Health Benefits of Magnesium [2021 Edition]

By Amelia Martin

June 14, 2021

Magnesium sources and their health benefits

A guide to know the health benefits of Magnesium

In this article, I want to talk to you about how you could improve your health with regular magnesium supplements. I'm Dr. David and sports medicine specialist, I help athletes and active people like you feel and perform your best regardless of age or injuries. Now supplements are something that is becoming more and more popular in the world. It's a huge industry in Australia. These are, you know, not necessarily medicines that are tracked by the Food and Drug Administration but you can buy them at health food stores, you buy them online, you can buy them at stores like G&C as ways to supplement what you lack in terms of food intake.

These are things that aren't normally made by your body and if you're not getting them in your food then they're usually in pill form as a tablet or cream form or something like that. And in this article, we're going to talk about Magnesium now.

There's thought to be a number of different benefits to taking magnesium and so I want to go through some of those and then we're gonna talk about how you potentially can get more Magnesium.

A quick list of the best health benefits of Magnesium

Muscle Recovery
Bone Health
Heart Health
Diabetes

Migraine Headaches
Premenstrual Syndrome in Women
Anxiety
Blood Pressure

Detailed list of the Magnesium health benefits - 2021

Muscle Recovery

The best one would be exercise performance. There are a number of studies that show, maybe from a muscle standpoint, maybe from a recovery standpoint, maybe help clearing lactic acid and things like that. We're not a hundred percent sure why that magnesium might be helpful in terms of muscle recovery and workout recovery but it does help. So if you are a high level athlete or just something that likes to run every day, lift weights, CrossFit or whatever it is, you might talk to your doctor or at least research more of the benefits of magnesium.

Bone Health

The first one I want to talk about and this is true with vitamin D as well and this is obviously important to me as an Doctor but magnesium is thought to be very very important for bone health and it works with via MIDI to help get our calcium into our bones and lower our risk of osteoporosis, lowering the risk of fractures as we get older. So magnesium, especially in conjunction with vitamin D, can be very important in optimizing bone health.

Heart Health

Another area where magnesium is thought to be helpful is with our heart health. It's been shown in medical studies that magnesium supplementation and higher levels of magnesium can lessen the risk of calcification within the arteries around the heart, the coronary arteries and the aorta of the abdominal aorta. So, regular supplementation with magnesium and not having magnesium deficiency is definitely good for your cardiovascular health.

Diabetes

Another area where magnesium can be helpful is that it can lower your risk of diabetes. Magnesium is involved in carbohydrate glucose metabolism. So a number of studies have shown that basically the higher your blood levels of magnesium and lower your risk of magnesium deficiency, the lower your risk of diabetes. And with all the different medical issues that come with diabetes certainly lowering your risk of that and have a tremendous impact on your health.

Migraine Headaches

Another one you might want to talk to your doctor about if you deal with migraine headaches. There are some studies that do show that migraines can be alleviated potentially even prevented by regular taking of magnesium. Now this again you want to talk to your doctor about because there are other medical treatments for migraines but if you're dealing with the headaches and the nausea and the vomiting that can come with migraines, that can be fairly effective.

magnesium helps in suppressing PMS symptoms

Premenstrual Syndrome in Women

Another area that might be useful for the women out there is regular intake of magnesium especially if you take it with vitamin b6 is that it may help lessen or reduce some of the symptoms associated with premenstrual syndrome or PMS - some of the bloating, some of the insomnia and all the different issues, the mood issues, the water retention, all of that might actually be decreased with regular intake of magnesium.

Anxiety

Anxiety, it's another area that potentially can be alleviated with magnesium supplementation. It’s thought that if you are magnesium deficient or have low levels of magnesium, you actually have a higher risk for anxiety. So you know, a decent number of people in Australia suffer from clinical anxiety so that may be something worth talking to your doctor about, could magnesium help with that?

Blood Pressure

Magnesium can also be helpful for lowering your blood pressure. Studies have shown that as little as 450 micrograms a day of Magnesium is thought to help or will actually lower your systolic and your diastolic blood pressure. Now that's probably not a big deal for people that have normal blood pressure but if you have high blood pressure that potentially is something worth trying as an adjunct to exercise and proper diet hopefully to lower your blood pressure so that you don't need medications. Now that's obviously worth talking to your doctor about but that's potentially a really significant factor for your overall health. Ways to lower your blood pressure - Magnesium can do that, that's certainly a good thing.

What’s the best way to get Magnesium supplement?

Now there's a number of different ways to do it and if you're gonna take the pill form, there's different forms of magnesium in terms of compound, like -

Magnesium citrate
Magnesium glycinate
magnesium chloride
magnesium sulfate
magnesium oxide
magnesium malate

And various sorts of chemical combinations of it. The pill or tablet form, they're typically very large tablets that can be difficult to swallow but it may be worth trying. Some people suggest magnesium creams that it's actually better absorbed topically so I have never tried it that way. I typically take tablet form but that may be something you look into.

Magnesium supplement through diet and food

Now there's a number of different foods that have magnesium so if you're interested in sort of getting your magnesium levels higher through your diet, there might be some different foods that you might want to try like -

Bananas (one large banana packs 37 mg).
Dark Chocolates.
Fatty Fishes (salmon, mackerel and halibut).
Avocados (One medium avocado provides 58 mg of magnesium).
Nuts (Cashews, almonds and Brazil nuts are high in magnesium).
Legumes (lentils, beans, chickpeas, peas and soybeans).
Seeds (flax, pumpkin and chia seeds).
Leafy Greens (Spinach, collard greens, turnip greens and mustard greens).

So all those different foods, if you incorporate those into your diet regularly may be worth or may help improve your magnesium levels. Now you can obviously get blood tests and find if you're deficient in magnesium, maybe worth talking to your doctor about but it may be one of the supplements that you can consider obviously talk to your doctor when you know talking about any supplement anything especially if you have medical problems or you take medications on a regular basis but if you may decide that magnesium is right for you and get some of the benefits that we've talked about in this article.