Magnesium Critical to Youth & Longevity

Do you want to preserve your youth and age gracefully?

Learn how we age due to cellular damage, and how our innate cellular protective systems require magnesium. Magnesium deficiency accelerates aging.

Page Overview:

This page shows us the mechanism of how a human ages. By looking at this process, we see how magnesium is critical to slow our aging, while maintaining the health of every nerve, muscle, and organ in our body.

The immortal human?

The reason why we can live for many decades, is because our body is constantly regenerating itself. What exactly does this mean?

It means that the innate intelligence that fuels all our bodily processes, can sense whenever one of our cells dies, because then another cell divides into two new cells to make up for the loss. In fact, in the time it takes to read this paragraph, the average human body replaces many millions of cells.

Let’s look at our lungs for example. The cells found deep inside the lungs renew every 12 months. Technically we have a completely new set of lungs every year. This should make us wonder why we aren’t immortal. We’ll get to this soon.

Every one of our organs and body parts has various types of cells, and each type of cell has a different lifespan and thus renewal rate. Here are a few examples:

  • Cardiomyocites: heart muscle cells have up to 20 year lifespans before being replaced
  • Our skin cells die and renew every 2-4 weeks
  • Our entire skeleton renews itself every ten years
  • Our red blood cells die off every 4 months
  • Our head hair lasts between 3-6 years for males and females respectively

So now the question arises, why are we not immortal if every time one of our cells dies off, another one divides into two cells, to replace it? Shouldn’t this regeneration keep us alive forever?

The biological process of aging

The reason this process doesn’t keep us alive forever, is because each cell has a limited number of times that it can divide. What is that determines this limiting factor? It’s a section of the cell’s DNA called a telomere. To help you fully grasp this, we first need to understand three main points:

  1. Every time a cell divides, it must replicate its own DNA so the two new cells will both have a complete set. (DNA is the instruction manual that will allow the cell to carry out its daily functions).
  2. Whenever a cell is about to replicate its DNA, all the DNA coils up into 23 bundles called chromosomes.
  3. These chromosomes are then replicated and each new cell receives it’s own 23 bundles of DNA.

Here is the limiting factor:

At the end of every chromosome, there is a protective cap made of generic DNA code. This generic ending section of our cells’ DNA is called a telomere.

Every time a cell divides, the telomere gets shorter. Eventually after enough cell divisions, the length of our telomere becomes insufficient and the cell can no longer replicate itself to replace other dying cells. Then as the cells of that particular body part continue to die without being replaced by cell division, the body part begins to deteriorate in functionality and structure, in turn leading to diseases and/or death.

The key to slower aging

The key to stop ourselves from aging prematurely and looking and feeling older than we should be, is to maximize each of our cells’ lifespans so that less cell divisions happen over time, and our telomeres stay longer.

Just because a lung cell has a 3 week life span does not mean that it will last the full 3 weeks if we smoke cigarettes. Just because an intestinal cell has a 3 day lifespan does not mean that it will last the full 3 days if we eat McDonalds and other toxic/synthetic foods frequently. If our cells are dying prematurely, then others are dividing more frequently to replace them, and our telomeres are getting shorter, at a faster rate.

The true key to aging slowly, and looking and feeling young into our later years, is to stop sabotaging our cells. Let them live out their maximum potential lifespans. Not only is a healthy lifestyle needed, but this is simply not possible without magnesium, because our body needs it for practically all the processes that keep the cell from dying.

Magnesium prevents cell death

Our cells have an innate intelligence that allows them to self destruct (apoptosis) if they have suffered too much damage and become too dysfunctional. While apoptosis is essential to preventing the replication of cancerous cells, the best outcome is not giving the cell a reason to self-destruct prematurely in the first place, instead letting it live out its full lifespan.

So why are so many of us getting sick and aging prematurely? It’s because our behaviors and environments are constantly attacking our cells. Our cells never live out their full lifespan, because in addition to this attack, they are magnesium deficient, and magnesium is needed to protect the cell from these behavioral and environmental attacks.

How does magnesium increase the lifespan of the cells?

  1. Magnesium is required for the creation of proteins which rebuild and repair the cell.
  2. Magnesium is required to make the energy molecules that fuel the reparation process.
  3. Magnesium is required for the production of our body’s most abundant innate antioxidant: Glutathione.
  4. Magnesium is responsible for cellular repair, recycling, and regeneration during our sleep, because it is needed to make the hormones that facilitate these anti aging processes, such as Melatonin, Growth Hormone, and DHEA.
  5. Magnesium deficiency directly causes cellular inflammation by spiking parathyroid hormone which causes our bones to release calcium into your soft-tissue cells, where the calcium hardens and inflames them.
  6. Magnesium deficiency directly causes inflammation because it is needed for the most critical phases of converting our food into energy. Without it, our cells’ energy production results in a higher rate of inflammatory byproducts called free-radicals.
  7. Magnesium is required for the continuous, 24/7 reparation and maintenance of our DNA, via its role in the activation of three critical DNA-repairing enzymes: DNA Ligase 1, 2, and 3.
  8. Magnesium is needed for DNA replication to make new healthy cells.

Avoid the trap

We now understand that our lifespan and how fast we age is largely influenced by how fast our telomeres shorten.

  1. The more frequently our cells divide, the more frequently our telomeres shorten.
  2. The more frequently our cells die, the more they divide.
  3. The more damage our cells incur, the sooner they die and new ones divide.
  4. The less repair and protection our cells have, the more damage they incur.
  5. All the innate processes that keep our cells from dying and thus telomeres from shortening, require magnesium.

This becomes increasingly important when we consider that scientists have now agreed it is impossible in our modern world to maintain healthy magnesium levels without supplementing:

Why Our Magnesium Levels Are Now Dropping:

Figure 1 is a general representation of the trends of the three primary factors that affect the magnesium levels in our body everyday. The fourth line represents our ability to make our own magnesium, which will always stay at zero.

  1. Total environmental stress that drains our magnesium
  2. Magnesium in our soil and healthy foods
  3. Our intestine’s ability to absorb magnesium from food and pills

Our adrenals (stress glands) are magnesium-dependent. Stress depletes magnesium, and inflames our intestine, hindering absorption of dietary magnesium. (Even a healthy gut only absorbs 30-40% of a food’s magnesium.)

This means our youth hormones and systems are competing for their magnesium not only with our other vital functions, but also with increasing amounts of environmental stress and poor intestinal Mg absorption.

Solutions & Summary:

Safe and smart magnesium supplementation

When it comes to the effectiveness of magnesium supplements, what is important is their ability to give us the magnesium ion (the charged magnesium atom on its own).  The magnesium ion is most available to humans from magnesium chloride supplements. You can also learn about the most and least effective magnesium supplements here.

In terms of absorption, many magnesium pills and powders exert laxative effects on the intestines and have absorption as low as only 4%. Liquid magnesium chloride supplements have magnesium ions that can enter our system before hitting the intestine.

Concerning the quality, safety and purity of magnesium supplements, liquid natural magnesium supplements are the most effective but are sourced from polluted waters and sold in plastic bottles containing chemicals linked with cancer, birth defects, infertility, and hormonal imbalances.

It is important to use a natural magnesium chloride supplement that is not sourced from open, polluted water, and one that is not in a plastic container. Click here to see the supplement we recommend, which surpasses all the above criteria.

Summary

The key to healthy aging is a lifestyle that limits the amount of environmental and behavioral stress that damages our cells. At the same time, it is critical to give our body the nutrients it needs to fuel all the biological processes which reduce the damage done to our cells, thus extending their lifespan, and our lifespan respectively.

We know that magnesium is central to these processes, and we also know that doctor and scientist experts have now agreed that based on the quality of even our healthiest foods, it is impossible to get enough magnesium without supplementation.

Magnesium deficiency concerns:

Most common concerns:

  1. Depression and mental function
  2. Heart disease
  3. Muscular performance
  4. Weight loss & energy
  5. Sleep
  6. Digestion
  7. Skin & youthful appearance

SUPPLEMENT GUIDE:

What to take and avoid.

For Beginners: The 4 Mg Facts

Other Critical Facts:

There are close to 100 symptoms of magnesium deficiency. See if you have any of them.