Minerals
Is Your Magnesium Level Optimal?
Magnesium plays a key role not just in energy production but also in fighting infections. Do you know if your magnesium level is truly optimal?
Minerals
Magnesium plays a key role not just in energy production but also in fighting infections. Do you know if your magnesium level is truly optimal?
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Magnesium is an underestimated mineral. This is certainly also due to the "marketing" – everyone who thinks about magnesium thinks about preventing leg cramps. Yet most people don't actually know how this muscle cramp prevention works through magnesium. Many believe that magnesium, as a natural calcium antagonist, lowers muscle tone. That's true in principle.
However, magnesium also plays a significant role in energy metabolism – the cell can neither synthesize nor maintain "energy" (ATP) without magnesium. This is because magnesium complexes ATP and converts it into a usable form. Furthermore, a large number of enzymes in energy metabolism can only function with magnesium. This is why magnesium is repeatedly associated with carbohydrate utilization defects, diabetes, and insulin resistance. (Source)
And that's exactly what lowers the muscle's tendency to cramp. We know this from rigor mortis. When energy production stops in cells, the body becomes rigid. We can experience something similar in the form of myogelosis (localized muscle hardening); in the back this can be very painful, or for example, in the form of muscle cramp tendency in skeletal muscles.
But that's not really the focus here. Because the fact is that magnesium is involved in over 500 enzymatic reactions, we could write an entire book about just this mineral and its importance to us. What's important right now, in the cold and wet late autumn, is infection prevention. Could become important for us and for those who don't want long-term consequences of a … you know what … infection.
You should probably know beforehand that research shows approximately one-third of the population doesn't get the recommended daily amount of magnesium. Moreover, there are simply no current studies that have actually measured magnesium levels in detail. A study from twenty years ago by the University of Hohenheim involving 16,000 participants was conducted. (Source) The researchers set the serum cut-off at 0.76 mmol/L.
Would one choose such a cut-off today? That depends somewhat. Research clearly shows that an optimal serum magnesium level is around 0.85 mmol/L. (Source) You should keep in mind that the serum level for magnesium represents a sort of fuel gauge that responds with a delay, since only 1% of the body's magnesium is extracellular – for example, also in the blood. The rest is in the tissues.
If someone walks around with a value of 0.75 mmol/L, you can assume that things in the cells look quite deficient. Conversely, a nice level of 0.85 mmol/L indicates that the tissues are slowly becoming nicely filled with magnesium. Those who want to know exactly can of course measure it in whole blood, which is somewhat more accurate.
But back to the topic. Magnesium and infections. Underresearched. Apparently researchers also long believed that magnesium was only needed for leg cramps after jogging. One research group recently dared to take a closer look and found that a specific receptor on T cells – those immune cells that destroy virus-infected and tumor cells – depends on magnesium to function. (Source)
With far-reaching consequences: "An adequate magnesium level, recognized via LFA-1, leads to superior performance of pathogen- and tumor-specific T cells." And as a result, "low serum magnesium levels are associated with worse outcomes in cancer immunotherapy." Oh! Because cancer immunotherapy precisely uses the body's own immune cells to fight cancer. But that's not all.
About ten years ago, an elegant experiment demonstrated that people who genetically have low magnesium levels in their cells and thus also in their immune cells lack a specific protein on cytotoxic T cells and natural killer cells (NK cells), a protein that these immune cells use to recognize, for example, old, sick, or virus-infected cells. These people are, for example, much more susceptible to EBV and lymphomas – magnesium supplementation in these people raises the cell level of magnesium and largely restores immune cell function. Sensational, right?
This study was published in the prestigious journal Science, by the way. So the results deserve to be taken seriously. But that's still not everything. Researchers in another study found that the T cell receptor, which recognizes antigens from, for example, viruses, requires magnesium for signal transduction in immune cells. This study was also published in a prestigious journal – the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
Animals exposed to magnesium deficiency in this experiment became much more severely ill with Influenza A and showed a much weaker T cell response. That is, without magnesium T cells apparently function much worse. "Thus magnesium directly regulates the active site of specific kinases during T cell responses, and maintaining a high serum magnesium concentration is important for antiviral immunity in otherwise healthy animals."
So… what more can you say except: Is your magnesium level high enough?
