet has
to do with how you're digest and absorbing. Then you
want you know, global or generalized supplementing, and then specific
supplementing if you're getting that advice safe from a healthcare provider.
(09:46):
So the trace minerals are in trace levels in your body,
and they'll have ranges that they're supposed to be in
and unless you've been real depleted. Or there are wonderful
not not for the patients involved, but there are wonderful
studies of areas where there was maybe too much of
(10:07):
a mineral in the soil or too little of a mineral,
and so the food the people ate in the area
made them either excessive or deficient in those minerals, and
then you know they wound up with some dysfunction or
even a pathology because of a low amount of a
trace mineral. Now, a low amount of a trace mineral
(10:28):
will not be as immediately noticed as say a real
low calcium or real old potassium, or something where you
might get a cardiac dis rhythmia. A trace mineral will
have other functions it does, and those other functions will
be impeded by the low level of trace mineral. So
I gave the example of depleting your zinc too much.
(10:50):
And as I say, it's like iron. We don't want
too much, but we need enough to keep our body running.
So if we deplete your copper and the zinc is
too high, so we've been you know, you've taken too
much zinc over time, and copper's love, you probably won't
get like a cardiac problem, but you might start to
(11:11):
develop actually an anemia can happen, and there's a number
of other things that can go on from that same
with selenium. Selenium is very important for stabilizing your cell membrane.
It's very important for keeping gluted thione cycling. It's very
important for some immune functions, kind of like zinc is
et cetera. So if it gets real low, it may
(11:31):
show up as a problem in maybe your immunity or
maybe one of the other areas that it is trying
to help out. Then there's things like chromium and vanadium,
and again these are trace elements, and again they're better
coming from diet than general supplements like a multimeneral then
maybe specific supplements. So chromium and vanadium are sometimes given
(11:55):
in blood shugtar control issues. You'll see them, especially chromium
in blood sugar support supplements, et cetera. And as long
as they're being monitored and you're looking at things et cetera.
Trace minerals are very very safe, but I always recommend
that beyond your diet and maybe a multi vitemin mineral
(12:16):
if you need to add trace minerals rather than just
buying one, get a multi mineral which will have the
big one schalcy magnesium and stuff, and then the trace
minerals like chromium and selenium and molybdenum and zinc and
copper and the stuff, because then they'll be sort of
in a balanced, balanced dosing format. Well, we're just about
(12:38):
out of time for this particular process. The other thing
I was going to say about minerals is beyond helping
run your heart and your nerves and all the stuff,
and helping to operate your bone marrow, et cetera, they're
also used with B vitamins as a co factor to
help operate the enzymes so the enzymes can operate at
the right speed. So that's another thing that will slow down.
(13:01):
If you don't have enough of the minerals available and
you've got to be vitamins, it will bind partially to
be vitamin part maybe you don't have the mineral here,
and it will slow that process down. So that's another
thing to keep in mind. But we're out of time
for this one. Please like, share and subscribe, do the
notifications on any of the formats, and we'll be right
(13:24):
back with the next session.
Welcome back to medicine health doctor Paul Anderson. That's me.
I'm doctor Paul, and this section is going to be
on minerals. So we're doing a series on natural treatments
or integrative treatments, et cetera that maybe somebody like a
nature pathic physician, integrative physician of some type, or maybe
your chiropractor or maybe some other type of healthcare provider
(00:25):
might recommend to you. And I get a lot of
questions on the various social media platforms about this particular
supplement or that one, or why do we use it?
So I thought i'd do some little short takes on
different types of supplements. So minerals most people understand, or
things like say calcium and magnesium are very commonly taken
(00:47):
as a supplement, or you find them in a lot
of multi vitamins for example. So you kind of have
a couple of groups of minerals. So there's the what
we consider maybe the larger used, higher quantity in the
body minerals, which might include iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium.
(01:10):
All of these are very very important for all of
your body's processes. Now, just like with a vitamin or
an amino acid, or any other thing. You can have
too low or you can have too high. And so,
as I say, with all of these supplement things, you
should be getting most of your nutrients that you can
from your diet, but a lot of times people don't
(01:31):
get enough. And that's fairly clear in the research if
you look around. Now. Obviously, when we get to things
like calcium and magnesium and bone health and all that,
you've got other things involve as the fat soluble vitamins
we'll talk about in a separate little vignette. But on
the face of it, calcium and magnesium live on the
(01:56):
outside and inside of your cell. Sodium and potassium live
on the outside and inside of your cell. If the
cell is what we call an excitable tissue, meaning it's
going to do something like a nerve tissue, it's going
to create an action potential or something in your brain,
et cetera, the calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium will have to
(02:18):
trade places in order to create this electrical potential. So
what happens is your excitable tissues have a suppressed it's
a negative electrical potential, and then you open up the
gates and you let the stuff inside the cell go out.
And the stuff outside the cell go in through these
(02:39):
channels and it changes from a negative milli volt to
a positive milli volt, and it creates what we call
an action potential. Now action potential will say for your
skeletal muscles rather quick. Action potential for your heart's a
little bit elongated by about one hundred times actually, but
there's still a millisecond, so it's not like they're sitting
(03:00):
around activating forever and ever. A calcium, magnesium, sodium potassium
are really responsible for those movements, okay. Also, of course,
calcium magnesium are responsible for a lot of your bone health,
not all of it, but a lot of your bone health.
And sodium potassium are very critical nutrients. And what you
(03:23):
see is if your calcium, magnesium, sodium or potassium go
either too high or too low, the first thing that
can happen is that you get a dysrhythmia sometimes called
an a rhythmia where your heart changes its rhythm, which
we don't want. If they go too far, you can
go into a fatal dysrhythmia, etc. So that's why one
(03:44):
of the common tests that are done by your doctor
just checking on your health is the electrolyte panel part
of the metabolic panel, and that looks at sodium and
potassium and calcium. Magnesium usually is an add on for
a variety of reasons. Now, the other big one in
(04:05):
high volume is iron. And again, like all things, you
don't want too little and you don't want too much.
Too much iron and you are sort of pro oxidizing.
It's not great for your body. Too little iron and
you don't make energy anymore. Right, you've heard of people
or maybe you've been iron deficient anemic, most common form
(04:26):
of anemia, and you can feel not only very tired,
but you have brain fog and all kinds of things.
Not enough iron. So iron is one of those things,
like all the other minerals, where you supplement it or
eat it into a particular range and we want to
keep it there. So with mineral supplementation where it's sort
of low level, you're just adding into your diet what
(04:49):
you're eating, et cetera. Usually that's not going to shift
your lab values around. If you start taking a lot
or let's say you're anemic and your doctor says, okay,
we're going to give you, you know, oral iron supplements
or a hematinic supplement, and we're going to do it
until your labs get to this certain place. What they're
saying is we're going to let your body process this
(05:12):
at the rate it can, and then once we get
enough stored iron in your system, which there are lab
tests for, then we're going to stop giving you that,
or lower the dose, or recommend you eat in a
certain way. Just like I said with the vitamins, you
can look up online very quickly high calcium foods, high
(05:32):
iron foods, high magnesium foods, et cetera. So again, the
concept always is get everything you can out of your diet,
but a lot of times you might need extra of
these things. So the big ones calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium.
You know, sodium is very easy to find in the diet,
in the modern diet, so you're going to have to
supplement that potassium. You may be good calcium magnesium, you
(05:57):
may have enough to run your excitable tissues, but you
might want some for other reasons such as bone health,
et cetera. And sometimes, then, as I was saying, you know,
some healthcare provider like a nature pathic doctor or integrative doctor,
or some other health care provider might say, well, we're
going to give you some extra magnesium iause your muscles
(06:22):
or tight or something of that nature. So they might
have a sort of a recommendation or a prescription for
extra of something, just the same as if you're low
and iron, you might get more of that. So those
are possible. But then there's the other group of minerals
that usually see like at the bottom of the list
on a multi vitamin mineral, that are called trace minerals,
(06:43):
and these are these are at trace levels, so you'll
need a little bit. So when you're thinking about trace minerals,
we think about things like copper and zinc, chromium and molybdenum,
and you know, vanadium and other things that you see
on a multimineral or a multi vitamin. When you are
(07:05):
looking at trace minerals, the biggest thing to remember is
that just like calcium and magnesium balance each other, and
sodium potassium balance each other a little bit, the trace
minerals have some balances too. The most famous one is
zinc and copper. So what happened a lot during COVID
is because people heard that zinc was important for anti
(07:28):
viral effect, which it is, and we talked a lot
about that on the show. You know, over the last
few years, people might have, you know, mistakenly just taken
a lot of zinc for a long time, and now
we're seeing people, you know, who have real high zincs
and some copper depletion. Now you don't want a lot
of copper. It's like iron can be a prooxidant, but
(07:50):
you don't want no copper or your body will not work.
You need copper to help with a number of neurological functions.
You need copper to help the formation of your you know,
red blood cells, et cetera. So copper is important, but
you just need tiny amount. So what I tended to
tell people and to this day through COVID was you know, yes,
(08:14):
you know, for a month or two, you could take
extra zinc, but really you're a smart move would be
if I think you need extra you know, zinc and
some other nutrients like selenium is important, et cetera, you
want that to be in a multi mineral. So again,
kind of like I said, you might take a multi
vitamin that has B vitamins in it and low amounts,
(08:35):
but your doctor might say you need more B vitamins,
so you take a B complex alongside it. It's kind
of the same with the minerals. You might get a
multi vitamin in your diet that kind of covers little
trace amounts, but it during you know, cold and flu season,
et cetera, you might be on a little extra of
a multi mineral. And the reason the multimineral is usually
(08:56):
a little safer than all a cart prescribing is because
if like I said, you know it happened a lot
during COVID, you're really banging on the zinc and taking
a lot of that, and then your copper levels start
to drop. That can create trouble within your system. Now
there are times where medically we might manipulate these things
(09:20):
such as copper levels and maybe zinc, et cetera. But
for general, you know, good health, again, you want to
start with diet, and a lot of that diet has
to do with how you're digest and absorbing. Then you
want you know, global or generalized supplementing, and then specific
supplementing if you're getting that advice safe from a healthcare provider.
(09:46):
So the trace minerals are in trace levels in your body,
and they'll have ranges that they're supposed to be in
and unless you've been real depleted. Or there are wonderful
not not for the patients involved, but there are wonderful
studies of areas where there was maybe too much of
(10:07):
a mineral in the soil or too little of a mineral,
and so the food the people ate in the area
made them either excessive or deficient in those minerals, and
then you know they wound up with some dysfunction or
even a pathology because of a low amount of a
trace mineral. Now, a low amount of a trace mineral
(10:28):
will not be as immediately noticed as say a real
low calcium or real old potassium, or something where you
might get a cardiac dis rhythmia. A trace mineral will
have other functions it does, and those other functions will
be impeded by the low level of trace mineral. So
I gave the example of depleting your zinc too much.
(10:50):
And as I say, it's like iron. We don't want
too much, but we need enough to keep our body running.
So if we deplete your copper and the zinc is
too high, so we've been you know, you've taken too
much zinc over time, and copper's love, you probably won't
get like a cardiac problem, but you might start to
(11:11):
develop actually an anemia can happen, and there's a number
of other things that can go on from that same
with selenium. Selenium is very important for stabilizing your cell membrane.
It's very important for keeping gluted thione cycling. It's very
important for some immune functions, kind of like zinc is
et cetera. So if it gets real low, it may
(11:31):
show up as a problem in maybe your immunity or
maybe one of the other areas that it is trying
to help out. Then there's things like chromium and vanadium,
and again these are trace elements, and again they're better
coming from diet than general supplements like a multimeneral then
maybe specific supplements. So chromium and vanadium are sometimes given
(11:55):
in blood shugtar control issues. You'll see them, especially chromium
in blood sugar support supplements, et cetera. And as long
as they're being monitored and you're looking at things et cetera.
Trace minerals are very very safe, but I always recommend
that beyond your diet and maybe a multi vitemin mineral
(12:16):
if you need to add trace minerals rather than just
buying one, get a multi mineral which will have the
big one schalcy magnesium and stuff, and then the trace
minerals like chromium and selenium and molybdenum and zinc and
copper and the stuff, because then they'll be sort of
in a balanced, balanced dosing format. Well, we're just about
(12:38):
out of time for this particular process. The other thing
I was going to say about minerals is beyond helping
run your heart and your nerves and all the stuff,
and helping to operate your bone marrow, et cetera, they're
also used with B vitamins as a co factor to
help operate the enzymes so the enzymes can operate at
the right speed. So that's another thing that will slow down.
(13:01):
If you don't have enough of the minerals available and
you've got to be vitamins, it will bind partially to
be vitamin part maybe you don't have the mineral here,
and it will slow that process down. So that's another
thing to keep in mind. But we're out of time
for this one. Please like, share and subscribe, do the
notifications on any of the formats, and we'll be right
(13:24):
back with the next session.
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