The Top 5 Ways to Increase Magnesium in Your Diet & Why You Should Start Today

Magnesium is one nutrient you're probably not getting enough of. Stay tuned, I'll tell you why that is and where to find it in your diet. I'm Dr. Blake Shusterman. I'm a board-certified kidney doctor. I'm also the cooking doc, and everything we talk about here is just for information. This is not medical advice. Make sure you like, subscribe, and share so you never miss a new recipe or a new health tip. Not getting enough magnesium in your diet can impact your health in a lot of different ways, including on your kidneys. The first way to increase magnesium is to increase it in your diet, and you may not know that you're not getting enough magnesium because it doesn't always correlate to your blood levels of magnesium. We'll often check a blood test to see what a person's actual magnesium level is, and just because the level in the blood is okay doesn't mean that they're getting enough throughout their diet to actually make sure you have enough magnesium stores in the body. So whether or not your magnesium levels are low, you probably need to increase the magnesium. My favorite sources of magnesium are nuts and seeds. So we're going to start with these cashews here. Cashews are very high in magnesium, and what I have here is just plain roasted cashews. There's no salt on them. That takes a little bit of getting used to if you're used to only eating salty nuts. So this may sound crazy, but I used to come home and reach my hand into a bag of potato chips, and I still do that sometimes, but I also sometimes reach my hand into a bag of cashews or a jar of cashews that I keep in my closet. You can really get used to them. They can hit that craving really quickly, and though they may not taste as good as potato chips at the beginning, you get used to them pretty fast, and they crunch good too. Number two, sunflower seeds. There are a couple ways you can get sunflower seeds into your diet. The first is you can be like a baseball player and just throw a whole lot of them in your mouth and spit out the seeds. That's awfully fun, but it makes a mess. I personally like to get my sunflower nutrition from sunflower butter, which I have here. I use that to spread on whole grain toast most mornings with some slices of banana and some seeds sprinkled on top. It's a perfect way to get me through the first six hours of my day if I don't have time to eat lunch. Fills me up, gives me fiber, gives me magnesium, really starts me out on the day with a healthy eating first meal. Next is my favorite. Number three, hemp hearts. These little nutrition powerhouses I keep in a bag in my fridge, and I put them on a couple different things. I talked about the toast with bananas and sunflower butter. I sprinkle hemp hearts on top. When I'm making waffles, whole grain waffles, I top them with fruit and some hemp hearts. Just a couple tablespoons of hemp hearts on top of your meals will give you plant-based protein, will give you magnesium. Number four is chia seeds. Now you have to know how to cook chia seeds and use them correctly, otherwise they can taste really weird. This is what they look like, these tiny little things here. You could sprinkle them on top of salads or on top of the toast or on top of the waffles, but what I really like to do is make a chia seed pudding. A chia seed pudding is really easy. You mix it with your favorite milk. I like to use oat milk or almond milk. You stir it really good, let those chia seeds kind of spread out in the milk, and then over the course of a couple hours, they'll actually soak up that water and you'll get like a pudding texture. Now don't eat chia seed pudding thinking it's going to be like regular pudding. Nothing like that. Much different, much healthier. Definitely take some changing in your taste buds to understand the flavor and the texture. Really, the texture is the hardest part to get used to, but lots of good associated with chia seeds. You can find a couple recipes for chia seed pudding on my website, cookingdoc.com. Lastly, pepitas. Pepitas are pumpkin seeds. For a long time, I thought pepitas were some kind of pepper, but it turns out, no, they're pumpkin seeds, and they're not the kind of pumpkin seeds that you kind of scoop out of the pumpkin on Halloween. They're a little different type. They're smaller. You can see them. You can get them roasted with a little bit of salt or without salt. They're really good too. Again, really high source of magnesium. The thing about all these foods is that they will allow you to empower yourself in the face of health challenges. So if you're dealing with things like diabetes or high blood pressure or kidney disease, learning to eat things that can actually benefit your health can really make you feel accomplished. So that's why I talk about this here, and that's why it's important to learn to eat a little bit like a squirrel or a bird. Of course, food isn't the only way to increase your magnesium. You can also take supplements, and every snake oil salesman or nutrition guru on the internet or on TV is probably trying to sell you magnesium supplements. I don't know that anybody can tell you which magnesium supplement is better than another, but try to find a trusted source, whatever that means, and get your magnesium supplements from them. Now, let's step back and talk a little bit about what magnesium actually does and why it's important. Magnesium is involved in more than 300 enzymatic reactions in the body. It does a whole host of different things. Magnesium helps in building proteins. It helps in maintaining bone health. It helps in keeping your blood sugars levels down by helping with insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity. It also helps lower your blood pressure and can lower your risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke through a variety of different mechanisms. You probably also have taken magnesium maybe when you're constipated. You know it can make the bowels move, and it also can impact your heart health and the way the muscles transmit the signals throughout the body. Without magnesium, we'd be in a lot of trouble. Diets that are low in magnesium have been associated with blood pressures that are too high, and at the same time, if you eat more magnesium, you may see that your blood pressure goes down some. The magnesium may work to relax your blood vessels, and that lowers your blood pressure throughout the body. Now, you may not get a huge benefit, but increasing your magnesium may lower the blood pressure by three to four millimeters of mercury, and every little bit counts when you're trying to get your blood pressure below the range where it increases your risk for things like heart attack and stroke. The body regulates magnesium very tightly. Most of the magnesium is stored in the bones, but the body knows how to pull it out of the bones, take it out of your diet, shift it through the body so that there's exactly the amount that your body needs to do all these important things. But if you don't have enough magnesium kind of stored throughout your body or in your diet, then some of these reactions may not be able to function on all cylinders, and you may have detrimental effects on a number of different systems throughout your body. Magnesium foods are also packed with fiber, and fiber is really an unsung hero of a healthy diet. They're also full of plant proteins, and they also are high in potassium. The only thing that may cause hesitation is if you have severe kidney disease and you have to limit the potassium in your diet because some of these magnesium foods also are really high in potassium. Thanks so much for watching today. I'm Dr. Blake Schusterman. I'm a board-certified kidney doctor, and I'm the author of The Cooking Doc's Kidney Healthy Cooking, a modern 10-step guide to preventing and managing kidney disease. You can find it on my website, cookingdoc.com. Make sure you subscribe to my channel so you never miss a new recipe or a new health tip, and I will see you next time.