Magnesium has many benefits throughout all the body’s vital functions. From nerves to cells to muscles, magnesium is hard at work regulating and promoting proper function.
Helps Increase Energy
Magnesium is used to create energy. This means that without enough magnesium, you don’t have the energy you need and can suffer from fatigue more easily. Inadequate magnesium intake also means you tire more quickly and need a higher level of oxygen during exercise.
Calms Nerves & Anxiety
Magnesium is vital for GABA function, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that produces “happy hormones” like serotonin. Certain hormones regulated by magnesium are crucial for calming the brain and promoting relaxation, which is one reason why magnesium deficiency can lead to sleeplessness or insomnia.
Treats Insomnia & Helps You Fall Asleep
Magnesium can help quiet a racing mind and make it easier to get a good night’s sleep. Magnesium can assist you to increase you sleeping time, make it easier to fall asleep, help to increase melatonin (our sleeping hormone) and lowering our cortisol levels which are associated with stress.
Helps With Digestion by Relieving Constipation
Low levels of magnesium in the body is associated with constipation. Magnesium helps to relax muscles within the digestive tract, including the intestinal wall, which controls your ability to go to the bathroom. Magnesium helps neutralise stomach acid and moves stool through the intestines, having adequate magnesium is a natural way to help you go!
Relieves Muscle Aches and Spasms
Magnesium has an important role in neuromuscular signals and muscle contractions. When you don’t acquire enough magnesium, your muscles can actually go into spasms. Magnesium helps muscles to relax and contract, and also enables you to move around. Additionally, magnesium balances calcium within the body, which is important because overly high doses of calcium, usually from supplements, can cause problems associated with muscle control including controlling the heart. While calcium is often taken in high quantities, magnesium usually is not at adequate levels. This can result in the potential for intense muscle pains, weakness, cramps, contractions and weakness.
Regulates Levels of Calcium, Potassium and Sodium
Together with other electrolytes, magnesium regulates diverse biochemical reactions in the body. Magnesium plays a role in the active transport of calcium and potassium ions across cell membranes. This makes magnesium vital to nerve impulse conductions, muscle contractions and normal heart rhythms.
Important for Heart Health
Magnesium is very important for heart health. The highest amount of magnesium within the whole body is in the heart. Magnesium works with calcium to support proper blood pressure levels and prevent hypertension. Without proper balance of magnesium to other minerals like calcium, a heart attack can even occur due to severe muscle spasms.
Prevents Migraine Headaches
Because magnesium is involved in neurotransmitter function and blood circulation, it can help control migraine headache pain by releasing reducing hormones and constriction of the blood vessels that raises blood pressure. Several studies show that when sufferers of migraines increase magnesium, their symptoms improve.
Helps Prevent Osteoporosis
Magnesium is needed for proper bone formation and influences the activities of osteoblasts and osteoclasts that build healthy bone density. Magnesium also plays a role in balancing blood concentrations of vitamin D, which is a major regulator of bone homeostasis. A higher magnesium intake correlates with increased bone mineral density in both men and women according to several studies.
Written by
Jenny Charlesworth – Nutritionist
GradDip Hum Nutr
