Magnesium

Vitamins and minerals are essential to life. They are needed on a daily basis to nourish the trillions of cell in our bodies. Magnesium is one such nutrient, an essential mineral.

Why is magnesium so important? It is involved in more than 300 essential metabolic processes throughout the body, including the assistance of transporting calcium into our bones.

Adequate Daily Intake of Magnesium

As always, you want to get as many nutrients a possible from your diet — the foods you eat on a daily basis. Foods rich in magnesium include: nuts, green vegetables, grains, legumes, and fish.

The recommended dietary allowance for magnesium is 420 mg for adult males and 320 mg for adult females. Many nutritional experts estimate we need much more to ensure an optimal daily intake of magnesium — anywhere from 500 – 875 mg per day.

So let’s look at a good source of magnesium: spinach. One cup of spinach (30g) contains 23.7 mg of magnesium. But does it really?

What’s in the Soil?

Minerals found in foods come from the soil. This includes virtually all meats since farm animals are predominantly fed grains. At the end of World War II, farming practices changed significantly. The use of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium) fertilizers skyrocketed. Traditional farming practices that preserved the nutrient content of soils became obsolete.

The nutrient content in today’s farmland is significantly decreased. That translates into a reduction in the nutrient content in all foods.

California v. Iowa

Let’s get back to spinach. Last week you went to your grocery store and bought spinach grown in California. This week you stop at a different store that sources spinach from Iowa. Does the spinach salad you made last week contain the same amount of magnesium as this week’s? More? Less?

The right answer is that no one knows. Mineral content in soils can vary widely from one neighboring section to another, let alone farms several states or provinces apart.

One thing that is certain: there was much more magnesium in a spinach salad served by your grandmother forty years ago.

The point of all this is that to enjoy optimal health, we need optimal nutrition. That means we need to nourish our bodies with high amounts of vitamins and minerals, like magnesium, every day.

But we have no way of knowing how much of all these vital nutrients we obtain from our food on a daily basis. How much magnesium did your food provide today? How much zinc? Vitamin C? How about yesterday? Last Tuesday?

Again, we don’t know.

So how do you guarantee you get that optimal daily dosage of magnesium, zinc, vitamin C and the other forty plus nutrients with which you need to fuel the cells of your body?

In addition to healthy eating practices, you need to add quality nutritional supplements to your diet to ensure optimal nutrition every day. This is the only way to guarantee your cells get what they need to do their jobs and to stay healthy.