If you experience chronic stress in your job, work long hours, do shift work, are exposed to excessive Electro Magnesium Field (EMF) environment, have financial, emotional or social pressures, then you are setting yourself up for significant magnesium deficiency.
For the heart muscle’s pump-and-relax rhythm we need the right balance between calcium and magnesium (which influences the sodium-potassium pump). That doesn’t however mean they have to be in the same proportion.
It used to be thought last century that we need equal amounts of calcium in relation to magnesium and this is why many tablet manufacturers have combined magnesium and calcium. However, this is presupposing that the tablet manufacturers know exactly how much calcium and magnesium you need.
Many people today have an over-supply of calcium without enough magnesium. In this case, if you take tablets containing combined calcium and magnesium you could manifest hypercalcemia – a state of over-calcification.
Vitamin D supplementation when magnesium is low can also attract too much calcium to settle where it shouldn’t be.
Calcium can then become a bully and block the activity of the little bit of magnesium you do have because it antagonises magnesium. In this case magnesium deficiency symptoms can increase as a result of too much calcium.
The magnesium molecule is also a lot smaller than the calcium molecule and many researchers are now thinking that we may actually need twice as much magnesium as calcium in order to keep our electrolytes balanced.
Funnily enough, you can even get calcium deficiency symptoms when magnesium levels fall too low because low magnesium can inhibit the release of parathyroid hormone, which is needed to support calcium. Vitamin D (calcitriol) also works in tandem with calcium. Notably, those with both magnesium and calcium deficiency symptoms are also usually low in vitamin D.
AND, you need magnesium to synthesise vitamin D. [5] No matter which way you look at it, we depend on magnesium at every turn.
Sodium is a big thief of water, hence it is used for drying things. If you have hypertension you don’t want to be consuming too much sodium salt – especially if magnesium is low – because it can push your blood pressure up way too high by making blood less fluidic. We do need the sodium, but we need enough magnesium to control and protect the cell from over-dosing on sodium. More later about water crisis.
If your blood pressure is too low (and blood too fluidic) you may need extra sodium to increase blood volume, as this can be another cause of heart arrhythmia. If blood volume falls too low the electrical supply falters with intermittent flow of energy and consequent heart beat irregularity. Sufficient magnesium can however control electrolyte balance and therefore normalise blood pressure.
By the way, if you use sodium salt in your cooking make sure it is a whole sea salt and not refined, so that it provides a good complement of all the other trace minerals of sea water, which buffer each other. It also tastes much better in food!
When the sodium and calcium push their way into the cell after the magnesium has dropped, we can get involuntary muscle movements such as cramps, twitches and restless legs, heart arrhythmia or even heart attack.
A cell membrane that is in a depolarised state for too long can allow too much potassium to slip out and be lost in the urine, which can also cause a heart attack if too much is lost. Potassium and magnesium team up to bolster each other’s effects, so as magnesium drops lower, so does potassium, which in turn weakens the remaining magnesium.