Nine Forms of Magnesium for Optimal Health You Probably Don't Know About with Dr. Gregory Kelly of Qualia - Episode 261

Important Links:

I will always support Qualia because of their quality, science and research.  Try their new magnesium and other brilliant formulations at a discount using my code sandyk - https://www.qualialife.com/.

Join my Substack, where you'll get a glimpse of my upcoming book:
https://sandykruse.substack.com/

Gregory Kelly is VP of Product Development at Qualia Life, naturopathic physician (N.D.), and author of the book Shape Shift. He was the editor of the journal Alternative Medicine Review and has been an instructor at the University of Bridgeport in the College of Naturopathic Medicine, where he taught classes in Advanced Clinical Nutrition, Counseling Skills, and Doctor-Patient Relationships. Dr. Kelly has published hundreds of articles on natural medicine and nutrition, contributed three chapters to the Textbook of Natural Medicine, and has more than 30 journal articles indexed on Pubmed. His areas of expertise include nootropics, anti-aging and regenerative medicine, weight management, sleep and the chronobiology of performance and health.

Magnesium powers hundreds of essential body functions, yet roughly half of Americans don't get enough of this critical mineral for optimal cellular health, energy production, and brain function.

• Magnesium serves as a cofactor in over 600 enzymatic reactions and activates 200 more processes throughout the body
• Modern food production, soil depletion, and filtered water have drastically reduced our magnesium intake compared to our ancestors
• Different forms of magnesium target different tissues – magnesium glycinate benefits the brain while magnesium citrate helps both brain and muscles
• Common symptoms of deficiency include muscle cramps, anxiety, irritability, brain fog, fatigue, and sleep disturbances
• Blood tests are poor indicators of magnesium status as 99% of the body's magnesium is stored in bones and soft tissues
• A "portfolio approach" using multiple forms of magnesium ensures comprehensive support for all body systems
• Magnesium works synergistically with trace minerals and boron for optimal absorption and retention
• Medications like diuretics, acid blockers, and birth control pills can deplete magnesium levels
• Quality control matters when selecting magnesium supplements to ensure purity and potency

Use code SANDYK at qualialife.com for 15% off Qualia Magnesium Plus, featuring nine forms of magnesium des

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Sandy K Nutrition
• 1:38 New Business Venture Announcement
• 9:09 Meet Dr. Gregory Kelly of Qualia
• 16:11 The 600+ Enzymatic Functions of Magnesium
• 21:33 Water, Soil, and Magnesium Depletion
• 32:05 Key Symptoms of Magnesium Deficiency
• 41:52 Bioavailability vs. Retention of Magnesium
• 48:06 Nine Forms of Magnesium Explained
• 58:04 Quality Control and Product Safety
• 1:05:29 Closing Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Sandy Kruse: 0:02

Hi everyone, it's me, sandy Kruse of Sandy K Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen. For years now, I've been bringing to you conversations about wellness from incredible guests from all over the world. Discover a fresh take on healthy living for midlife and beyond, one that embraces balance and reason without letting only science dictate every aspect of our wellness. Join me and my guests as we explore ways that we can age gracefully, with in-depth conversations about the thyroid, about hormones and other alternative wellness options for you and your family. True Wellness nurtures a healthy body, mind, spirit and soul, and we cover all of these essential aspects to help you live a balanced, joyful life. Be sure to follow my show, rate it, review it and share it. Always remember my friends balanced living works. Friends, balanced living works. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy Kay Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen.

Sandy Kruse: 1:33

Today with me I have Dr Gregory Kelly of Qualia. We're going to talk about magnesium. Most of you who are familiar with my show know that I actually have a very long standing relationship with Qualia, formerly known as Neurohacker. They've rebranded and now they are known as Qualia. Over the last five years, I've recorded with them three times. This is now my fourth time, so I really love what they do. They stand behind the quality of their products and their research and their safety and their efficacy. And, yes, I am affiliated with them. You will see a discount code in my podcast description to try their new magnesium.

Sandy Kruse: 2:41

And I am going to ask you to refer back to the other three episodes where I recorded with them. 162 was all about senolytics. Episode 203 was all about gut health. Episode 208 was all about Ayurvedic medicine. So those were recorded with Dr Nick Bitz. He, I think, has moved on since, but he's amazing. I want you to listen to those episodes and check out the show notes for discount codes and links and, trust me, you're going to learn a lot of new things in this episode about magnesium. We are constantly learning more and more about the importance of this mineral. Please do me a favor.

Sandy Kruse: 3:40

So for over five years now, I have been bringing to you quality discussions and amazing guests just to help you live your best life. It's never medical advice. It's always there so that you can just listen to it and decide critically whether this makes sense for you and then discuss these health options with whom, whoever your practitioner is. So I'm going to ask you to do one thing for me today. Share this podcast Actually, two things. How about that? Share this podcast however you wish to share it, whether it's through texting your best friend or sharing it on Instagram or on Facebook, and just say, hey, this is a great podcast on magnesium. Check it out. And then the second thing I'm going to ask you to do is whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple. I think those are the two ways that you can actually write a review and comment and rate. Please do that for me. That really helps me. First of all, just to get you know, a temperature check on who really likes this episode and and if it appealed to you. And then, number two, it helps me to keep having amazing guests each and every week to bring these topics to you. Follow me on all of my socials it's Sandy Kay Nutrition, everywhere I'm on Instagram, facebook, tiktok. Follow me on Substack.

Sandy Kruse: 5:26

Some of you might know I am a registered holistic nutritionist. I'm also a certified metabolic balance coach, but I'm also an English literature graduate, so I love to write. Writing is really, really, I'm going to say home for me. So I write a lot of short essays in Substack that pertain to our wellness body, mind, spirit and soul and most of it is free and really the essays are there just to really help you learn how to critically think about your health and how these things that I talk about pertain to you. I never give definitive advice. It's really all about learning what your body needs are. So go find me on Substack sandycruisesubstackcom. Links will be in the show notes also for all my other social media channels, and you'll also be able to watch this on Rumble or YouTube.

Sandy Kruse: 6:36

I've saved the best for last, as it relates to my announcements. It relates to my announcements. I have taken on a new role. Sandy K Nutrition does not go away. This new role will actually help me to enhance some incredible brands that I have met. I've been on social media in this space of Sandy K Nutrition for eight years, podcasting for over five, and I've met incredible brands, many of them not as well known to the general public, and so I've taken on a new role as the director of business operations with TKG partners/R ipple distribution.

Sandy Kruse: 7:31

Tkg is The Kruse Group. This is my husband's company, and what he does is he helps bring brands to market. He helps grow them. So what I am doing is growing the leg of business that he has in the channel of health and beauty and if you're a brand in those categories and you, I guess you're ready to scale up to get into the Costco's, the Walmart's, wellca Home Depot I mean, you name it the drugstore, shopper's drug mart, you need to have a conversation with me. So this is a big venture and I think it really blends what I do and what my husband does beautifully. You can connect with me on LinkedIn it's just Sandy Cruz, s-a-n-d-y-k-r-u-s-e. Email me sandy, s-a-n-d-y it's a Y at the end at tkgpartnerscom or sandy at sandyknutritionca. If you have a brand that's really ready to scale up, then let's have a conversation.

Sandy Kruse: 8:59

Now with that, let's cut on through to this amazing interview with Dr Gregory Kelly of Qualia. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen. Today with me I have a special guest. His name is Gregory Kelly and he is the Vice President of Product Development at Qualia Life. He is a naturopathic physician, an ND, the author of the book Shapeshift as well, so he was also the editor of the journal Alternative Medicine Review and has been an instructor at the University of Bridgeport in the College of Naturopathic Medicine, where he taught classes in advanced clinical nutrition. Oh, we can have some really good nutrition talks, can't we Counseling skills and doctor-patient relationships. Dr Kelly has published hundreds of articles on natural medicine and nutrition, contributed three chapters to the textbook of natural medicine oh, my God, I have it right here, I have that text. It was one of my student textbooks. That's so cool and has more than 30 journal articles indexed on PubMed. His areas of expertise include nootropics nootropics I don't know how you're going to pronounce that but anti-aging and regenerative medicine, weight management, sleep and the chronobiology of performance and health.

Sandy Kruse: 10:40

And today we're going to be talking about magnesium. I think I was just saying I think I've done two other shows on magnesium, so this will be my third, with various experts and different viewpoints, with different research, to help you decipher if magnesium is something you need to add to your stack, because everybody's talking about it. But, as Dr Kelly and I were just talking about, resonance is so important and bio-individuality. So whatever you hear here, hear, hear on my podcast we are not giving you any medical advice. You need to speak with your own practitioner on if this is right for you. And I do also have a discount. It is qualialifecom forward slash Sandy K that's going to give you 15% off. I will have the link in the podcast description, and let's go. Let's talk about magnesium.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 11:44

All right, super happy to go into the weeds on magnesium. So for listeners, as Sandy said, I'm a naturopathic doctor and graduated in 96 with my naturopathic degree. So I've been around the nutrition world for quite a few years, seen patients, worked in corporate wellness and currently work for Quality of Life and really looking forward to this discussion with Sandy to help you listeners understand more about magnesium and whether it's a good fit for, as Sandy said, adding to your stack.

Sandy Kruse: 12:17

Yeah, so I always like to ask my guests why nutrition, why naturopathic medicine, what really inspired you to get into this field?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 12:29

Yeah. So my first career was an officer in the Navy from 84 to 89, us Navy and pretty quickly like I got to my first duty station, it was in the San Diego area, the big Navy presence. I'm still here. But back then it was huge and for the first time in my life I had to fend for myself with food. Before that I was really fortunate. My mom was a home mom that made all of our food really great cook.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 12:57

And then in college they just put food in front of me and I would eat it and all of a sudden I was on my own and realized I don't know anything about what I shouldn't eat. And a friend that was like a gym rat kind of personality you know looked like he was in great shape. I'm like, all right, dude, like what can you tell me? And at the time this would have been 84, a popular nutrition book was called Eat to Win by Elson Haas and it was. We think of it today as like a high complex carbohydrate, low fat approach to eating and that became my Bible. So even in the Navy I was the weird officer that would bring food onto the ship and have things specially made and, would you know, pick all of the fried thing off of fried shrimp and just eat the shrimp. So my interest in it just goes way back, realizing that I didn't know much. And as I learned more then I was horrified at some of the things that had been fed me.

Sandy Kruse: 13:56

So yeah, and you're talking about things from way back.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 13:57

Imagine how bad it is now.

Sandy Kruse: 13:58

Oh yeah, I mean, if I look back at the 80s and I say this actually I say this to my kids all the time I'm like listen, kids, mcdonald's was not as bad in 1980 as it is now. Like think about it. So listen, I'm not saying, I'm certainly not saying it was great food, but you know, a lot of times when you're young you don't really think about these things and you think you're, you know you can do anything and eat anything and you'll never get sick, never have problems. So it's funny that you mentioned that, that you were really interested at that age, because at that age man like I was, I was smoking cigarettes, I was having a good old time.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 14:43

Yeah, I mean I that I used that in exercise to compensate for all my other bad habits back then, so they were far from perfect.

Sandy Kruse: 14:52

There you go, there you go. Okay, let's get into magnesium, and something that Greg and I were discussing. Is that Greg and I were discussing is that it's really important if you can listen to this entire discussion, because we have become conditioned to get snippets of information off of social media and then go oh well, then it must be like this and you're listening to a 30-second snippet on something related to health. So I think if you stick around and listen to the entire hour, then you can go back and do a little bit of research yourself on magnesium. I'm going to give you a couple of snippets, though, because we see this one statement all the time and I'm going to quote it, and I don't know who I'm quoting it from, because you see it everywhere is that magnesium is responsible for over 600 enzymatic reactions within the body. So maybe start by explaining what that means, because we see that statement all the time. What does this mean?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 16:11

Yeah, so, and before even getting to that, it would be over 600 enzyme reactions and then works in more than another 200 as an activator. So we'll touch on both of those things.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 16:15

Okay, good. So enzymes are proteins, fundamentally, right. So our DNA mostly is churning out proteins inside of our cells. And then when you say enzyme to have a reaction in the body like a chemical reaction, so let's say building an NAD molecule, because NAD has been super popular over the last handful of years then you need to take, let's say, the precursor molecule, like a nicotinamide riboside, and do work to it to turn it into NAD+. And that work inside cells is done by enzymes. So think of enzymes as the things that allow flow through all the different pathways. You know, whether that's breaking down sugar or fats, all that work is done by enzymes.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 16:55

Okay, and so when you say magnesium's involved in 600, it would be called a cofactor, meaning that enzyme's not going to work or work well without enough magnesium. And so because of that, magnesium just is usually important in all kinds of diverse jobs in our body, and one of those is actually metabolizing sugar. So this gets into kind of like the general progression. If you consume something with sugar you know fruit honey, you know table sugar, you name it, you know carbohydrates, they're eventually metabolized down to sugars Then that sugar has to be, at the end of the day, turned into ATP, right, the cellular energy kind of the power molecule in our cells. And the first step in that biochemically is called glycolysis. But there's 11 enzymes. It's kind of a cascade that sugar molecules have to go to to be turned into that and those first 11 steps, five of them need magnesium.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 17:56

So the take-home is without enough magnesium your ability to metabolize sugar, whether from food or some other source, is going to be compromised. And then the next big link in making energy is almost like a merry-go-round. It's something in biochemistry again called like citric acid cycle or TCA cycle or Krebs cycle, but it's just like it's just a circular roundabout that just goes around and around and magnesium is used in four of those stops. So whenever we think of like extracting energy from food, we just can't do that well without magnesium and that's because of some of those enzymes. So that alone processed magnesium is used in about 11 enzymes, right, so of the 600. Then DNA, right, Super important to age well is we need our DNA to both stay stable, right, so it doesn't degrade, and then we need it to do a good job when it makes copies of things, right. And again, dna is about making proteins and magnesium is involved in a bunch of enzyme reactions that help repair DNA and help DNA do its main job replicating.

Sandy Kruse: 19:02

Can I ask you a question Because I know people who are listening. So, relating to DNA, you know we hear, I know it's way more complex than that and I don't want to get that complex. I hated chemistry, by the way, but you know we hear often about epigenetics and flipping on switches that we don't necessarily want to flip on around midlife and they could cause health issues. So magnesium would be responsible in some of those processes.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 19:39

Yeah, that has to do so. At any given point we may or may not express some of the genes, meaning that the proteins they would allow us to make we may make less of more of. That's the epigenetic component and that's so influenced by our diet and lifestyle. But magnesium's involved in processes that determine how much of our DNA we express at any given point in time.

Sandy Kruse: 20:10

So super important. I mean, is there anything else that you wanted to touch? Sorry, because I kind of cut you off there with that question.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 20:17

So that's like the coenzyme, like the 600 enzymes. But then you also will hear of magnesium as an activator and that has to do with ATP. So ATP, why that's so important as an energy molecule, is ATP is needed to fuel hundreds of enzymes on its own and the key takeaway is that ATP is always complex with magnesium to be active. So that's when that you know another couple hundred reactions. When magnesium is an activator, it's because without magnesium, atp can't do its job and ATP, as I'm sure you and your listeners have heard, is the energy currency of our cells. So we could have all of that. You know, energy in the bank. We can't deploy any of it. If we don't have magnesium, we can't deploy any of it if we don't have magnesium.

Sandy Kruse: 21:04

Wow, that's, yeah, that's very very important.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 21:13

So anything else that you want to know? No, I think the key takeaway, just on a cellular health level, is that magnesium just has a huge number of jobs that it's doing for each and every one of us all the time. So we need to be good to our magnesium stores.

Sandy Kruse: 21:29

So here's the thing that you also hear about now. Is that? What was the stat? I read? Was it 30% of Americans are low in magnesium? You'll probably know that better than I would. What is the stat?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 21:39

on that, it would be more like 50. Okay, it hovers around, it depends on the age group, some and gender and more like 50. Okay, it hovers around, it depends on the age group and gender and things like that, but it's net-net across the entire population. Somewhere close to half the people don't get what in the US would be called the RDA amount, the recommended dietary allowance of magnesium.

Sandy Kruse: 22:00

Okay, and you and I both know that RDA is just recommended daily amount, right, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the optimal amount for us. And there's so many factors, like I know even some like I don't have a thyroid gland, so I know that a couple of my medications that I take deplete magnesium from my body. So there's so many. It's this is where the whole bio individuality comes into play, right.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 22:33

Yeah, and I know you know. So take your classic biohacker type of personality right, like drives themselves pretty hard. You know, some of that stress is hormetic, meaning it's good stress, but it's still stress. Um, you know, some of that stress is hormetic, meaning it's good stress, but it's still stress. Maybe a fair amount of exercise, maybe saunas, like all of those things, are adding to our need for magnesium because we'd sweat some out with saunas. We would use more through sweat and other things with exercise. Um, you know, stress has kind of a vicious psycho relationship with magnesium. When we're stressed we tend to push magnesium out from our cells. It's part of their response to stress, but then that allows it to be like wasted away from the body and so, you know, if stress is enduring, then we tend to like be slowly depleting magnesium. So there's lots of reasons to think that, as you mentioned, the RDA amounts are, you know, a good starting point, but not where we want to be at if we want to really optimize how we're showing up in life.

Sandy Kruse: 23:35

Yeah, and the other thing is is that RDA? It's almost like it's inferring that we're all robots, like we're you know and we're not. We are all so individual. Now there's another factor. They're saying that our soils are depleted of a lot of these essential minerals and nutrients.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 24:02

Yeah, so that's true, right With fertilizer and other things, that our soils just in general would not be as mineral rich. There'll be some examples where that wouldn't be true, right, like organic farming maybe, or well-maintained land, but in general mineral depletion is super common in our soils. But then the other thing is for plants to take up the minerals. They have their own microbiome on the roots and the health of that microbiome, what allows the plant to take in the nutrients from the soil. And you know, modern agriculture doesn't create the best microbiome type of thing for plants, you know, just like it wouldn't for us. So that would be one piece of it. And the other piece is that evolutionarily we would have got a lot of magnesium from our water and most of us, even well-intentioned people, drink relatively magnesium-poor water now. So that's a big piece that many of us probably almost all of us are missing getting a lot of our magnesium from water a lot of our magnesium from water.

Sandy Kruse: 25:06

I have a question, and I'm not sure you know they say no question is dumb, right. So are there toxins or other minerals that could actually almost like leach magnesium or deplete magnesium? Does that even make sense?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 25:22

From us or from food From food from water.

Sandy Kruse: 25:28

Like you know how certain things can almost like leach or overpower other minerals. Like does that even make sense?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 25:35

Yeah, yeah, so in plants it wouldn't be my area of expertise, but my suspicion is, what we think of is more like the toxic metals right, like your leads and cadmiums probably would impair some of the uptake of magnesium into a plant. And plants are, you know where magnesium starts. And still, the best food supply of the richest sources of magnesium in our diet are green plants, like, for us, our red blood cells. At the center of that molecule is iron, which gives the red color. In plants it's chlorophyll, that really green thing, and the center of chlorophyll is a magnesium. So magnesium is super important for plants. But it's why we were joking about kale Before. Kale would be a really good magnesium. So spinach is thought of as among the highest concentrated and it's because of that many reasons but one that green pigment in plants has got a magnesium at its center.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 26:30

And then, when it comes to water, the issue is more that at one point we would have drank mineral rich, what scientists would call hard water water that had a lot of minerals in it. You know from, you know running over rocks, or you know from glacial runoff or mountain stream runoff. And now we do things to soften the water and we also do things to purify the water and reverse osmosis I'm sure you're familiar with probably many listeners right, like that would be a super common water purification method that gets out a lot of the bad things in water but it also strips away maybe I've seen anywhere between about 94 and 99% of all minerals, right? So we end up with a really pure, soft water that is now demineralized.

Sandy Kruse: 27:20

And I actually have. I've done posts on this, greg because I'm like, yes, there are companies out there that will do that what you're saying. They're going to strip the water, they're going to make it really, really clean and then some companies will put the minerals back in. You know, a lot of times I don't know if your area is like this, but they'll try and sell you on a whole home reverse osmosis system, which, you know, back when I was seeing clients, I never recommended it. I'm like it's better to get any kind of purifier or get a whole home maybe chlorine purifier and then get you know something else to take out all the other garbage than to strip your water. It's like I just I don't know. Anyway, I just feel like people don't even think about it because it's recommended by you know whoever their water supplier is. Oh, get reverse osmosis, it's easy, it's for your whole home, but you might be doing some damage there.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 28:26

Yeah, I think you know, often we naively think of things as good or bad, right and and most things there's trade-offs. It's just the way, the nature of life, right? So you know, I I'm definitely personally I grew up in a near Cape Cod, massachusetts. We had a local town reservoir that had, you know, harder water than what I would have here in San Diego, and you know I grew up drinking tap water. I still would have no problem drinking tap water when I'm traveling somewhere for a few days.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 28:55

And then, you know, on my home I you know I have I don't have a whole home water purification thing. I think you know I did a lot of reverse osmosis water through naturopathic school and a lot of my life, and at this point I'm willing to get a little less pure water that has minerals in it, and so that's just a choice that I've decided to make. In part I make that because there's not been a lot of studies on you know what happens long-term with drinking, really you know purified water, but in animals, because that's not been a lot of studies on. You know what happens long-term with drinking, really you know purified water, but in animals, because that's where you start mice and rat studies long-term. You know, purified water impacts bones a lot, but also metabolic health, right?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 29:39

And so I think you know, I guess, one of my stories of how I think of health. There's almost two camps. There's a camp that thinks they can and wants to try to control everything when it comes to their health and their body, and there's another camp where I just call it trust my body. So I believe there's fewer people in that camp, but that's the one I reside in. I believe there's fewer people in that camp, but that's the one I reside in. I just have a lot of confidence and trust in my body that it's going to do the best it can for me and my job is to listen to it, to love it and to support it.

Sandy Kruse: 30:14

Oh gosh, we align so much. Listen, I come from a place. Of control comes natural for me. I want to kind of control everything, and I've had to step back and learn that maybe that and this isn't a conversation about diets but maybe for me that keto diet was causing me more harm than good because it was just so much need to control every morsel that was going into my mouth. And so I just I really resonate with that statement that you made, because I also believe that as we age, we need to really think about taking things out that might be good for us. So you know things like reverse osmosis we're taking out all the minerals and then trying desperately to put them back in. Oh, let me drink this electrolyte packet, and let me right. So why not drink the water with the minerals, but try and take out as much of the garbage as you can.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 31:27

Right, and then you know like I'll buy. So I'm not a German speaker, so I'm probably mispronouncing it, but Gerolsteiner is a really great mineral water. You know, buying some of the really good mineral waters that you know would be high in magnesium and then at least having those as part of our you know, like our beverage plan across the week.

Sandy Kruse: 31:49

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ways that you can do this, but really you know you have to decipher what, what makes sense for you. But I think a big question is what are the symptoms of deficiency in magnesium? Because I've heard and I'm sure a lot of people have heard a lot of different things and sometimes it's a quick fix. I've seen that with clients. Greg, I remember a client saying every night they went to bed with foot cramps and their feet would cramp. It would affect their sleep. They were, it was a menopausal woman and I'm like you need to try and just add in a little bit of magnesium. It was almost remarkable how fast that worked and I'm not saying everybody's solution is simple, but I was amazed at how quickly it helped.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 32:47

Yeah, it's. I know we do a study before quality would launch any products. So we did that on our magnesium products a two week study, and we saw 25 to 30% improvement in a whole bunch of different symptoms over those two weeks, right? So, um, yeah, things can happen quickly when you're, you know tanks are low on something and you start to replete them. So, um, you know, getting to like, I guess, bridging things together because you know, most of us, even when we're really diligent, but our water aren't getting as much magnesium in that as our ancestors would, and the food supply is not as good, even if we're impeccable with our diet, there's a huge amount of people that have issues with not having enough magnesium, and you see that then show up in symptoms, and so the magnesium clusters into.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 33:42

Think of it as three different groupings. One would be physical symptoms, and so you know you really commonly see muscle twitching or spasms, those types of things, cramp, cramping, something you just mentioned, you know, so that those would be super common. Another would be what I think of as more your cognitive bucket, and so you know these would be like muddled thinking, quick to anger, irritable, a little bit anxious, like all your moods, you know responding poorly to stress that bucket, and then the last would be kind of a sleep and energy bucket. So you know problems falling asleep, staying asleep, fatigue during the day, you know general low energy. So those would, all you know, be super common and you know you're shaking your head because, like who among us doesn't know many people that suffer from a lot of those right.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 34:35

So what we use when we're measuring response to quality of magnesium plus is it's called the magnesium status questionnaire and I have no idea who created it, but it's used in a lot of functional medicine and naturopathic practices and I'm sure we could provide a link to one. They're easily found on like a Google search, but usually there's four buckets of things, or not. Usually there's four buckets of things that they ask about in that questionnaire. One would be medications that are known to tax your magnesium stores. Diuretics would be the most common one, but other ones, like birth control pills, impact to a degree of magnesium status.

Sandy Kruse: 35:19

Acid blockers.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 35:20

Acid blockers yeah.

Sandy Kruse: 35:21

That's a big one, isn't it?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 35:23

Yeah, so there's lots of comments. So that's one thing, but even like nutritionally, taking a calcium supplement that doesn't have magnesium is going to unbalance magnesium. Then there's quite a few medical conditions that have connections to poor magnesium status. So that question you were asking about those, but then a big one that what we look at is then the symptoms. Right, some of the things that I mentioned and that's what we usually just use to assess in our study Like all right, how did these symptoms change from before to Inquire Magnesium Plus, to after? And what we found in our small study before bringing Inquire Magnesium Plus to market is that 24 out of the 25 people in two weeks improved their scores and on average scores improved 27. So, as you mentioned, you often start to see good changes and things like mood, muscle cramps, stress, sleep fairly quickly when you do a better job getting magnesium.

Sandy Kruse: 36:28

Now you mentioned the magnesium status questionnaire, which is pretty cool. I think that's cool because, in terms of just going and getting a blood test, that's not really a reliable way to check magnesium, because that's just what's floating around in your blood serum, right? Does that make sense?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 36:49

Yeah, so about 99% of our magnesium is stored. Bones is the biggest storage place, with about 60, 65%, and then most of the rest is in soft tissue, muscles, our brain. You know our organs, like you know heart as an example, and you know 1% or so is in circulation. So you know, outside of red blood cells or inside red blood cells, and so what's outside red blood cells is a horrible, has really almost no correspondence at all with what's in tissues, and that would be like a plasma magnesium status, which is commonly measured. But it's like what will happen, like the body tries to keep that within a really narrow range. So if it starts to go low we would pull from our tissues to keep that within range.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 37:38

So because of that it has no correspondence with tissue levels and so a long time ago I would have learned about oh well, we should do red blood cell magnesium, because that's at least showing what's inside red blood cells. But red blood cells, in the studies that have measured tissue levels, don't correspond very well either to that. So because of that they give an illusion of you know what's going on when you really don't. I think the symptoms are way more valuable. I would default to the magnesium status questionnaire. Over a blood test, 100 times out of 100 for deciding whether someone should have more magnesium.

Sandy Kruse: 38:16

And then I think I read that you probably know who Dr James DiNicolantino is. He did a book called the Mineral Fix, so I learned a lot from him. But urine is useless for that, then too right.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 38:32

Yeah. So what happens? In so say, we take a magnesium supplement.

Sandy Kruse: 38:37

Yeah.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 38:38

So we're gonna absorb some of it and some we won't. But we never absorb 100% of the magnesium from our diet or from a supplement. So what we don't absorb will go down to the gut microbiome and they need and love magnesium too. So that's all good right. They need to get theirs and rely on us to get it for them. But you know, say, 40% of the magnesium was absorbed and you would be able to see that by, like a change in circulation and then urine.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 39:06

So if you were really doing a good bioavailability study, you would measure urine and what is then like. So if you took more magnesium and more went out in the urine or say you took two magnesiums and same amount of magnesium in both and one you put more magnesium out in the urine you would say that was more bioavailable because more got in but then got out. So bioavailability has nothing to do with retaining magnesium or getting into our tissues, right. And so urine if it goes up in the urine from the same amount, it was more bioavailable in the sense that it must've got into the body. But it doesn't mean the body held on to it. In fact, the way they're measuring it, the body didn't hold on to it and that's what matters is that retention.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 39:51

So we at qualia we talk a lot about retention. We the way I would describe bioavailability is necessary but not sufficient. Right, so like we want it to be absorbed but that we wanted our body to hold on to it and get it into tissues. So that's the, that's retention, and almost no one talks about that, but that's what really matters if we want to correct symptoms absolutely that's.

Sandy Kruse: 40:15

That's the key, right. You want your body to use it. You want, if you're eating a, you know, a nice grass-fed steak, you want to make sure you're getting all of the bioavailability from that steak. So, and it's going into repair and muscle building and all the good things. So, yeah, that's really important and nobody talks about it yeah, and what happens?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 40:43

like aging? We focus on longevity and aging a lot at Qualia, and what classically happens with, you know, an aging population is their magnesium tissue levels are really poor, and it's because of a combination of things One, they don't do quite as good a job at absorbing. Often their diets, for a variety of reasons, aren't quite as good as when they were younger, and then they do a horrible job at retaining it. They basically waste more, their kidneys flush more out with urine, and so because of that, their poor tissues are starving for magnesium often.

Sandy Kruse: 41:16

Oh, you know, and then you add into medications and all of that other stuff that we were talking about that could be depleting it. So it's just, it's fascinating, medications and all of that other stuff that we were talking about that could be depleting it. So it's just, it's, it's fascinating. But I guess the answer is is your symptoms matter? Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 41:35

These other things are proxies, right For um. You know, at best for magnesium and you know relatively poor proxies.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 41:42

So, um, like in one of the studies that I thought was super cool. So you know I'm doing the research part of what led to quite magnesium plus, I read hundreds and hundreds of studies on magnesium and you know magnesium bioavailability studies, retention, clinical outcomes, you name it. But what absolutely shocked me was how infrequently anyone's ever measured tissue changes in magnesium status. Like I mean less than 10 times in all of the studies I found on magnesium and one was super cool. So if you don't mind, I'll share yeah.

Sandy Kruse: 42:17

I want to hear it.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 42:19

To do these types of studies you would use biopsy tissue, so these are animal studies, right? So just that caveat. But one of them measured changes in both brain and muscle magnesium, but also looked at red blood cell magnesium with five different types of magnesium among the ones that we think of as the most bioavailable, right? So magnesium citrate, magnesium glycinate, magnesium malate. Another one was magnesium acetyltorate, which is a newer magnesium, yeah, and so the super interesting thing in this was that they also measured a couple different doses or amounts of magnesium and measured it over time. So magnesium malate, as an example, if our listeners follow magnesium or Google it, you'll usually hear that as a really good form of magnesium. Yep, that made red blood cell magnesium improve. It didn't change muscle or brain magnesium at all, so it had no ability to make an impact in those tissues. Magnesium glycinate worked really well to improve brain levels, but not muscle, so it was a good brain one, which maps to how magnesium glycinate is often thought of as like a sleep form of magnesium.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 43:39

Yes yes, magnesium citrate increased magnesium in both tissues, so like that was. Magnesium citrate increased magnesium in both tissues, so like that was. But both of those, the glycinate and magnesium citrate for the tissues they worked in required a pretty big amount of them. What was really cool about the magnesium acetyltornate is that even at a low dose that made brain levels optimized really efficiently, so you didn't need as much of it to, like, you know, make a big change. And the magnesium acetyltory although that was that rock, that was by far the one that improved brain magnesium, the at the lowest amount it didn't make any difference in muscles, it just didn't work there, right.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 44:18

So the, the, the lessons for me that come out of that is that these different forms of magnesium are different. Like our tissues can almost wave away certain ones and then, like, pull in others. You know some are more versatile. Like magnesium citrate worked in several different tissues. Glycinate worked in one tissue. The acetyltoronate rocked for the brain but, you know, didn't make much impact. So I know, you know, when I think of magnesium it's like I want to take a portfolio approach to the magnesium that I consume, right, to make sure that all of my tissues are going to get forms of magnesium that they can, you know, grab hold of, bring in and just retain and love in their bodies. So you know that guided a lot of my thinking of developing quality of magnesium plus.

Sandy Kruse: 45:06

That's brilliant because I actually I even use that I'm going to say methodology with a few different types of supplements, because it's almost like you're thinking about what you would get if you were to eat a variety of foods in a variety of well-varied, mixed diet. Right, you're going to get that magnesium with those amino acids if you're eating a really good variety of foods and a balanced diet. So the fact is, we already broke down the things that deplete magnesium, why a lot of our food doesn't have all the magnesium that it used to. So then that's when we want to supplement and say, okay, I'm going to give my body a little mix of what I should be getting in a really good varied diet, whole foods diet. Does that make sense to you?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 46:17

Yeah, a hundred percent makes sense to me and it's, you know, that's guided. And it's why Aquaria Magnesium Plus has nine different types of magnesium in it, because I believe that that portfolio approach is a sounder investment if we really want to optimize our magnesium well-being, so to speak. And the other thing to be aware of is the thing that magnesium is complexed with, whether it's like citrate or glycinate or taurine, like these things also have important roles. Taurine as an example. Taurine I often hear like, oh, magnesium, taurate, that form, is it like a heart magnesium, which is there's some truthfulness to that, because our heart relies on taurine. But the thing you don't hear is vision, like taurine is super important for vision, super important. We concentrate taurine in our eye. Taurine is also really important for hearing. So those you know our senses rely on taurine, right? So that having some of your magnesium in that form is important. We have something called magnesium, creatine, chelate and creatine. You would know of many listeners, right? Creatine's, this super important compound. Bodybuilders were onto it 25 years ago, but now we know of its importance for brain health as well and the studies on that form have largely looked at muscle hydration, muscle response to exercise, exercise and magnesium chelated to creatine works better than magnesium plus creatine separate right, so that bonding of them together allows more of it to be pulled into and used in muscles. So you know, some of these different forms, I think have just been largely neglected and I wanted to make sure in our product that we brought to light some of these cool forms of magnesium. And one I love that used to be really embraced when I was first in naturopathic school is called magnesium aspartate. Now I almost never see it and everyone now uses, like the glycinate or citrate, which are great forms and we use them as well, but aspartate back.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 48:24

So when I was in the Navy I worked in engineering spaces, so think of a lot of loud machinery, always in the background, and so because of that we used to always have what was called double hearing protection. We put those soft, squishy ones in our ears and then the hard outer ones over it. So double hearing protection, and then the Navy would routinely measure our hearing to make sure, because what would happen with that type of machinery noise is you lose your ability to hear some of the higher pitch sounds over time. And so because of that, when I got out of the Navy you know I had, you know, my exit physical, had a hearing test in around that time period and later there was a handful of studies all on noise-induced hearing laws and what magnesium could do to help safeguard our hearing from noise stress, and the form they always used in those studies was magnesium aspartate.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 49:17

So I think of that as that's our hearing protection form of magnesium. Now that doesn't mean other forms of magnesium might not do it as well, but we know that form of magnesium does a really good job. And you know back then you know me around machines. You know people in rock bands are going to loud concerts right, they would put their hearing under a lot of noise sets. But because of earbuds and you know, video game headphones and lots of other things, many of us unintentionally are stressing our ears with the equivalent of noise pollution, right. So magnesium is not talked about nearly enough for how important it is to safeguard our hearing.

Sandy Kruse: 49:59

Well, that's brilliant. I mean, I have been using the qualia magnesium. We had a strike, though, so it was a bit of a.

Sandy Kruse: 50:11

There was a Canada post, there was a strike, so it was a bit of a delay. But it's interesting that you talked about the taurine, because I actually started adding that into my own stack and my husband's, and now with qualia, because I did do a lot of research on taurine but nobody talks about it, and so I love that you guys added that. Now, another form I want to ask you is l-threonate. That's not in your formula, is it or is?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 50:45

it no. So, um, that's a. The magnesium L-threonate is also thought of as a brain magnesium. Yes, it goes by the name. Magteen is the branded name and it's a patented form. The company that um owns that patent. To use that ingredient you need to use a certain amount of it, which would have prevented us from doing our portfolio approach, and their studies are reasonable studies. But what they measured was magnesium changes in CSS, cerebral spinal fluid, which isn't exactly the brain right when the acetal torate form that we use was actually measured brain levels changes. So I think, um, that magnesium l3 and 8 is a good form of magnesium, but in in the overrated category and that the magnesium.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 51:37

Sorry, sorry, go ahead, go ahead that the magnesium acetotorate is a much better brain form above magnesium.

Sandy Kruse: 51:45

I'm going to add to this because I won't. It's in one of my other recordings, but I never heard this until I recorded with this physician who is, you know, she's very well versed. She's written a lot of books on magnesium. Yeah, she talked about that very specifically. If you look at it, the dosage is always three capsules and typically you only get like 80 milligrams of actual elemental magnesium. A big fan of it, specifically, only because she said, you know, it's a patent, it's a lot of hype over the fact that it's a brain magnesium and she said that there's other ways that you can actually optimize the magnesium in your brain. So that's all I'm going to say about that, because I was like I was, because if you look at the price point of that, just alone that one type and only getting 80 milligrams per three capsules it's around 80 or 80 to 100. So I just had to add to that because everybody's talking about magnesium L3 and eight and it is very expensive for that one form and you don't get a lot.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 53:12

Yeah, and I think the getting. So one of the things I wanted to do was within two capsules, because two, you know, like you start to, it becomes, you know that pill fatigue right If you're taking lots and lots of capsules for other things. So I wanted to be able to get 350 milligrams of magnesium in two capsules, because that 350 to me is a sweet spot. It's the, you know what at least our government in the US would think of as the upper limit of what they recommend from supplements, and it puts you with what you would have in a diet into a pretty optimized area and maps to what's often used in studies. So you know, the having to take more capsules and get less magnesium just wouldn't have been congruent with what I was trying to do personally, and you know, I know our magnesium works, so that's good, that's good, and you know, like I said, I've been looking at magnesium for many, many years, so I have to get.

Sandy Kruse: 54:13

We talked about symptoms of not enough. What would be symptoms of too much, or is that even something that happens?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 54:22

Yeah, I mean you'd have to go a lot of like a lot like grams of magnesium to get to too much for most people. And part of the reason is we mentioned that bioavailable piece like the absorption. So what naturally happens and this goes into the trust your body category is our body's pretty wise at things. So if we, you know like, I'm just going to put out a number, so don't think of this as a real factual number, but directionally right. So if, say, maybe on average we're going to absorb 40% of the magnesium we take from you know, whatever we're supplementing, if our body was low in magnesium it would absorb more. If it had plenty of magnesium in its tissues, it would absorb a lower percentage, right? So it's already got that ability for magnesium, for iron, for a lot of minerals. So that's one of the checks and balances.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 55:12

If we don't need as much, more is just going to now go down to the lower digestive system used by the gut microbiome or just eliminated in our stool. And then the next fallback I said was what's in circulation, right? So if we take a massive amount and that goes up too much, we just urinate out more of that magnesium. So, because of that, within at least a range of sanity amounts of magnesium.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 55:41

The innate checks and balances we have keep us in a good place, but what ends up happening if you're taking a lot more than you need? You're just wasting a lot of that magnesium. It's either not going to get absorbed or it's going to be flushed away in the urine. So for most people it's not a more is better. It's that Goldilocks principle, right? We want to put ourselves more in the zone of we're getting what's going to optimize our tissue levels levels, and I think you know the amount in two capsules of quality magnesium for most people, especially if someone's you know more the turtle versus the hare approach, you know like not needing changes in a day, then you know you'll get there in a really safe way.

Sandy Kruse: 56:23

Okay, so magnesium wouldn't be. You know how fat soluble vitamins like you have to be careful with vitamin A and vitamin E because they get stored, so magnesium would typically just be excreted if your body yeah, it's.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 56:43

I mean we can only store. So I've seen an amount and it's going to matter on our body size, I'm sure, health and other things. But we only can hang on to somewhere between, say, 22 to 28 grams on average of magnesium in our bones and our muscle tissues. So we just need to make sure those tanks stay full. Right, it's not. You know, if we're taking, say, a gram of magnesium a day and we were really low, we'll fill those tanks up maybe faster, but once they're pretty full we just need to do a good nutritional amount to make sure they stay full.

Sandy Kruse: 57:20

Okay, yeah, I love it. So you kind of covered off why magnesium from qualia is different because it has many different forms. Can you just run down all of them? We talked a little bit about taurine, or taurate, acetyl taurate, um. Can you?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 57:41

just run. So we've got um, the magnesium aspartate. So I think of that, as you know, the hearing, magnesium, the brain, right? Um, well, magnesium aspartate, the to help our hearing. We don't actually have to get the magnesium into our brain, it doesn't quite get there. Hearing is like a different compartment. Okay, we got magnesium citrate, which I call the versatile one, right, because in that study it went up in both the brain and muscles with magnesium citrate.

Sandy Kruse: 58:07

Does it make?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 58:08

you poop, though too much If you take too high, that would be one that tends to have that more laxative effect. So we wanted some, but not, like you know. Again, it's the portfolio idea, Magnesium glycinate, which again I think of as like a calming, sleepish type. The magnesium acetotorate like that to me is the best brain and the one experienced by people that run their own n of ones as maybe the most calming form of magnesium. And then we also have magnesium taurate. So without the acetyl, you know so that's, you know, just bonded to taurine we've got something called magnesium gluconate, and that one in one of the studies was the best retained form of magnesium. So we wanted to have that. Um, we've got the magnesium creatine, um chelate, right, so the creatines used really differently in the body than those other things.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 59:02

And then we've got two forms of magnesium that are magnesium with a whole bunch of trace minerals, and both from water sources, and that goes back to what we started with, right. Like you know, along with losing magnesium from our water, we've lost all these trace minerals that normally would have accompanied magnesium. So evolutionarily, magnesium would have always been packaged with trace minerals, whether it was in food or water, and we wanted to create that same packaging in our quality of magnesium. So we have a type of magnesium called Aquamin that's derived from ocean water. Off the coast of Ireland they basically suck water from the deep ocean and bring it up and then remove some of the salt, most of the salt and chloride, and then you have the magnesium with basically about 70 trace minerals from Aquaman. And then we have another magnesium. It's labeled as concentrated seawater minerals but it's from the Great Salt Lake area here in Utah and they take the dried minerals there and again get rid of some of the salt and chlorine.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 1:00:13

But that would be another form of magnesium with again like 70 trace minerals. So we have those two blends, you know, each with an abundance of trace minerals, Because we never really hear about the trace minerals and how lacking most people are and the you know the way I think of it is. We wanted to create something more like mineral water with quality magnesium, and so I wanted all of the trace minerals packaged with it. And then the last piece is we have a small amount of boron, which boron is another mineral and one that's really important for retaining magnesium. That's one of boron's jobs is, you know, helping us retain the magnesium we get in our diet and our bones and tissues. So you know, so that's our product and you know we're super thrilled to be sharing it with the world.

Sandy Kruse: 1:01:04

Brilliant, so a lot of listen. I'm in this whole world of supplements and I hear a lot of different things about heavy metals getting into a lot of the minerals. How do we know whether or not our magnesium or minerals have heavy metals? Like, would it say that it's heavy metal, tested, would it say?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 1:01:28

that it's heavy metal tested, so any reputable company is going to do that as part of GMP. So I think sometimes those things get overblown as issues. They, you know, maybe buying the cheapest one you can find on Amazon where you know it may not have been a reputable company, but you know, if it's any of the big brands that have been around for a while, the way it would work, you know. So, say, we're getting the magnesium creatine chelate, right, so we're buying that from a vendor. They're the only ones in the world that make it. With that they'll have a specification and that just means this is their target and it will have, you know, a list of the impurities, right, like the heavy metals say.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 1:02:11

And then you know, then there would be what's called the certificate of analysis, like, okay, what did you hit that target when it went through testing? And you know so we would get that as a baseline. But then we'll do our own testing as part of our qualifying the ingredient and then we test our finished products for all those things as well. And we wouldn't be alone. I, you know. I think sometimes you know the the media takes a swing or a poke at supplement industry writ large, but I think most of the I'm sure on any of the brands you would have had on you your show as a guest are all doing the best they can to make sure that they're producing exceptional quality products because they want to take them. Like you know, I want to take our products, so I want them to meet my standards, your standards, and to really work for your listeners and my friends and family.

Sandy Kruse: 1:02:59

Agreed and you know, even working with clients, there were brands that were very specific, brands that we would recommend versus, you know, buying it off Amazon or off the Walmart shelves. I mean they're, they're. I don't mean to say everybody loves Walmart, everybody loves Costco, but there's just some things that you just want to really be sure that it's clean, right for you before you just buy it off the shelf because it's cheap. That's all I'm saying.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 1:03:37

Yeah, and most things you know to. To get to cheap, corners are often cut and certain things are sacrificed. So you know, if you can make the you know an investment in something that's, you know, a better quality in almost any area. Right Like I, you know, think about stocks and investing as one of my hobbies. Right and I, when I was first into it, it'd be like, oh, what stocks like that I can buy for like a dollar a share. And we're now it's like what's, what's the highest quality company I can invest in. So I think of it the same with supplements and with health.

Sandy Kruse: 1:04:12

I agree. Food. You don't want to skimp on Supplements. You want to make sure that you're buying quality. You know there's a few things that you know you're putting inside your body. You want to make sure it's decent. So now I think, kind of covered off almost everything. Do you have anything that you want to add that we missed?

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 1:04:36

No, I would just say you know, I would invite any of the listeners that were intrigued. On the qualyalifecom website, I wrote a fairly long blog about the qualia magnesium product, a bit about why magnesium is important. Um, you know something about each of the forms that are in it and why I chose them, so you know I want to invite any interested listeners to read that. And then we're really active on instagram, so you know we do a lot of educational content there and I would invite all of you to check our instagram out. And again, our company is Qualia Life and I really appreciate that you invested your time with me and Sandy today.

Sandy Kruse: 1:05:17

Thank you so much. It's just such a pleasure meeting you and I'm glad we had this discussion. Thank you very much.

Dr. Gregory Kelly: 1:05:25

My pleasure.

Sandy Kruse: 1:05:29

My pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit and always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bringing these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.