Nutrients
Vitamin D and Magnesium – Why Both Matter Together
Vitamin D's effectiveness in your body depends on adequate magnesium levels. A crucial nutrient interaction many people overlook.
Nutrients
Vitamin D's effectiveness in your body depends on adequate magnesium levels. A crucial nutrient interaction many people overlook.
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Our blog has published over 700 articles by now. That's quite a lot accumulated over the past seven years since edubily started. Some articles are no longer available, though. Not in the blog anyway, and not publicly accessible. They have ... disappeared – for various reasons.
For example, a whole series of very old blog posts from 2014. They didn't seem appropriate to us anymore. So out they went. But that's only half the story: eventually they'll come back, perhaps as an eBook. There are also articles from 2018 that have vanished. We'd like to introduce you to one of them today because the topic is so important.
The topic is: Vitamin D, or rather, optimal vitamin D function. The usual chatter is familiar: vitamin D isn't really a vitamin – well, actually it is, but the active form of vitamin D is a hormone. It binds to the vitamin D receptor in cells ... and does great things there, for example, a stable immune system and so on. What's still not widely known is this fact:
Vitamin D only works if there's enough magnesium in your body.
Wow. Taking vitamin D supplements or keeping an eye on proper levels—that's one thing. Having magnesium in your body so vitamin D actually works properly—that's the other. Hence, the article:
A study has just come out that shows us:
Well, I never! That's quite the coincidence. So to make a substance work, we need yet more essential micronutrients?! Great insight. And of all things, it's magnesium.
The paper's co-author, a professor of pathology, stated on ScienceDaily [source no longer available]:
«People use vitamin D supplements but don't understand how it's metabolized. Without magnesium, vitamin D isn't particularly helpful or safe. Patients with optimal magnesium levels also need less vitamin D.»
In the paper itself, we find some interesting facts:
Then there are a few other noteworthy facts, such as the estimate that approximately 50% of the US population is not adequately supplied with magnesium. A similar pattern emerges in Switzerland.
What vitamin D ultimately has to do with magnesium, in summary, is shown in the following graphic:
The key point of this graphic, in brief:
That already says everything. When it comes to nutrient interactions, this is an important principle in nutritional biology.
