Podcast #45 from http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2009/05/podcast-

episode-45-the-shocking-information-about-a-

compound-that-pharmaceutical-companies-really-

dont-want-you-to-know-about/

Introduction: In this podcast episode: The shocking information that

pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know,

transdermal magnesium therapy and how to improve your

mitochondrial density.

Ben: Welcome back to the www.bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast.

You know, every once in a while, I come across some type of

exercise technique or nutritional compound that I get very

excited about and this happens to be one of those times.

Today I’m going to introduce to you an entirely natural and

incredibly inexpensive compound that is all around you and

that could be used to vastly improve sports performance. I

really truly believe that a whole new world of sports medicine

and sports performance is going to explode on to the scene

when athletes and coaches discover this 100% natural and

100% legal compound that they could be using. Today you

are going to become an expert on it and when you finish

listening to this show, you’ll know everything that you need

to know about it. This is going to be one of the most exciting

podcasts that we’ve put out in quite some time. Now the

other things we’re going to go over on this show is a great

question on mitochondrial density and also fat utilization

during exercise. Before we get on to our special interview for

this week as well as our Listener Q and A, however, I do have

just a few special announcements.

Ben: This week’s Listener Q and A comes from Listener Al.

Al asks: Is there value in training hard after depleting a third or more

of your glycogen stores to improve mitochondrial density.

Ben: That’s part one of his question. And part two of his question

is…

Al asks: Can one train his or her body to preferentially utilize fats at

race pace?

Ben answers: Now for those of you who are not triathletes or those of you

who do not race, the question to answer two is still going to

be relevant because essentially what Al is asking is can you

teach your body how to burn more fat during exercise. I’m

going to answer question two first because it strikes close to

home as just yesterday in my lab I was doing an exercise

metabolic test on a father and his son. And what the

metabolic test allows me to see is how much carbohydrate

and how much fat someone is using during exercise

specifically during a graded exercise test that starts easy and

gradually gets harder. What I observed was that the son who

was a soccer player – kind of very on off, start stop interval

based sport – during the course of the test which took place

on a bicycle, he was actually cycling between carbohydrate

and fat utilization at a very regular up, down rate and so if

you looked at his graph of total calories utilized, he would

jump up and use a bunch of carbs and then he would jump

down off of carbs and use more fat, up on carbs, down on fat

and that’s a very classic profile of someone who has done a

lot of interval based training, or specifically solely almost

interval based training. In other words, somebody who’s not

necessarily aerobically trained, but has done of a lot of hard

easy efforts the same way that someone would train for

soccer. Now his dad’s carbohydrate fat profile was very long

and steady and generally a mix of fat and carbohydrates

without that cycle up and down between fat and

carbohydrates. Now, everybody burns a mix of fat and carbs

while they’re exercising. But we can see from this example

that one person had trained their body to jump back and

forth by doing intervals and one person had trained their

body to basically settle into a certain percentage of

carbohydrate and fat utilization. In this case, he was at about

I believe 30% carbohydrate, 70% fat. Now what you can do if

you want your body to preferentially utilize fats when you’re

exercising is you can include as part of your training, longer

slower exercise sessions at your peak fat burning heart rate.

If you don’t know what your peak fat burning heart rate is,

you can approximate it. It’s usually about 50 to 60% of your

maximum heart rate. You can also get it tested at a

physiology laboratory where you can find out exactly the

heart rate at which you’re burning the highest number of fat

calories. Now, if you’re doing these long slow sessions at your

fat burning heart rate, I would caution you because they’re

not going to burn a lot of calories and they’re not going to

build a lot of fitness. What they will do however is teach your

body how to utilize fats a little bit more effectively. When I

write out programs for people who are trying to lose fat, we

generally prioritize what I call metabolic resistance training

circuits or weight lifting that’s done at a little bit higher

intensity. We prioritize cardiovascular intervals because

those elevate the metabolic rate just a little bit more. But we

include these fat burning sessions in one of two ways. We’ll

either do two to three long 45 to 60 minutes fat burning

sessions during the week or else everyday in the morning

when the liver’s carbohydrate stores are empty and you can

actually jump start to those fat burning enzymes a little bit

easier. We’ll do 20 to 30 minutes of fat burning exercise

prior to breakfast on an empty stomach or in a fasted state.

So those are a couple ways that you could actually get the

body to burn fat just a little bit more preferentially during

exercise and I generally see when highly aerobically trained

athletes such as an Ironman triathlete come into my lab for

testing that those people are generally utilizing fats very

effectively or put in another way, conserving their body’s

carbohydrate stores just a little bit more effectively.

So the first part of Al’s question was is there value in training

hard after depleting a third or more of your glycogen stores

to improve mitochondrial density. Ok, I know that’s a

mouthful. Essentially what he’s asking is if you burn through

your body’s carbohydrate stores on purpose – basically

deplete your body’s carbohydrate stores and then go out and

do an exercise session that is hard, can you improve your

mitochondrial density? Well let’s go ahead and look at what

mitochondria are and what type of training has been shown

in research to actually improve your mitochondrial density

or the number of the mitochondria that are actually in your

muscles. The basic idea behind mitochondria is they’re tiny

microscopic parts of your cell. And they’re the parts of your

cell where aerobic energy production actually takes place.

And what aerobic energy production is, is it’s the use of

oxygen – when you breathe in oxygen, the mitochondria use

that oxygen to actually create essentially a gradient that

converts energy or makes energy from something called ATP.

So basically oxygen plus ATP equals energy. Essentially the

mitochondria use the oxygen to split a molecule of ATP in

your body. So what a mitochondria is it’s called an organelle.

It’s just a little part of the machinery of your cell. And they’ve

got two membranes, the mitochondria do. They’ve got an

outer membrane and an inner membrane and the outer

membrane is essentially just the surface of the actual

organelle whereas the inner membrane is the place where all

of this oxygen utilization, splitting of ATP actually occurs.

Now, endurance exercise is actually a very strong stimulus to

improve the proliferation of what are called mitochondrial

enzymes. And when these mitochondrial enzymes increase

their activity, you get an increase in your mitochondrial

density. And when you increase your mitochondrial density,

it increases the amount of time that you can perform aerobic

endurance exercise and actually mitochondria are very

popular among the anti-aging movement because the whole

idea is the more mitochondria you have, the more oxygen

you’re able to utilize, the more energy you have and the

longer you’re able to live. Now what happens is that generally

more fats are used to generate ATP when you actually

increase your mitochondrial density. And the whole idea

behind that is that endurance exercise uses quite a bit of fat

as a fuel. So if you can increase your mitochondrial density,

you can also increase the amount of fat that you burn during

exercise. So let’s look at exactly how you could increase your

mitochondrial density. The first thing that you got to

understand is that there are basically two signals that signal

your body to generate more mitochondria. One of these is

the amount of calcium that’s inside the basically the fluid

that surrounds your cells and an increase in calcium within

the cells of your skeletal muscles can actually induce what’s

called mitochondrial protein synthesis or the growth of the

mitochondria in your body. So one is to increase the amount

of calcium that’s inside the cells of the muscle. The other is to

actually reduce the amount of ATP that you have available.

Now interestingly, when you exercise very hard, what

happens is there is actually observed a calcium increase in

the muscle cell. So you get a release of calcium and that’s just

– we’re not going to get into it today – but that’s just based

on the electrochemical gradient that has to occur in order for

your muscles to create a contraction. So we get a release of

calcium when we exercise hard and that’s often one of the

reasons you feel sore after you exercise hard, is that calcium

build up. The other thing that we get is a decrease in the

amount of that ATP. And that’s the other signal that signals

mitochondria to become more dense. And the rate at which

that ATP decreases or the extent to which that ATP decreases

directly correlates to the increase in mitochondrial densities.

So in other words, the harder that you exercise, the more

likely it is that you’re going to induce an increase in your

mitochondria concentration. And there has actually been

exercise duration studies that have found that exercise

durations longer than about 60 minutes at a controlled easy

aerobic intensity actually don’t result in significant

additional mitochondrial density. Whereas very high exercise

intensities like around your VO2 that last around 30 minutes

that are for example 2 minutes hard, 4 minutes easy, very

intense 30 second all out sprints – that these will actually

increase the mitochondrial density. So the long slow aerobic

stuff does not necessarily increase the mitochondrial density.

The interval training does. And this returns to why in all the

programs that I write out for the triathletes that I train, we

include lots of intervals and then we include just enough

aerobic exercise for recovery and to teach the body how to for

example sit on a bicycle saddle for a long period of time. It’s

the same reason that most of the athletes that I work with get

away with 10 to 15 hours a week of training for Ironman

triathlon, which for a lot of people is not that much. So we

increase the mitochondrial density through decreasing that

ATP very quickly and exercising very hard. So, what we can

take away from that is actually returning to Al’s question. Let

me pull up his question here so I don’t get off topic too far. Is

there value in training hard after depleting a third or more of

your glycogen stores to improve mitochondrial density? Well

let’s ask this question. Does depleting our carbohydrate

stores to improve our mitochondrial density actually cause a

large release of calcium or does it cause a large depletion of

ATP energy stores? Well, the answer to the first is likely no.

I’ve never heard of shutting down carbohydrate availability

to a muscle actually increasing the amount of calcium

production. As far as I know, that would not induce a

calcium release by basically stripping your muscles of

carbohydrate and then exercising hard. Now the second part,

in terms of decreasing the amount of ATP that’s available,

that’s kind of an interesting thought because when your

muscles use ATP they have to regenerate more ATP. And one

of the components that’s used to produce ATP is called

NADPH. I’m not going to into the actual name. Just trust me,

the abbreviation is NADPH. Well the only way to make

NADPH is its kicked off of a part of something called the

Krebs cycle. In order for your Krebs cycle to actually occur,

sugar must be present. Basically sugar is fed into the Krebs

cycle. The Krebs cycle kicks off NADPH and that’s used to

produce more ATP that can then be split via the

consumption of oxygen during exercise. So when you think

about it, if the body doesn’t have enough sugar available,

then the Krebs cycle would actually slow down. Less NADPH

would be available. Therefore less ATP could be available.

Therefore technically you could signal a higher production of

mitochondria or increased mitochondrial density. And by

exercising hard without much sugar on board, you could

actually – if you think about it – cause that to occur to an

even quicker or greater extent. So on paper, it would actually

work. My question is if you’re really feeling starved and you

don’t have enough sugar on board, are you going to be able

to train hard enough? Are you going to enjoy your training,

which is a big part of it and are you going to be able to avoid

overtraining when you’re exercising hard without much fuel

on board? So really interesting question, Al. And I guess my

final thought would be I would like to see a research study

that actually compares glycogen depleted people with

glycogen sufficient people and see if there’s a difference in

the mitochondrial density generated, you know after a four

or six or eight week period of cardiovascular interval training.

So, there you go. If you have a question for me for the

podcast, you can call toll free 8772099439 and you can leave

me a voice mail. I will play the voice mail on the show. That’s

also interesting. You can Skype me at pacificfit or you can

email ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com. So let’s go ahead and

move on to the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The

awesome interview on transdermal magnesium therapy with

Dr. Mark Cirkis.

Ben: Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and on the other

line I have a doctor who is one of the most prolific writers in

medicine. He holds the honorary title Doctor of Oriental

Medicine. He was actually one of the first nationally certified

acupuncturists in the nation. His name is Dr. Mark Cirkis.

He was trained in acupuncture and oriental medicine at the

Institute of Traditional Medicine, Santa Fe, New Mexico and

the School of Traditional Medicine, New England in Boston.

And for many years, Dr. Cirkis has been researching the

human condition and the causes of disease. He has quite a

bit of research under his belt but his primary focus recently

has been looking into environmental toxicity and he’s written

extensively on poisons in the environment and our foods, in

our medicine, even in our dental practices. And he’s the

director of the International Medical Veritas Association

which is advocating radical changes in orthodox medicine

and in addition to some of these qualifications, Dr. Cirkis

happens to have been doing quite a bit of study in the field

of magnesium oil and sports performance. And today, we’re

going to talk quite a bit about some of Dr. Cirkis’s research

and some of the things he’s been involved in but also some

things that most coaches, most athletes, most teams

especially in the United States are completely unaware of

when it comes to some of the powerful things we can be

doing to enhance sports performance and recovery. So Dr.

Cirkis, thank you for coming on the show today.

Dr. Mark Cirkis You’re welcome Ben. Pleasure to be here.

Ben: Can you tell me a little bit about your background. Expound

on that just a bit and what you’ve been up to in terms of the

type of medicine that you practice and the type of research

that you do?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well, to sum it all up. I’m basically founding a new medical

approach and it’s called natural allopathic medicine. Natural

and allopathic would normally be thought of as an oxymoron.

Two words that don’t normally go together. But in my

research I found kind of I stole in the dark of night into the

emergency rooms around the world and the intensive wards

and discovered that their most effective medicines are

actually natural and not pharmaceuticals. Principally it’s

magnesium chloride or magnesium sulfate, iodine and

sodium bicarbonate. These are substances that are only

considered legally medicines when you inject it in the

emergency room, but you can buy sodium bicarbonate in the

supermarket. You can buy iodine in a pharmacy or

supermarket and magnesium chloride or what is called

magnesium oil – is something kind of new. It’s only been out

basically the last five or six years. Though the product I

endorse is 250 million years. It’s been around in nature for a

long time. So, I’ve basically applied these substances and a

full protocol behind it, but this is part of my holy trinity of

medicine – these three substances. And I apply these

substances that can save your life especially magnesium

chloride and sodium bicarbonate in a heartbeat if you’re

having a heart attack or a stroke or chronic disease.

Ben: Holy trinity of medicine. Now what were the three again?

Just to clarify to the audience?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Magnesium chloride, which is something that’s abundant in

the sea. Iodine which is an old universal medicine. 400 years

ago it was one of the most popular medicines along with

medical marijuana and sodium bicarbonate which is

something they use all the time in chemotherapy, emergency

rooms, intensive care wards. Something you can brush your

teeth with, use as deodorant. You can wash your refrigerator

with it. Very common, bake food with it. But it’s also when

used appropriately, a very strong medicine.

Ben: So what is magnesium? And why is it important?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well, magnesium… I have a chapter. I’m redoing my first

book which is called Transdermal Magnesium Therapy. It

was the first book actually in print.

Ben: Transdermal Magnesium Therapy?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Therapy, right.

Ben: Is that book available, for example on Amazon? Where can

people find that?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yes, it’s on Amazon. Right now I’m coming out with a second

edition. I have a whole line of eBooks on my IMVA site and I

have two new books on magnesium. One is called

Magnesium – The Ultimate Heart Medicine and the other

one is called Magnesium Medicine. That work will be

integrated into the second edition of the Transdermal book.

But basically, magnesium – I have a chapter in one of the

new books called the Lamp of Life. And without magnesium,

there is no life on this planet. Why is that? Magnesium is the

atom. It is the metal that is in the very heart of chlorophyll

and it enables chlorophyll and plants to capture light energy

and turn it into chemical energy. Without that there is no life.

So probably one of the reasons we need to eat plants, we

need to eat vegetables is we get a lot of magnesium from that

and the body takes the chlorophyll, knocks out the

magnesium, takes out the magnesium and puts in iron and

you can have hemoglobin. So it’s a very social relationship.

But basically magnesium is the oil of the body. You take an

engine and take out the oil or deplete the oil down to 20%

and you (inaudible) the engine. It’s the same with

magnesium. It’s involved in everything. 325 enzyme

reactions. Cell permeability, barrier integrity, insulin

production, insulin resistance, mitochondrial production –

so ATP production, detoxification, everything. So, when you

start running down on magnesium, here’s an analogy. The

body stops working at its high performance. Performance

level starts dropping. Physiology gets compromised and

everything becomes more difficult for the body to do.

Ben: So we’re talking about essentially a dry bike chain with no oil.

Dr. Mark Cirkis Exactly.

Ben: It might still go around but it’s not going to go around

smoothly?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Right, and the more drops, the more chance of breakage.

Basically when you have a heart attack – almost everybody

has diabetes has a heart attack has very low magnesium

levels. When somebody dies of a heart attack, what are they

dying of? Are they dying of a heart attack or magnesium

deficiency? When an athlete drops dead in the middle of a

marathon from a heart disease – it’s really a confirmation of

two things. It’s magnesium deficiency and a tremendous

concentration of mercury in the heart.

Ben: You know this is something I wanted to get into a little bit

later on in the interview, but because you brought it up and

before we go a little bit deeper into magnesium deficits and

before we talk about health, recovery and human

performance – when you talk about heart attacks in the

athletic population and magnesium deficiencies, that strikes

very close to home right now because yesterday one of the

greatest triathletes in America – Steve Larson – died of a

heart attack during or after a run. Why would magnesium be

so important in the function of the heart of athletes during

exercise? Why physiologically or where physiologically does

magnesium actually help?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well it’s not just during exercise. But exercise compounds

the problem. Magnesium – if your magnesium levels in the

blood drop, if they drop far enough which is just a little bit a

person will have a heart attack. That’s all there is to it. You

need magnesium to – the heart muscles themselves need the

most energy of all the tissues of the body especially in

athletes. They’re cranking out… you need optimal

physiological performance. If your magnesium is low and

you have a build up of calcium in the heart tissues. Calcium

is kind of something that is very rigid where magnesium is

very soft. The Chinese used to call magnesium thousands of

years ago the beautiful metal. Calcium is the opposite.

Things get very gooey and very solid and nutrition can’t get

into the heart cells and poisons from respiration can’t get out

because the cell walls get calcified so things don’t go in and

out so easily. And then the magnesium ATP doesn’t keep up.

So it’s a set up. People are not dropping dead everyday right

and left from it, but you increase your risk factor when you

have a drop in magnesium levels. And the other complication

is mercury. People – the United States government does not

want anybody to know…

Ben: I lost you for just a second as you were saying that the United

States government does not want anyone to know what?

Dr. Mark Cirkis I’ll start right there. The United States government does no

want anybody to know that there’s a huge problem with

mercury in the United States. In the whole northern

hemisphere, that the United States coal industry, electric

power generation is putting 50 tons of mercury in the air.

The dentists are putting these toxic waste dumps in people’s

mouths. The amalgam which is 50% mercury… and they’re

promoting flu shots which have mercury. These things get

concentrated in the cells where everybody in America is

mercury toxic. And they’re not giving anybody a clue to this.

They’re not giving anybody an idea on how to detoxify frm

the mercury poisoning.

Ben: How does this tie into magnesium?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well it ties into what we’re talking about – a heart attack.

There’s a case I remember where an athlete died and they

did a tissue analysis of his heart and it had 22,000 times the

normal concentration of mercury. So this is part of the

problem. This magnesium deficiency and toxicity create

these sudden heart attacks when these athletes just fall over.

The mercury gets more concentrated in the heart tissues for

some reason and probably more so in athletes because

they’re really using their hearts and that particular tissue to

an extreme extent.

Ben: Well that’s what I wanted to ask you. These magnesium

deficits, I’m assuming and I imagine the response is going to

be yes but I was going to ask you are magnesium deficits

common and if so, is the deficit more common among the

athletic population?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well, an athlete will use more magnesium so they will need

to eat more magnesium. And yes, officially 67% of the

American population is magnesium deficient. But the way

they measure that is using blood serum tests and the blood

does not budge. The body conserves magnesium in the blood

so you don’t have a heart attack and it will suck out all of the

magnesium from the rest of the tissues. So, whenever they’re

testing you very rarely see the magnesium deficiency and yet

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledges that

67% of the population are not getting enough magnesium so

I would assume easily over 99.5% of the population are

having a problem with magnesium. Their oil levels are not

topped off. They’re deficient and it’s a problem and it’s one of

the basic reasons that chronic disease is increasing. One of

the reasons people die because of something like a flu is

because you put some stress on the engine and the oil is low

and something pops. You pop a gasket.

Ben: Now I seem to remember at some point in one of my science

courses at university that we learned that magnesium is

stored in the human body. Now if magnesium is stored in the

human body kind of similar to a fat soluble vitamin, how

could a magnesium deficit be so common?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well because your intake – it’s not a micromineral like

selenium, it’s a macromineral. According to the federal

government, you need 500 mgs a day. So if you’re eating only

300, you’re running a deficit of 200 a day, you very quickly

will year by year and month by month be running down your

stores. Just like you’re running an engine. You run down the

oil. You go from New York to California and you’re going to

be using up probably two quarts of oil. Everyday we need to

eat magnesium and a background reality is that the mineral

and vitamin contents of food has been decreasing

dramatically the last 50 years for many reasons. So when you

eat an orange or you eat any kind of food – it’s not going to

have the same vitamin C content it had 50 years ago.

Magnesium is not refurbished into the soil. They don’t

fertilize – very few people fertilize the soil with magnesium

which could be… so (inaudible) farming and modern farming

methods is depleting the amount of minerals inside the food.

So it’s almost impossible today actually to eat and get

everything you need. And this is critical for the athlete

because their performance is dependent on it. Injuries with…

we’re getting to this – the magnesium – so transdermal

magnesium therapy is ideal for athletes because yes you can

drink magnesium chloride but you can put it on the skin like

you would sun screen and it goes right into the tissues. So if

you have a swollen knee and you just lather this stuff on and

do it three or four times a day, you’re actually treating the

local tissues and magnesium is an anti-inflammatory. Any

kind of injury creates inflammation. Magnesium is the god of

anti-inflammatories. It’s just amazing stuff and the effect is

almost immediate.

Ben: What are some dietary sources of magnesium? If I wanted to

get it from food what I would need to eat?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well you certainly would eat brown bread, organic brown

bread. Not white bread. Whole wheat rice, not white rice.

Sugar cane as opposed to white sugar. Anybody who’s eating

white sugar, white bread or white rice guaranteed – no test

needed – guaranteed magnesium deficiency.

Ben: How about seeds or nuts?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well the highest – the sesame seeds is one of the highest

sources of magnesium. Spirulina is also a very high source of

magnesium. All the organic vegetables and seeds, nuts.

Ben: What you’re saying is the soil that these types of foods are

grown in doesn’t actually contain enough of the magnesium

mineral or not enough of the magnesium gets transferred

into the fruit or the vegetable because of modern agricultural

practices?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yes. Not just magnesium. This is a universal characteristic of

the modern age. And of course it varies from location. Some

places in the world are lower in magnesium than others.

Same with selenium. There are many studies that show that

heart disease are higher in certain areas and lower in certain

areas and they correlate this with both selenium and

magnesium – basic minerals that are crucial to health.

Ben: Ok now I have an organic garden in my backyard that I get a

lot of my vegetables from. I know it’s not leeched of probably

as many minerals as typical fertilizers or a sprayed farmer’s

field is, but I’m an Ironman athlete I’m a triathlete. Am I

getting enough magnesium from the high vegetable, fruit,

seed and nut intake that I currently take in or should I be

worried about my heart or about my performance during

exercise based off what you’ve observed from a magnesium

deficiency standpoint? Especially with people who are

exercising a lot.

Dr. Mark Cirkis Where do you live? Where is your garden?

Ben: I’m in Washington State.

Dr. Mark Cirkis Washington State. Well if you lived in a pristine environment,

I could answer the question and say yes. You’d probably be

sufficient. It would still be iffy. But living where you live and

anywhere else in the United States, coming across the Pacific

Ocean is a bank of fog – of pollution coming in from China.

The mercury and many other chemical poisons – 30% of all

the pollution on the west coast of the United States is coming

from China. So and then also just being in a modern

environment is toxic. If you’re taking any kind of drugs, any

kind of vaccines or have dental amalgam, you’re using up to

defend the body from these poisons – you need minerals and

vitamins. But you need magnesium, selenium, even calcium.

You need these things to buffer and protect and help

eliminate. So just dealing with the poisons increases the need

– forget about being an athlete and pushing your body to its

limits – the toxic load is demanding more nutrition when

actually we’re getting less. Though having your own garden –

if you sprayed your garden with magnesium – with this

magnesium oil we’re going to be talking about, you’ll be

increasing the magnesium content of the foods you’re eating.

Ben: Interesting. Now is it going to give me any added benefit to

use it from an athletic standpoint or from a health or

recovery or immune system standpoint?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well I’ll tell you, I started using this magnesium – it’s called

magnesium oil which is not an oil. It’s magnesium chloride.

35% magnesium chloride and the rest is basically water. The

first time I took it – it’s the only thing I’ve ever taken in my

life where I actually felt a difference. I get on my bicycle and

after a few days of taking it, I could feel my endurance

change. I could feel my power increase. The only other thing

I’ve taken that I feel something is niacin. Take niacin and you

get a flush. You can feel it. Same with the magnesium. My

experience actually – my personal experience is when I

started doing this – got into this magnesium thing – I’d gone

back to the tennis court after… I’m 53 years old. I got back on

the tennis court after 15 years off and I’d come home

everyday in pain. I was hurting. And I have here in Brazil,

many of us even if we don’t have that much money – I have a

maid and she would give me a rubdown with this magnesium

oil. And I’d get off the table with a smile and the pain would

be gone. And I literally survived the first year of training with

magnesium. Everyday I’d come home and I’d get a

magnesium rub and it would make all the difference in the

world. So when athletes – somebody like you who’s used to

really feeling their performance – it’s like if you’re going to

go out and do a race, it makes sense to top off your oil. It

makes sense to put this magnesium all over the body not

only for performance’s sake but as a preventive against

injury because it prevents injury or treats injury because it’s

an anti-inflammatory. It goes right into the tissues. It’s a

pure tonic meaning whatever’s going wrong, whatever’s hurt

or injured – it’s going into those tissues and will support this

regeneration. It will support the detoxification. It will

support the physiology of those injured cells.

Ben: What about strength gains or muscular gains?

Dr. Mark Cirkis I would say there might be a slight – here I’m just intuiting –

strength. I think the thing a person feels more is the

endurance. Usually an athlete would have to test it out, have

other athletes testing it out and talk about strength. There’s

nothing I was doing that I could say oh I felt stronger. I felt

more powerful as far as endurance but I didn’t test that

against weights or anything like that.

Ben: Right. Is there any hormonal effect that you’re aware of from

a testosterone or cortisol standpoint?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yes. Magnesium as I say is so fundamental to physiology, it’s

involved in the whole hormonal system, in the master

hormones which break down to the other hormones. So yes,

if you’re slightly or grossly magnesium deficient, there’ll be a

hormonal problem.

Ben: Now what would be the problem – you’re talking about

perhaps doing some type of a soak or some type of a spray.

What about just taking magnesium orally versus a

supplement or via multivitamin?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well taking magnesium in a pill form is different than taking

magnesium chloride which is liquid or magnesium sulfate.

The body can absorb much easier liquid vitamins than solid

because with the solids – any kind of solid magnesium

supplement – you have to break down the magnesium. That

takes energy, that takes good levels of hydrochloric acid in

the stomach and oral absorption of magnesium is very iffy.

You maybe absorb 50% of it if you’re lucky. Some people, a

lot less. If you’re going to use magnesium as a medicine, if

you drink enough magnesium where you’re using it as a

medicine or really enhance performance – it’ll provoke

diarrhea. Like too much vitamin C. So, using it – oddly in my

book I recommend using both orally and transdermally.

Transdermally has a different effect especially to an athlete

because it gets right into the muscles. You’re bypassing the

stomach. The first doctor actually before me who was

beginning to speak about this transdermal approach is Dr.

Normal Sheely and he has a patent pending using the – only

when you put it on the skin for some unknown reason does it

stimulate the DHEA. The master hormone. Somehow the

magnesium chloride is interacting with the fatty tissues and

so we talk about the hormone situation. But if we’re athletes,

it’s a matter of using it on the body and if the whole body is

receiving it and it becomes available for the muscles… if

you’re going to do real intense sports or competition – what I

recommend actually, I have a chapter called Magnesium

Bicarbonate, which is something that exists only in the sea.

Magnesium bicarbonate together or using – which you can’t

really buy but using magnesium chloride and sodium

bicarbonate – sodium bicarbonate if you’re doing any kind of

sport, it increases your oxygen carrying capacity because it

raises the PH of the blood. And here’s another key point for

athletes. Both magnesium and the bicarbonate are essential

for the dynamics of the red blood cells and their ability to

carry oxygen. The magnesium is very intricately involved

because of this whole relationship with chlorophyll. If you

don’t have enough magnesium – the shape of the red blood

cells isn’t going to be quite perfect. Meaning it’ll reduce its

ability to carry oxygen. The bicarbonate increases CO2. I just

published a two part series on Co2. Co2 is very much linked

to oxygen capacity. If you don’t have enough Co2, you can’t

carry as much oxygen. So you take bicarbonate, which used

to be alka seltzer and there’s an immediate effect. If you take

a teaspoon of bicarbonate before you go out and workout,

you’re going to find actually right away – more oxygen

available to the cells. So you get increased performance.

Tying the magnesium bicarbonate together, you need

bicarbonate to get the magnesium into the mitochondria. So

the two together I call the ultimate mitochondrial cocktail.

So again, we’re increasing performance because we’re

increasing ATP production. So these are critical things and…

Ben: You know while I was talking to you, I looked up just a

couple of studies that I’m looking at magnesium and I

wanted to ask about these or if you were familiar with these.

There’s one here that was done at Western Washington

University on football players that found that a magnesium

supplementation increased free testosterone levels and

muscle strength in NCAA football players. I see another one

here where young athletes experienced significant increases

in endurance performance during aerobic exercise

supplementing with magnesium and both of these studies, it

looked like they used an oral magnesium. I’m just wondering

how much greater the effects would have been if they’d used

a topical application. And then there’s another one here – an

eight week training program in which athletes who

supplement with magnesium had a two and a half times

greater muscle strength gain than a placebo group. Now I’m

assuming and looking over the methods of these studies, it

looks like all of them used an oral magnesium

supplementation. However, if people were wanting to use

this transdermal magnesium to try and get some of these

metabolic or some of these strength benefits, is this

something that would be applied for example 30 minutes

prior to exercise. Is this something that needs to be used for

several months leading up to an exercise event? What are the

recommendations with transdermal magnesium?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well it’s something – for an athlete or anybody who’s either

interested in maintaining health, maximizing their health or

preventing disease or preventing sports injuries or

maximizing sports performance, using this as a regular

aspect of life is – for me magnesium is number one in my

protocol. It’s way ahead of vitamin C or calcium or anything

else that… I mean really any high performing athlete I

believe would feel – after three days of using it, they would

notice a difference. Yes, you’d use it before sports

performance. Maybe an hour before and then wash it off and

then after the performance to relax everything and it’s just –

it’s something that has to be tried. Transdermal magnesium

supplementation is the – I don’t know what word to use. It’s

the ultimate way of using it. You can inject it. You can eat it. I

dilute it and put it in my eyes. You can vaporize it right into

the lungs with a nebulizer. There are many ways of getting to

the body. But the easiest way instead of using sun lotion, just

put it all over the body or you can put it in very high

concentrations in a bath – somebody gets a sports injury, the

first thing you want to do is put it all over their body. Get

them into a hot bath and throw in three, four, five pounds

magnesium chloride. It’s going to be a mineral.

Ben: Now what about cramping or spasming in the body? I realize

with the heart, magnesium is crucial for that electrochemical

gradient but what about for athletes who are dealing with

spasms during exercise, from electrolyte loss or dealing with

chronic cramp in the hamstring – things of that nature –

would magnesium be indicated in a situation like that?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well yes magnesium, but not just magnesium. You have to

pay attention to make sure you have a balance of calcium,

which you have if you have a good diet. If you’re eating a lot

of dairy, but eating bananas to get potassium is very crucial.

You could be – cramps could be from low magnesium and

also from that too. So when you get to dealing with cramps

you got to look at the full spectrum of minerals. Something

like spirulina is very helpful for that. Eating good salts like

Himalayan sea salt or dead sea salt. Of course your organic

vegetables. You need really a balance. You could be using a

lot of magnesium and still get cramps and that means you

got to be looking at the other minerals at the same time.

Ben: Now with the health of bones – bone density – I know that

mineral intake is very important from that perspective. Is

there a role that magnesium or transdermal magnesium has

to play in for example the healing of stress fractures of the

enhancement of bone density?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Absolutely. If you look at the difference between human

teeth and the teeth of a tiger and the tusk of an elephant –

the thing that makes bone harder and harder if you look at

these bones – the higher the magnesium, the stronger the

bone. Elephant tusk or tiger tooth is very high in magnesium

compared to a human tooth. So yes, magnesium is

instrumental in bone density and magnesium controls

calcium also. If you have a low profile of magnesium then

calcium becomes a big problem.

Ben: Do you have any experience with athletes actually using

magnesium and seeing breakthroughs in sports performance

or seeing breakthroughs in their events.

Dr. Mark Cirkis Ben, this has been a frustration of mine. I wrote my only

essay on sports medicine and magnesium – it must be from

my first book – three, three and a half years ago. I have been

wanting to break open this story to the sports world ever

since then and the opportunity – I tried once or twice to

create an opportunity and it just didn’t happen. It’s a sad

thing to me.

Ben: It’s happening right now. I’m hoping that a lot of people will

listen to this. But yeah from a sports performance standpoint,

with what you’re telling me it amazes me that I’m not

flipping open Runner’s World magazine or Triathlete

magazine or any of these publications that are associated

with endurance sports – a sport with a high amount of

attrition – I never see magnesium or minerals. I’ve never

come across anything like transdermal magnesium oil.

Dr. Mark Cirkis The only thing I can think of is sports doctors in sports

medicine are just like all the other doctors – the oncologists,

the pediatrician…

Ben: For just a second there I lost you. You were talking about the

oncologists and the pediatricians?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yeah. I think one explanation is that the sports doctors –

allopathic sports doctors are very similar to their brethren –

the oncologists and the pediatricians. They just want to

remain ignorant. They don’t want to educate even

themselves or the people they deal with to these… it’s

amazing. It’s just so amazing. I mean especially with sports

medicine with people dropping dead from a heart attack that

a sports doctor wouldn’t finally say look, let’s look at the

magnesium levels and so yeah. It’s amazing. And I hope…

you take a sports club – a team, competitive team – you take

the whole team and you give them the right minerals –

magnesium bicarbonate and do it the right way – man, the

whole team is going to raise in performance. They’re going to

– I wouldn’t want to come up against them or be at a

disadvantage on this level. And for sports injury, if you’re

getting injured or to prevent the tragedy of an athlete when

they hurt themselves. The agony of that. A lot of it can be

avoided by just topping up the oil. Keeping the magnesium

levels to their maximum levels and the transdermal effect for

an athlete in this sense is optimum. It’s because you’re

putting this stuff right onto the tissues that would get

possibly injured.

Ben: Yeah and you know what, I’ve come across a couple of

interesting things because during our discussion I’ve been on

your IMVA website. I’m going to actually post a link to a very

interesting article on transdermal magnesium mineral

therapy and sports medicine. I’m going to put a link to that

in the Shownotes to this podcast as well as a link to a couple

other very interesting PDFs that I’ve just come across on

transdermal magnesium. Now I realize that for most of the

people and especially for the athletes listening in to this show

that this may not be something that is readily accessible to

you. I myself am trying to determine the best way to actually

find transdermal magnesium. Do you have any resources

that you would point the audience to, to be able to utilize this

as a resource in recovery or in sports performance or in what

sounds like general health?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yeah, I’ve been involved in the last four, five years – four

years basically in different companies, different kind of

products, research… people have sent me products from all

over the world and about a year and a half ago I found 1500

yards underneath Europe is a sea. An ancient underground

sea of trapped ocean water that’s 250 million years old that’s

turned totally into magnesium. Magnesium oil. And they

pump it up like oil. And it’s the purest. We tested it down to

two parts per billion and found no mercury. One of the ways

you can buy this is seawater evaporation. When they make

salt, after the salt settles out and the magnesium chloride

settles out as a liquid. But these ponds – these ocean ponds

are not protected and the birds can shit in it and it’s just not

high quality for medical use. So I recommend this stuff called

Ancient Minerals. You can buy it very easily in two forms. In

oil form, which is pretty expensive because it’s incredibly

pure. Pure like eating clay. Just super pure. And then they

sell these flakes which is a lot less expensive. You can buy 6.5

lbs of flakes and use that. Put it in your baths and use it

transdermally. So either way you cover yourself.

Ben: How would you use the flakes transdermally?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well you put it in your baths, you make foot baths. You put it

in a regular bath. You can add water to it. And it’s not quite

the same as a pure magnesium oil.

Ben: Now what if I’m going out on a four hour bike ride and I

want to have magnesium oil with me. Is there a way right

now? Anywhere on the market that I would be able to have

an oil that I could spray?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yes, this Ancient Minerals. You could just take it in a little

bottle and every 15 minutes, just pop a little spray in your

mouth. I use it pure. You can mix it with a little bit of water

in your water. The best thing actually for an athlete is to put

a little bicarbonate and a little magnesium in their water and

just keep drinking it. That would be… because as you’re

doing your 26 mile marathon, you’re constantly – like a

doctor would give it intravenously through an IV, constantly

going into the body, you can do that. This magnesium –

nobody sells actually magnesium – well I wouldn’t say

nobody but they’re not selling the magnesium oil to drink it.

It’s not rated that way, but for sure (inaudible) it’s pure. So

you just mix it in water or it’s great for the gums and the

bones and the teeth. Just spraying it…

Ben: You don’t think there’d be a problem with diarrhea if taken

orally in that amount?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well anybody who’s going to use it athletically should

experiment with it. I’ll take like 15 sprays in a little glass of

water. If I do that twice or three times I’ll get a little bit of

loose stool. So you know to cut back the dose just a little bit

under the bowel tolerance and then you’ll be fine.

Ben: What about applying it transdermally like on the forearm?

Dr. Mark Cirkis No problem. All over the body. That will not give diarrhea.

So it’s not a problem.

Ben: And will you still get the benefits.

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yeah, sure. The best way of course would be to use both

together. You’re taking some orally. You put some on the

skin and you’re really maximizing – you want the oil to get

into every part of the engine. So, as far as taking it into the

body… I have a chapter Combining Oral with Transdermal.

So yes you take some orally and you can – as you say, if

you’re doing a 26 mile run, it would be good to constantly be

taking it. The body is going to enjoy that especially if you mix

it with the bicarbonate. You’re going to increase the

endurance and the performance. There’s no doubt about it.

It’s almost mathematics. It’s like the same level of physiology

as oxygen. If you cut off somebody’s oxygen or you’re going

to run a 26 mile run with your mouth taped over and one

nostril closed, you’re going to… bicarbonate is covering the

Co2 side of things which is very important. You’re talking

basic physiology. The magnesium also. So if you’re covering

this basic… it’s like putting rocket fuel, high octane fuel and

turning on the afterburners at the same time when the jet

fires. You’re dealing with the primary substances that govern

basic performance, basic physiology.

Ben: Now from what I understand and what a couple of other

physicians have actually mentioned on this show is the fact

that magnesium in addition to enhancing sports

performance can assist with such issues as chronic fatigue or

resistance to weight loss, metabolic issues. Do you have any

experience with observing the use of magnesium for things

of that nature?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Yeah, I have a book coming out in probably about a month

called New Paradigms in Diabetic Care. And excuse me… you

have to retape this session. In Brazil we have these cars with

loudspeakers passing by. I’ll start again in a minute. In about

a month I’ll be publishing my book called New Paradigms in

Diabetic Care. Diabetes of course which is a metabolic

disease – diabetes like heart disease is totally correlated with

magnesium. The more magnesium deficiency you have, the

increase of the chances of metabolic disease and diabetes.

And one of the reasons why is that metabolic syndrome is

like a fire. Like a house burning down. There’s a general

inflammation, systemic inflammation. Why? Because there’s

not enough magnesium like a fire extinguisher to keep the

inflammation under control. And also magnesium is crucial

as far as insulin production. The shape of the insulin and

also the receptivity of the cell walls to the insulin. So

magnesium is right in the middle. So for diabetics who are

having neuropathy in the feet – transdermal therapy is like a

dream because you can treat directly the feet. You just put

your feet inside the magnesium. You don’t have to drink it

and hopefully it gets inside and down into the feet. You soak

your feet into a high concentration and…

Ben: Interesting. Well you know the feeling that I’m getting is that

magnesium plays a pretty significant physiological, really

pivotal role in energy production and in maintaining health

and as we spent most of the time discussing – maintaining or

improving sports performance and it appears that not

enough people are getting it. It appears that there are pretty

high deficiencies of magnesium as you mentioned most likely

due to the leeching of minerals in the soil and then for

athletes the fact that they’re just using greater amounts of

energy than the average population. I’m going to post as

many resources as I can on the Shownotes to this podcast

but I would encourage those who are listening in, if you

would like to ask me more questions or perhaps have me

forward a question to Dr. Cirkis, you can email me

ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com. This is an issue which I

would like to explore as deeply as possible because I’ve seen

enough studies and talked to enough professionals who’ve

spoken about magnesium so highly on this show and face to

face that I think it’s high time that we actually did something

about it and made the general population aware and also

made athletes aware of the enormous improvement – the

enormous benefit that this could give them. This could be

kind of like the way creatine was the magic supplement for

the past decade for especially strength and power athletes. I

have a feeling that magnesium may be the magic supplement

for endurance sports for the next decade going forward. We

just have to get the news out to athletes about the power of

this supplement. Dr. Cirkis, are there any other resources

that you would like to point the listeners to?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well I’d like to point the listeners to my site

www.publications.imva.info... That was the backdoor, now

the front door to my… I have a whole series….

Ben: I have your website pulled up in front of me and I’m going to

make sure that that one ends up on the Shownotes.

Dr. Mark Cirkis And don’t forget – listeners don’t forget the bicarbonate, the

mixing of the magnesium and the bicarbonate. On my site

you’ll see the book Sodium Bicarbonate – the Rich Man’s

Poor Man’s Cancer Treatment. It also has the chapters on the

application of the magnesium, both orally and transdermally

and a chapter on transdermal medicine in general and why

transdermal is not just for magnesium but bicarbonates also.

You can put it in a liquid and put it right on your skin or put

it by the pound in the bath with the magnesium. The two go

together really, really well and…

Ben: And you know, I have to ask you one other thing Dr. Cirkis, I

would imagine that some of the research that you do and

some of these theories that you’re talking about – I would

tend to think that this stuff wouldn’t be too popular among

traditional western allopathic medicine. Have you run into

that?

Dr. Mark Cirkis Well I run into plenty of allopaths who are opening up to this

but in general it’s not authorized. It’s not part of the

protocols of the medical health officials, health authorities.

Doctors are afraid to step out of the lock step. They’re afraid

to do something different – many of them at least or well

maybe the majority of them, I’ve never done a poll – but

these things are non-pharmaceutical. There’s not much

money to be made from these things. They only help. Things

that help help and are inexpensive and are not dangerous are

not very popular. You won’t find this in the media. Media

promotes the pharmaceuticals. They promote poisonous

medicines. If you remember, legally it’s a supplement but it’s

also a really high profile medicine. If you inject it and you’re

having a heart attack, it’ll save somebody’s life in a heartbeat.

Ben: Interesting. I’m happy we’re getting the word out about this.

Well Dr. Cirkis, I would like to thank you for coming on the

show today. And I would encourage our listeners to look at

some of the resources that Dr. Cirkis has sent our way and I

think that’s about it. So thanks for coming on.

Dr. Mark Cirkis It’s been a pleasure Ben and I hope some athletes really get

this message. I really do hope so.

For personal nutrition, fitness or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or DVD’s

from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at http://www.pacificfit.net