3-Time Canadian national All Natural Bodybuilding Champion who competed as a
vegetarian, former Mr. Universe Competitor, host of The Awesome Health podcast, Wade
Lightheart is one of the world’s premier authorities on Natural Nutrition and Training
Methods. Having majored in Sports Science at the University of New Brunswick, he has
authored numerous books on health, nutrition, and exercise which have sold in over 80
countries.

Wade also serves as an advisor to the American Anti-Cancer Institute, and is the
Co-Founder and President at BiOptimizers, a digestive and health optimization company.
He’s been in the health industry for over 25 years, coached thousands of clients, and is
sought out by athletes and high-performance oriented individuals worldwide for his advice
on how to optimize their health and fitness levels.

Few alive have traveled farther or crusaded harder on behalf of helping individuals
transform their digestive health, wellness and overall lives than Wade T. Lightheart. After
competing in Mr. Universe and his health failing him following a competition victory, Wade
began to search for answers. In the process, he learned so much about what makes
digestion work, along with other principles that form what he calls the AWESOME health
system.

LEARN MORE AT:

bioptimizers.com
https://www.facebook.com/BiOptimizers/
https://www.instagram.com/bioptimizers/
https://www.youtube.com/user/BiOptimizers

SHOWNOTES

Get 10% Off BiOptimizers's Magnesium Breakthrough  At Magbreakthrough.com/melanie10

1:50 - IF Biohackers: Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life: Join Melanie's Facebook Group For A Weekly Episode GIVEAWAY, And To Discuss And Learn About All Things Biohacking! All Conversations Welcome!

2:10 - Follow Melanie On Instagram To See The Latest Moments, Products, And #AllTheThings! @MelanieAvalon

2:20 - BLUBLOX: Blue-light Blocking Glasses For Sleep, Stress, And Health! Go To BluBlox.com And Use The Code melanieavalon For 15% Off!

3:20 - JOOVV- ​Red Light And NIR Therapy For Fat Burning, Muscle Recovery, Mood, Sleep, And More! Use The Link Joovv.Com/Melanieavalon With The Code MelanieAvalon For A Free Gift From Joovv, And Also Forward Your Proof Of Purchase To Contact@MelanieAvalon.Com, To Receive A Signed Copy Of What When Wine: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine!

7:00 - Wade's History: Chronic Body Building, Wrecked Digestion, Weight Regain, And Health Recovery 

12:35 - Covid And Lack Of Control

13:30 - What is Magnesium? The connection to calcium 

15:30 - How To Pair Calcium And Magnesium?

17:15 - Can you Overdose on Magnesium?

19:45 - IV Magnesium (The below is A Note From Wade):

20:20 - The Bucket Theory Of Nutrition 

21:20 - Menstruation and Magnesium Requirements 

23:10 - The Different Types of Magnesium And Different Effects 

24:00 - Natural Vs Created Magnesium, And Magnesium Sources

26:10 - Magnesium Threonate

28:30 - Transdermal Magnesium 

32:05 - BEAUTYCOUNTER: Non-Toxic Beauty Products Tested For Heavy Metals, Which Support Skin Health And Look Amazing! Shop At Beautycounter.Com/MelanieAvalon For Something Magical! For Exclusive Offers And Discounts, And More On The Science Of Skincare, Get On Melanie's Private Beauty Counter Email List At MelanieAvalon.Com/CleanBeauty!

34:25 - The Relationship between magnesium and the nervous system 

36:30 - The Role Of Vitamin D In Health 

37:30 - Vitamin D Supplementation Vs.  Sun Exposure

38:45 -  The Problems With Today's Light Exposure

The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #31 - Andy Mant (BLUBlox)

BLUBLOX: Blue-light Blocking Glasses For Sleep, Stress, And Health! Go To BluBlox.com And Use The Code melanieavalon For 15% Off!

39:10 - Mineral Depleted Soil, bomb Material fertilizer, nutrient depletion

41:40 - The Role Of Crop Cycling 

44:30 - Heirloom/Organic  Vs Conventional Produce 

45:40 - How Solving The Calorie Problem Lead To Obesity

46:50 - Mistaken Minerals

The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #43 - Teri Cochrane
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side Of The All-American Meal

50:00 - Magnesium,  Digestion, And Relaxation

53:45 -  Using Magnesium as a Laxative, And Chronic Dehydration

57:45 - The Role Of Stress And Resources 

58:15 - The 7 Types Of Magnesium In Magnesium Breakthrough: Addressing Energy, Detox, Chelation, Sleep, Migraine, Brain Cells, And More

The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #15 - Dr. Chris Shade (Heavy Metal Detox, Push Catch Liver Sauce, etc.)

QUICKSILVER SCIENTIFIC: Go To MelanieAvalon.com/Quicksilver For 10% Off Quick Silver Scientific Products!

1:10:45 - LUMEN: Measure Your Breath To Instantly Find Out If You're Burning Carbs Or Fat! Get $25 Off A Lumen Device At MelanieAvalon.com/Lumen With The Code melanieavalon25

The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #43 - Daniel Tal

1:12:35 - Magnesium Malate For Heavy Metals

1:13:10 - What Dose Should You Take For Magnesium Breakthrough? 

BiOptimizers - 12 Week AWESOME Health Course

1:15:45 - SpectraCell Laboratories For Nutrient Deficiencies

1:19:00 - Get 10% Off BiOptimizers's Magnesium Breakthrough  At Magbreathrough.com/melanie10

1:19:40 - Alternate Day Fasting 

Intermittent Fasting Podcast Interview With Wade

1:25:25 - Fasting Vs. Cold

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon:                      Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am super excited about the topic of today's episode and the guest, who I don't even know now, how many times I've interviewed this fantastic person. That's how you know that you have a keeper or a winner when you've done that many interviews, but today's topic is something that I think my audience and just people in general have so many questions about, and that is magnesium. I know I have a lot of questions about it, but I am here with the man himself, Wade Lightheart. He's the Founder of a company you guys know I love BiOptimizers. They make an amazing array of supplements to support really particularly digestion, but really all aspects of your health as well.

Wade weighed himself, he is a three-time Canadian national, all-natural bodybuilding champion, who competed as a vegetarian, which is very cool. We don't have his partner, Matt, on the podcast, but one of the cool things about them, the partner for BiOptimizers is Matt, is actually on the Keto meat-eating side of things. It's a really unique partnership and I think it really speaks to what my audience knows me for as understanding that a lot of different dietary approaches can work for different individuals, and that's what we're all about here. Wade, thank you so much for gracing my show again.

Wade Lightheart:                     Melanie, always a pleasure, great to be here. I just feel really honored that you have me on your show and for all your listeners and hopefully, we'll be able to provide some insight into this topic. I think it's maybe one of the most important conversations that you can have in nutrition today because of the widespread deficiency that people are suffering from.

Melanie Avalon:                      I was really excited when BiOptimizers came out with a magnesium supplement, because I cannot tell you how many times, well, a), we just get questions about magnesium, b), we get questions about recommended magnesium. That was a really exciting moment and we were like, “We've got to do some interviews on this so we can actually, get the science of what's going on, address a lot of the questions that people have, maybe some of the misconceptions.” Before we do that, I bet a lot of my listeners are pretty familiar with you but would you like to tell listeners a little bit about your personal story and what brought you to health and nutrition, BiOptimizers and all the things?

Wade Lightheart:                     Sure. I'll try to be as concise as possible. Basically, I got interested in health and fitness and all these kinds of things when I was 15. Three things happened; my parents moved me to a very rural area. It was five miles to the nearest neighbor in the middle of the woods at this beautiful resort. My parents were the caretakers. It wasn't a great place for me to live at 15. Most people would be just overwhelmed with the beauty and all that sort of stuff but it gave me a lot of time by myself.

Melanie Avalon:                      I forgot about that because I always think of the shining.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yes, it was kind of like that. Just not the big, long cabin. There were cabins and all that stuff but then the second thing that happened at the same time, literally just a shortly time after, it was, my sister was diagnosed with cancer. She was four years my senior and I watched her go through the medical model before she died at the age of 22, very young and very tragic circumstances. At that point I realized that my health and my life was not a guarantee.

That's a big lesson to learn as a teenager and certainly impacted my curiosity and my awareness because I was looking at, as she struggled through that, I was like, it didn't make sense to me how her treatments seemed to be making her more sick. My naive question, I thought I needed to find healthy and at that time it was, you needed to look healthy. She had given me a bodybuilding magazine with the… I still remember it to this day, had Troy Zucclotto was the Mr. California, this blonde guy with muscles and I'm blonde so I was like, “I could relate to that,” and had two pretty girls on the cover.

I was a 15-year-old driven mad with testosterone, I was like, “Oh man, maybe if I look like that, I can be healthy and attract females and all that stuff.” I got bit by the bodybuilding bug, got a job that summer working and paid for my first weight set and put it in the barn and I had saw horses and two wheelers under tractor tires and pulleys I built out there as a 15-year-old because at that time in life, I didn't have control over anything and bodybuilding was a way that I could not only have control over myself, but I could actually see incremental process or progress through training and through diets.

I got into Arnold Schwarzenegger and all that and eventually that led me to go to the University of New Brunswick, to study exercise, physiology and nutrition. After four years of that, I found that it was a lot of compartmentalized components. At that point I started seeking out mentors, people that were producing the results that I wanted to do. I worked at every single stage of the health and nutrition industry and certainly in the supplement industry from manufacturing, being a sponsored athlete, and to being into development.

I owned my own nutrition store. I worked in the warehouses, I worked in retail and then ultimately got to the point where I was writing books and developing my own supplement line. I know all the ins, the outs, the bad, the good, the ugly, about that industry. Then years later after I had won a couple of national titles and competed at the Mr. Universe as a vegetarian, what was interesting at the universe, after my first Mr. Universe in 2003, I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks.

That was just a jarring thing because here I'd spent 16 years, working at what most people would call the cosmetic idea and I think most people are attracted to a cosmetic level of fitness. In other words, they want to look good and may compromise their health in order to do that and certainly, I did, and it was devastating. I had the good fortune of meeting a doctor, Michael O'Brien and he was this vibrant senior citizen. He had clear skin and he was super strong and he just had so much energy and he could look right through you.

I went to a seminar with him and I walked up and I said, “Here's my story. I don't know what happened. What am I doing wrong?” He said to me something I'll never forget. He said, “Wade, you've learned to build the body from the outside in, not the inside out and I can show you how to do that,” and so we did. I started using enzymes and probiotics, I had just wrecked my digestion. Once I repaired that and started using some of these, I would say more holistic health principles, I was able to regain my physique in about six months, but what I was able to experience was something I hadn't experienced before, which was a new level of vitality.

Previous, we have a philosophy at BiOptimizers, which is aesthetics performance and health as a triangle and you typically go towards an aesthetic version and then you get obsessed with performance, and then eventually you go, “I need to make sure I take care of my health.” That's just generally the trajectory that most people follow through and we look at all three of them simultaneously and what we can advance in those and for us, that's where we started. Matt and I have since that, that was in 2004 and we went on and not only [00:07:04 inaudible] my health, I got to go back to some world championships. I didn't have the blowouts after.

I did better than I did before and I felt great and at that point, we really took the brand to a bigger level to the world at large. We were cut and dry in the high-performance area but when the high-performance area fell apart, we understood the other aspects that we needed to become aware of and switched our focus and that's how BiOptimizers came into being. We've been happy to help tens of thousands of people around the world since that time and we're continuing in our mission.

Melanie Avalon:                      That is so incredible. I know listeners are probably already super encouraged and motivated by that story. I was just thinking about how, when you experience something traumatic in life like the death of your sister, which is so tragic, I'm so sorry about that. I feel like things like that or really anything, especially now with this whole COVID and quarantine, it's like people often turn to, like you were talking about controlling their food to create this aesthetic ideal because it seems like the one thing they can control.           

But then of course, not only is there the potential for, like you experienced with the rebound effect, but then the emotional aspect of that of losing seemingly all the control of the one thing you were controlling, it can just be further traumatic.  It's so great to hear that there is hope to grow healthier and stronger from it. I love that you competed again, after that rebound effect that you experienced. I could go on and on, but I guess we can jump into today's topic, magnesium, because a lot of the things we've talked about prior with you guys have been digestive enzymes, probiotics, things like that. Magnesium, I'm going to ask a really simple, basic question, but what is magnesium?

Wade Lightheart:                     Great question. Magnesium is one of the most potent minerals inside of the body and what it regulates, it regulates everything from blood pressure to your blood sugar, bone density and migraine headaches, depression. It's part of serotonin manufacturing. It's involved in over 300 enzymatic processes. It's so important for cognitive function and memory. It is also a big factor when it comes to PMS magnesium deficiencies. I mean, the list just keeps going on. Oxygen uptake, you name it. Magnesium is involved in this process.

What's fascinating is, there's so much emphasis and focus on calcium and calcium and magnesium exist in a 2:1 ratio, but with most of our diets, were very calcium dominant and magnesium deficient, and magnesium is actually the control component. Oftentimes, many of these things that people are thinking they need to take calcium for, they actually need magnesium. I just heard Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the podcast the other day and he's a heart, vascular heart doctor and he feels that every single one of his clients’ needs to be on it, everyone, and this is a medical doctor that doesn't have that training, but he found that taking magnesium supplements we're far superior than many of the mandated drugs for cardiovascular conditions. That's how potent he feels that is.

Melanie Avalon:                      That is insane. The calcium relationship between calcium and magnesium, I know a lot of people might think calcium for bone health and things like that. People who are potentially at a risk for calcium deficiency or osteopenia, even osteoporosis, how does one properly pair together calcium and magnesium and how do they know, should it be at the same time? Do they compete with each other? How do they interact in the body?

Wade Lightheart:                     Yes, great question. Basically, what happens and I'll just keep this really simple for people to understand, is that for every two calcium units, you need one unit of magnesium. If you're running a deficiency of magnesium and let's just use simple terms so people can understand. This is to demonstrate how you would look at that. Let's say you need a hundred units of magnesium on a given day and you're only getting 50 units of magnesium a day that your body requires, generally, you should have 200 units of calcium, 200:1 is what your requirements are.

Oftentimes, what happen is, you're going to have maybe 400 units of calcium. You're going to have way more calcium in your diet than you are going to have magnesium and instead of being in a 2:1 ratio, now you have an 8:1 ratio so your body will now start to dump calcium in order to regulate the magnesium component that you're able to work with because they interact in a variety of different channels, from muscle contractions to nervous system function to neurotransmitter formation. What happens oftentimes is people are taking in so much calcium that they're further amplifying they're magnesium deficiencies.

Melanie Avalon:                      What about on the flip side? What if you were to overdose on magnesium will that deplete calcium?

Wade Lightheart:                     There's a couple of components and just so people know them and I don't recommend this. Matt and I are radical bio-hackers and we have a lot of supporting naturopathic doctors, medical doctors, testing, and stuff like that. I've gone to the wall on magnesium, if you will, because I'm so fascinated with this mineral. If you take certain types, first thing, the breaking the GI barrier. That's going to happen if you take a higher dosage of magnesium, and I'm actually going to share with you a little bit later about how you mitigate taking in too much magnesium, whether that's through divided dosages or selecting specific magnesiums over others because sometimes you want magnesium for a laxative effect and that's been used and sometimes you don't want that, you want magnesium for different parts of the body.

Different types of magnesium, there's a variety of different types of magnesium that work in different components of the body. The other thing is a deep sense of relaxation. When I was doing my magnesium research, one of the things that I did was IV magnesium. Please, if you're going to think about doing that, be under the supervision of a qualified magnesium practitioner, a naturopathic doctor, who can supervise that because you could totally shut your body down if you took in too high of dosages.

At high dosages, and we're talking about 10 milligrams or 10 grams pumped through an IV and you don't go to that level, you would go to whatever tolerant level you get almost rubbery. You can't really contract your muscles or get around very well and you feel woozy. It’s a nice pleasant feeling. Then you'll also experience little pieces in your body that are actually burning and that is where you have calcium buildups inside your muscles, inside your brain, inside different organs of the body. You'll actually start to feel heat as the magnesium starts to bond with the calcium there.

This chemical reaction is going on inside the body, and it can be helpful for flexibility and helpful for relaxation, but you can really overdose that so you have to monitor it. That would be at the super high dosage, as you would never be able to take that kind of dosage in an oral format. I certainly don't recommend it, but it was one of the things that I experimented with.

Melanie Avalon:                      Two questions about that. What type of magnesium was it for the IV?

Wade Lightheart:                     We tried different variety ones. I'll put it in the show notes so I get the one that was best. I forget which one that we ended up going on. My naturopathic doctor broke it all down for me. That's a good question. I should leave that. I don't want to miss step because we tried a bunch of different ones and I forget which one was the safest.

Melanie Avalon:                      For listeners, we'll put that in the show notes and the show notes, by the way, will be at melanieavalon.com/magnesium. I said two questions about it, but I actually have three. The second one is, what was the purpose of that? Were you just trying to experiment with how the body reacts to different types of magnesiums?

Wade Lightheart:                     We have what I call the bucket theory of nutrition. What I mean by that is, okay let's imagine that every single nutrient inside your body is a full bucket versus an empty bucket. For a full bucket, you have exactly the total amount that allows your body to operate, functioning perfectly. Let's say at the bottom of that bucket, there's a hole. Well, that hole to me is relative to your lifestyle. Your lifestyle is how much of any given nutrient that you're burning up on any given time. Different people with different genetics, different lifestyle, different activity levels, are all going to determine how big that hole is.

For example, if you're really stressed, oftentimes you're going to exhaust more magnesium than if you're not stressed. It's related to the stress response or the development of neuro-transmitters or if you're a hard training athlete, for example, magnesium is going to go up. If you are menstruating, you're going to require more magnesium. For example, the average woman, she, because of the cycle requirements of a woman going through her monthly cycle, she varies significantly in her requirements for magnesium, just in the course of the month, as well as other key nutrients.

That's why it's a little bit more complicated when you're dealing with female anatomy, because they build babies for pits sake because it's a whole... guys don't do that. Women have the ability to build a baby and that's a pretty amazing engineering experiment. In order to do that, you need a unique biochemistry to do that. Same thing as a gold medalist, a gold medalist has requirements. That's going to change the hole in your bucket. Going back to why was I doing that? Well, we understood that the deficiency of magnesium was so great that it would take an extraordinary period of time in order to even fill up that bucket if you will.

One of the things I said, “Well, what if we can do IV? You can do IV’s vitamin C.” I found a practitioner, I was in Bali, Indonesia at the time that was willing to do it and he turned out to be a friend of mine. He was a special force’s naturopathic doctor and everything, pretty interesting guy and says, “Yeah.” He's like, “Yeah, we used to do this,” as part of some of the processes that he used with elderly people with osteoporosis and people who are suffering from various neurotransmitter issues and that was leading to psychological issues and stuff like that.

I said, “Well, hey, let's give it a shot.” We started at a small dose and we kept going up until we hit tolerance and that was like, “Okay, this is good,” as a way to fill up my bucket, if you will. Later on, I realized there was a lot of unsophistication with that strategy because as I dove deeper into the magnesium, the equation, I found out that different magnesiums have different effects on the body. There's probably 30 different magnesiums I think out there, some of which you definitely don't want to take and then some of them which are superior and then other ones would be specialized magnesiums.

We'll get into the ones that I think are important a little bit later, but it's such a big array. It's not just magnesium. It's like chocolate, which by the way, is a great source of magnesium. I do believe that a lot of reasons why people crave chocolate is because of magnesium deficiency, but there's all different kinds of chocolate and there's all different kinds of magnesium and each chocolate has its own note, its own taste, its own flavor, its own effect in the body. Well, it's even more pronounced in the world of magnesium.

Melanie Avalon:                      How many types of magnesium are found naturally in nature versus… because aren't some of these created, it's like magnesium attached to a certain compound or are they all natural?

Wade Lightheart:                     Well, all of them are going to be attached to a compound in supplemental form. Magnesium is a very good bonder. Different types of magnesiums are available in different foods. For example, and I always believe that everybody should go for food right off the bat. Now, I don't have the scope of breaking down which magnesium is in each type, but you will instantly notice that some people will do really well consuming leafy greens if they have sufficient levels of hydrochloric acid to extract magnesium. Most people don't have good levels of hydrochloric acid so it becomes very difficult to get the magnesium out of those greens.

Fruits, avocados, and bananas, which of course people aren't doing on a ketogenic diet. Nuts and seeds, of course, different nuts and different seeds depending on legumes, vegetables so, seafood. For example, a lot of the seafood stuff, which seem to contain a lot of the threonate, which is maybe one of the reasons why, as well as dark chocolate. I really like threonate. It’s one of my favorite magnesiums. It's for the brain. It’s one I noticed the most, but…

Melanie Avalon:                      That one's engineered, right? Magnesium Threonate?

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah.

Melanie Avalon:                      Because it's not found naturally anywhere?

Wade Lightheart:                     Yes, but there is some evidence that dark chocolate seems to be able to... the magnesium seems to be superior in neurotransmitter formation, that's why I think it’s mood enhancing. The threonate is one of the things that I think is superior in the building of neuro-transmitters. Many people are neurotransmitter deficient that going down that road, again, comes down to this, does the magnesium cross the brain barrier and you need to have a magnesium that can do that. For example, the brain enhancing effect, which would be different if you're looking for magnesium citrate that's going to draw water into the intestines for say, flushing out the body if you're constipated.

Melanie Avalon:                      Yeah. I was just thinking more about the threonate one because I read about how it crosses the blood brain barrier and how it's great for addressing that, sleep, things like that. When I was asking for questions in my Facebook group for you about magnesium and one person brought up something really interesting. They were saying that they were concerned by the idea that since magnesium threonate isn't naturally found in nature, what are the implications of creating a compound where magnesium is crossing the blood brain barrier when perhaps it wouldn't have been normally in our normal diet? I just thought that was interesting. I thought it was… I was like, “That's a good question.

Wade Lightheart:                     Well, it is a good question and to be frank, there is probably some doses that would be not recommended. However, I think on a functional side, you'd have to take so much magnesium to throw your body off. I think you'd run into other troubles before you would run into any brain issues. The other thing is, is there are some people who don't tolerate magnesium threonate that well and if they do, they're going to notice it right away. They would notice that, “Hey, this doesn't feel right in my head,” or they feel some sort of headache or something like that. That means, you know what? That magnesium is not right for you.

One of the things that I did individually is, I was testing different magnesiums for my own body and then Matt was doing it for him and then we have a team of insider biohackers. This is very unsophisticated but it's more clinical. We'll take a group of people, we'll run the test on our products and then we get them to give us the data, give us the flow rate, give us the feedback. We get data, we get personal feedback and then we look at that and see what is concordant. It allows us to test a little bit faster. We base it on the science. We base it on the chemistry that we concoct together and then we apply it in the world and there's always some tweaking that's involved.

Double blind studies are very convenient after something's been proven in the real world. Oftentimes, it's 20 or 30 years later and for someone who is magnesium deficient, you need to do that. I don't think there's any real fear about I think a person consuming sugar is far more risky or trans fatty acids, I think those have a far greater risk than a little bit of magnesium in your brain.

Melanie Avalon:                      Got you, and then my last question from your original story about the IV magnesium, you talked about how you had a burning sensation. Is that all related to…? I know with topical magnesium, people often experience a burning sensation and I had read it was because, I don't know if this is true, that the skin was sucking it up so fast because it needed it and that was what created the burning, but now I'm wondering if it actually relates to calcium or do you know what causes that sensation?

Wade Lightheart:                     Well, it could be, one, first thing I would always ask is what agents is the magnesium with? That'd be the first one that I would suggest because you never know if you're taking a topographical magnesium, what it's been with that could cause an irritation. Number two, uptake can be an issue because I know some people, if you go into a float tank and if you have, for example, any open wounds or cuts or scrapes or whatever, you're going to feel some burning there.

It’s a magnesium salt essentially that you'll find in water, which is not necessarily that absorbable by a lot of the tissues in the body, but it does have a calming effect on the nervous system and on the muscle tissue, particularly if you do floating, which I'm a big proponent of floating as are most of our team members. Then, I don't know about the uptake side of it. I can't answer that one accurately, but I do know, what I feel, and there's some evidence to support this.

This hasn't been all fleshed out in a long-term flexibility study. For example, I had an old shoulder injury from way back in the day and I know I have calcium deposits built up there, and it causes a little tightness and things like that. When I was doing the intravenous, I started to notice that, well, guess what? That burning is right in the spot where I have the calcium deposits and I could also feel it in my brain as well and we know that we build up calcification in the brain and all tissues. It's a natural part of the aging process. I do believe that some of it is accelerated through magnesium deficiencies.

What I have noticed is, through magnesium supplementation I have been able to increase my flexibility. That's probably the weakest area in my whole training regimen throughout my historical component. I'm working on it. We all struggle in certain areas. I like stretching, but I don't like stretching as much as I like lifting weights, for example so we always have our challenges.

Melanie Avalon:                      Yoga is not your main calling?

Wade Lightheart:                     I do the meditation side of it. I would consider myself a Yogi because I'm very much into Eastern philosophy, mysticism, meditation, and the kind of spiritual components of what yoga is, which is union with the infinite intelligence. However, my exercise performance on yoga is basically 38 moves, very limited that I run through in 15 minutes before I sit in my meditation. It's not like go to a class and really work the areas that I need to work or counteract the muscle tightness that I have.

Melanie Avalon:                      The topical magnesium, I experimented with it a few years ago and I tried multiple different brands and it's a thing, the burning sensation. People are like, “This one burns, this one doesn't burn,” but that was the general consensus in the interwebs that it had something to do with because we're so magnesium depleted that the skin just sucks it up and maybe the fact that it's a salt or slightly, I don't know, interacting with the calcium's slightly caustic, I don't know, but it can be painful.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yes, it can. Well, magnesium also, just one other point on that too, there's an intricate relationship between magnesium and your nervous system and it's a really big nervous system regulator. For example, when stress goes up as in Olympic athletes, for example, who put themselves under incredible levels of both mental and physical pressure, the body burns, literally burns up higher levels of magnesium. Temperature regulation is another issue with magnesium and stuff.

It's really fascinating like all these different processes that magnesium... we could go on for days because it's like 350 some people say, other people say 600. I haven't even exhausted the list myself. I'm still learning.

Melanie Avalon:                      I was going to say, it sounds like that in vitamin D but that's a hormone, not a mineral.

Wade Lightheart:                     Vitamin D I think the best way to get it is from sunshine. Even if you take... let's say you're taking 5,000 IUs of vitamin D, it's going to take up much better if you jump in the sun for 20 minutes after you take it than if you just take it in the dark, for example. There's an interaction between the sun and your uptake of vitamin D and I think that's true with a lot of vitamins and minerals. Vitamin D is so powerful.

Melanie Avalon:                      I wasn't aware of that. Sun exposure actually increases your uptake of the… if you're taking it as a supplement.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yes, it does. Funny enough, I was just in a conversation this morning with our chief researcher at BiOptimizers, Katrine. She's a super genius who feeds me the information that I need to get figured out in my little brain to completely understand and find applicable applications. We were talking about that this morning on a comment, there were some stuff with Rhonda Patrick was talking on Joe Rogan, when she was talking about vitamin D.

Melanie Avalon:                      I'm making my way through that one right now.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah. It's a vitamin D and she was comparing it with Mathison. He was another guy that was challenging some of our assumptions and then Katrine was synthesizing the components between the two of them. We get into this kind of geeky conversations.

Melanie Avalon:                      I love it. Is there a relationship between vitamin D and magnesium?

Wade Lightheart:                     I'm not sure if I can support that. I think vitamin D though, I think it's like 5% of our genetics is affected by it. I would think that there's a lot of things. It’s likely that it is on your uptake and assimilation. I wouldn't discount it, but I can't say here's the research, here's the proof that there’s a direct correlation because some of these correlations are hard to prove. I know myself, if I'm in sunshine regularly, like I am right now.

I'm staying in Arizona during the lockdown, I'm actually adjacent to Katrine's house so we get into a lot more geeky conversations. Everything works better with sunshine. I mean, across the board. All my hormones, all my nutrient levels, everything has bumped up. I've been here for an extended period of time during the lockdown and all of my numbers and everything have gone up. The biggest change that I've made is I'm out in the sunshine for three hours a day now.

Melanie Avalon:                      Yeah, I think it's so huge. Even in the winter, I know it's controversial, but I have a membership at a tanning salon and I basically, I just go into the cheaper beds because the UVB… Is it UVB? The rays that you want? The ones that don't actually make you tan, they're the cheapest, which works well and I will go in literally for a minute and they're like, “Okay.” I think it's really good especially in the winter months when there's not much sunlight.

Wade Lightheart:                     Well, I used to live in Vancouver. The essential survival of Vancouver without getting depressed for me was, literally, I went into a high-pressure tanning bed twice a week. I couldn't tell you how great that was for my health and vitality. I know a lot of people would say, “Oh well, you are getting sun damage,” and stuff like that. Well, it's better than jumping off a building because I'm depressed. Not that I was. I'm using exaggerated components, but I think when someone just says, “Well, you're going to get sun cancer from that.” Well I said, well, it's better than jumping off a building as a comparison.

I would recommend that for literally hundreds of my clients who lived in low sunlight places. It was remarkable, the effects. I'm a big believer in good old sunshine and we live in doors now, which is not natural for humans and the difference in the amount of light we receive on a given day is super different than before.

Melanie Avalon:                      I actually, I think yesterday, interviewed Andy Mann at Blue Box about light exposure changes and it's just crazy. Actually, speaking to that, so the environment and the environment changing, it's often talked about the mineral depletion of our soils. Historically, magnesium, were we getting it all from food and was it in the food sources from the soil? What's the connection between magnesium as a dietary source today in relation to the soil, how that's changed from hunter-gatherer times compared to today?

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah. Great question. There's a couple of things. This is a very passionate topic for me and I'm learning more and more every day. Let's just back the track up for a second. If you were to have say, a peach or an orange from 1955 and you do a comparison to an orange or peach today, you would need 50 plus peaches or oranges to make up for the equivalent in 1955. You're going, “Wait, how's that possible?” Well, you have to understand that our definition of food that we came up with was incomplete.

Starvation has been the number one killer of humans throughout all time and right now during the COVID virus, 130 million people have been added to the starvation list, totaling over 265 million people right now are going hungry and don't have nutrients and it's killing people all over the world. That thing's pretty radical in Western world but I would say this, I believe that we are starving here in North America and that's why there is a proliferation of obesity and excessive weight gain.

Because I believe that part of the reasons that people are overeating is because there's under nutrients in the food and there's also chemical agents that are designed to mimic essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that our bodies require that we're not getting, so it makes us try to consume more. It is literally tricking our nervous system. We think we're getting magnesium and we're getting like poly mag what the... you know what. You know what I mean?

How did that happen? Well, that happened literally is, it happened as we moved from hunter-gatherer into more civilization and we started doing more monoculture, but after World War II is where this thing really took off. World War II, we had all this leftover bomb making material and we thought, “Oh, what can we use this for?” Well, a lot of it, the base of that was nitrogen. If you add nitrogen to the soil in the form of fertilizer, it has a growth effect on the speed and yield of the crops.

We used to have like crop cycling. If you go to the old farms, they'll have several different fields and you're like, “Why do they have the different fields all portioned off, why would you do that?” They would plant potatoes this year in that field and next year they'd plant carrots and the year after they'd do cabbage and the year after they do tomatoes. They would divide that up and they would move the different plants into the different fields. Then one year they would grow hemp, because hemp is an amazing restorer of soil and they would plow that back into the ground and let the ground have a year of rest and you would run these on these seven-year cycles.

Well, after World War II, we started going into government sponsored monoculture farming to meet the yield for food production as the massive explosion of the baby boomers and we started looking at ways of accelerating the growth of crops through farming. If you look at the turn of the century, 90% of the people worked on a farm and now it's less than 2% of the people work on a farm. That's how fast and powerful our industrialization of society happened.

Now, inside of that definition of food, we didn't account for enzymes, we didn't account for probiotics and we didn't account for what the natural mineral rates and vitamin rates were for and this had horrific effects on our food supply. What happens is, as the elements became less available to the fruits and vegetables, although they were growing more, what was happening is they would start to get blight, they would start to get disease, literally the plant strength was weaker because it didn't have all the key elements.

What did we come out with next? We came out with herbicides and pesticides and fungicides, in order to kill off the bugs because the plants weren't able to develop a hardy resistance like they would in nature because they were weaker plants because of these weaker elements inside the soil, because now we were growing wheat on the same land every single year. We weren't plowing in, we weren't conditioning the soil. We were just throwing more fertilizer on this and then when that didn't work, we threw more chemicals on top of that.

Over the course of the last 70 years, we haven't done a really good job of taking care of our soil. For example, in my mum's organic garden, she uses cow manure, she puts in it every year for some of the probiotic components inside of that. She makes sure that she has a worm farm, that she literally puts worms onto the soil and then every so many years, my dad will till in various types of rocks, ground up like really fine gravel in order to reconstitute the soil.

Then if you're using an original type seeds, seeds that make other seeds or sometimes called heirloom, then you know that the components and elements that are required of that seed was hundreds of years ago, are still retained as opposed to the big commercialized versions of seeds. When you have those two different two tomatoes, one's grown on nitrogen, one's grown on a factory farm, one comes in and you thinking it looks perfect and has beautiful red tones and it's been genetically engineered and it's been sprayed and waxed and shines.

It looks beautiful and you eat it and it tastes like nothing. Then you have one of these funky weird colored twisted looking tomatoes in my mother's garden, who builds things the regular way and guess what? You taste that tomato and your brain explodes because you're like, “Oh my God, I've never had a tomato that tastes like this.” So many people who travel to Italy, for example, will have trouble eating pasta and tomatoes and all this stuff over here and they go over there where it's grown on the local place, in the local restaurant and the tomatoes come from there and they make their own home pasta and they go, “I don't understand. Why am I having this pasta and I don't feel the blast gas, the bloating, it digests well, it tastes amazing. Why is that?”

Well, that's because they're actually using real food. We as a society where more people are living in cities, more people are dependent on the modern food production and distribution model that uses all these agents, then also adds chemical elements onto it. That creates a definition of food that isn't really food. I'm not blaming anyone. I don't think it was some grand conspiracy or anything like that.

It's just, sometimes when you take actions in certain directions, you do not understand the consequences. We solve the food calorie problem very well and the food distribution is not a lot of people that starve in North America, even with all the food banks and everything that are available for those who are less financially solvent. Well, then guess what? Why do we have such a great obesity rate? I do believe it's because of this element. Diabetes and food regulation and it's all because we don't have the minerals.

I'm working at one day, I hope to be able to mandate from a political platform that the definition and requirements for what food is, truly represent other than fats, proteins and carbohydrates because there's so much more to food than those elements. Those are a component of it but they're not the whole picture and I think we're suffering as a society because of it.

Melanie Avalon:                      I mean, it's so insane. I think a lot of people might think casually about it, that food is not as rich in minerals today, but the whole aspect that you talked about, the potential for them to have compounds that our body mistakes as other minerals, it's just a whole another layer. I know, for example, I recently interviewed Terry Cochran and she was talking about how... I was unaware of this, how glyphosate actually can be mistaken by the body for glycine. She thinks that that's one of the major reasons that glyphosate has had such a detrimental effect on our health with its pervasive nature and the environment. It's crazy. It's insane.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah. There's a great book by Eric Schlosser called Fast Food Nation and he talks about the rise of the chemical industrial companies that were using a variety of chemicals to increase the amount that a person was consuming of that product because in business, the cost of a client acquisition is one of your biggest costs. What they realized, that they could spend money on making the food more addictive through these sophisticated addiction mechanisms and that's when you saw the little tiny bottles of soda and the little tiny bags of chips when we were kids, going into.... you go into Costco and you literally throw a sack of chips and a jug of soda in your thing and your cart's full. I've seen it.

It's like what the-? How did we get to this point? Of course, none of those things have anything to do with nutrient quality, but people consume it because why? There is empty calories in it and it does give a blast to the brain from maybe sugar or carbohydrates or something like that and those chemical agents. You know that commercial, I bet you can't just eat one. Well, guess what? That's true. It's a very sophisticated design. You have to realize that as a health advocate, we're up against some of the brightest scientific minds in the world who are paid very well by large corporations, who are in the business of addicting you to things that aren't that good for you.

Melanie Avalon:                       Yeah. It's so shocking. If you just think about it, historically getting a huge blast of fat, for example, would probably, I imagine, only come in the context of an animal product which would be rich in minerals and nutrition as well or getting a huge glass of carbs, maybe with the exception of honey, probably come in the context of fruit, starches and we were talking about how they've been so depleted today, but in the past, that would have also had nutrition with it.

Now we get all these signals or I guess another correlation would be milk, which would also be high in nutrition but we get these signals but there's no nutrients, so no wonder we're still hungry because we’re not getting what we need.

Wade Lightheart:                      Exactly.

Melanie Avalon:                       Some more magnesium questions, because I know a lot of people take magnesium. You mentioned it already briefly. It can have a laxative type effect. A lot of people had a lot of questions for you about magnesium's relation to digestion. There were questions about, if you find magnesium keeps things flowing in you, if you struggle with constipation, is it okay to take certain types of magnesium if it keeps things flowing, on a long-term basis? Somebody else wants to know how it might affect the microbiome as well. Magnesium and digestion, two of your favorite things.

Wade Lightheart:                      First and foremost, you're not going to break down your magnesium very well if you don't have good levels of hydrochloric acid and so you can always do the baking soda test. You take a quarter teaspoon of baking soda and you put it in four to six ounces of water, stir it all up, mix it up really good, and then drink it down. If you don't burp within the five minutes, you don't have enough hydrochloric acid, simple, easy test.

Most people at the time they're 40, don't. That's going to make it not only difficult for you to absorb magnesium, but a whole lot of other things and it's also going to make you more susceptive to a variety of pathogens inside the body, whether that's parasites or viruses or bacteria and all that sort of stuff, because hydrochloric acid is related to that.

Melanie Avalon:                       Quick question for you about the burp test. Releasing HCL is what causes you to burp?

Wade Lightheart:                      Yeah, if you have enough hydrochloric acid inside the body you'll burp.

Melanie Avalon:                       You want to burp earlier rather than later?

Wade Lightheart:                      Yeah. The sooner you burp, the better.

Melanie Avalon:                       I just want to clarify. Okay, sorry.

Wade Lightheart:                      Yeah, no worries. When it comes to magnesium, magnesium is responsible for also relaxing muscle tissue. It’s one of the reasons it was used in high performance athletics, Dr. Charles Paula Quinn, who I studied under, because… God rest his soul, he died early, but he coached gold medals in 27 different sports, which is ridiculous. I think I know of no one person who has ever done that and magnesium was his secret sauce to repairing the nervous system, rebuilding neuro-transmitters and relaxing the body.

In order for you to actually digest your food, it's best to be in a relaxed state. If you're stressed out and you're pounding caffeine and you're doing the grind and you're in a high WIFI environment and you're in the city doing the hustle and doing that thing, which so many of us are, guess what? You're in a fight or flight mode. Your body is not even in a position to uptake any magnesium.

Magnesium is a great component to relieve that and so many people will take a piece of dark chocolate in the evening, for example, and they put it and melt it in their mouth and they feel relaxed. I do believe that part of that is magnesium. Part of that is the threonine and other neurochemicals, but there is an effect if you go to, for example, a float. If you eat before you float versus if you eat after you float, there's a different relation of that digestion and that's because you need to get yourself out of the fight or flight mode into a relaxed state of being.

Out of sympathetic and a parasympathetic nervous system. Because if you don't do that, your ability to absorb nutrients, whatever you're taking, is far limited and I think that's a big factor for people today. The other thing is if you're in electronics, blue light, WIFI signals, all of these things disrupt and accelerate the burn rate of magnesium. I think where magnesium's role in digestion is, is first and foremost, just keeping the nervous system, being able to flip into that relaxed mode.

Second thing is, magnesium is involved in about 350 different enzyme processes inside the body. Some of those are related to digestion. In severe levels of magnesium deficiency, it can impact digestion as well.

Melanie Avalon:                      People who do find a beneficial laxative effect from it, for people struggling with constipation, is there a potential for long-term damage? I mean, I know it's probably not the ideal.

Wade Lightheart:                     Sure. First and foremost, if, going back to digestion, we've talked about this in another podcast, the five stages of digestion and whether you have enough enzymes, whether you have enough hydrochloric acid and whether you have your microbiome in order. But I think background to that, there's a lot of people suffering from chronic dehydration.

If you're chronically dehydrated, you're not able to draw enough water into the intestines and that can have a drying sensation and that's why people go for colonics and colonic irrigation and enemas and things like that and the health thing and they've experienced all these wonderful benefits. I think if you're drinking bottled water or you're drinking chlorinated water out of the tap, but without any pre-filters and not getting into the decent pH and stuff, I think you're asking yourself for trouble. Oftentimes, it's chemical agents.

The other thing is, there's peristaltic contraction. Peristaltic contraction is the contraction of smooth muscle tissue in the body that moves your food along and eventually your poop along and because we sit a lot and we start losing muscle tone inside the intestinal tract. That's another reason. Then of course, water doesn't come in very well and we get dehydrated and if we don't have enough magnesium, what happens is there's a contraction, but then there's not the relaxation.

The relaxation component is that's where you actually release the waste product that is out of your body. Again, if you're cramping, if you're having insomnia at night, if you're feeling tight all the time or you're feeling constipated, guess what? It's because your body is in fight or flight mode all the time. Oftentimes, that's caused by stimulants. I've gone through that program. I understand how that works, by taking what I would call super physiological dosages of caffeine to burn through my work day when I  was working for, I think it was two and a half, three years straight at 15 hours every day, well, you're going to pay a price.

Magnesium, particularly citrate, draws water into the intestines. The old  orthomolecular nutrition model was you literally dose up until you break the GI barrier, in other words, your body can’t absorb any more magnesium at that given point and that's when you get the disaster pants, if you don't make it to the bathroom quickly, because if you hit tolerance really fast, you can really, super relaxed, very quickly, especially if you're really bound up. You got to be careful with that one.

Long-term, I always believe that no single supplement, no single nutrient, no similar agent, can get you out of a bad lifestyle. You've got to exercise, you've got to breathe, you've got to drink great water and you've got to be able to take care of your mental health. If you don't do those things, you can get a short-term effect out of a product but at the end of the day, you're not addressing the fundamental flaw in the whole system.

We're always adapting. We're always mutating. We're always changing and life changes. It's very dynamic existence here on planet earth. It's just to be able to regulate up or regulate down, depending on what's going on in your life. It's not about living some serene life in a perfect organic monastery, somewhere in some Holliston place of the planet. It's about being able to have the tools, have the practices available that when it's go time, you can deliver what you need to do and when it's rest time, you're able to do that. But I think getting away from the blue light and the WIFI signals and not watching, eating your food in front of the TV is a big factor.

Melanie Avalon:                      I love so much that you have this company that is giving these tools to help address health issues, but you come from this perspective of the holistic importance of everything and the mindset. I was just thinking about the stress thing. I've often heard that chronic stress is often when you feel like you don't have the resources to handle a situation. Stressors can arise in life and if you feel like you're capable and have resources to handle them, they likely won't cause as much chronic stress, but so often we just feel like we don't know.

We don't know if we're capable. We don't know if things will change. I think especially now with, I keep mentioning, but the whole quarantine situation, there's a lot. The supplement that you guys created, it's called Magnesium Breakthrough, would you like to tell listeners briefly a little bit about the formulation, how they can take it, what it's going to address? The basics.

Wade Lightheart:                     I don't know how good I'm at briefly, because I'm so excited about this product, but…

Melanie Avalon:                      It's fine. It doesn't have to be briefly. Go as long as you want.

Wade Lightheart:                     Here's the thing. Let's start. Here's what happens and this happens to virtually everybody that gets involved in magnesium, is you start taking it and all of a sudden you hear about do magnesium chelate and you hear about bis-glycinate and you hear about citrate and all of a sudden you're like, “Oh, well, I'm going to try this one and I'm going to try this one,” and you'll notice different effects from different magnesiums.

We're going to go through some of the ones that I've been able to document through research, which has been peer reviewed research, not just my own research and that's how we came to the formulation. Literally, this all started for me, I was literally getting into magnesium because I started to notice when I hit my burnout, magnesium made so much difference. I went right up, I just kept dosing up. I got up to, I think, five or six grams a day at one point. I went to the overdose at a moment where, “Oh, I got to make a run for the bathroom and I hope I make it.”

I've gone through those experiences so I don't recommend that. I don't suggest it, kind of why we do these things, but I couldn't deny when you talked about that component of resources, how much my situation in my business didn't change that much but my ability to handle and tolerate that and think better and think clear and be able to take time off and relax, that was regenerative for myself, as opposed to staying in this kind of anxiety, stress loop.

This was not BiOptimizers by the way. It was actually, it was another business that I had. I'm a kind of a serial entrepreneur. I have a number of companies, BiOptimizers being the prime one that I love the most. I ended up dumping that company at the end. I got rid of that company after a while. Sometimes that's the best. Sometimes you just can't supplement yourself out of a bad lifestyle. I was just asking for myself too much.

I got all these bottles all over the place, testing it and it was like, “Okay, I'm taking one of these and I'm taking one of these and I'm taking one of these.” It became really frustrating because I needed five different bottles of magnesium in order to hit my magnesium doses, which I was feeling was delivering to all the parts of my body. What I'm going to share with you is what I learned during that time and how we came up with the magnesium breakthrough formula, because basically, we tested all these magnesiums and we took the seven best ones that we felt would cover you from the top of your toes, to the middle of your nose or whatever you want to call it and that's how we came up with it.

Again, we did manipulate the dosages of each one to get the optimal level, what we feel is the optimal level and we'll continue to test and I'm sure there'll be magnesium breakthrough, 2.0 and 3.0, it’s because we never stop improving. We always suggest. We don't always think that we always nail it, we're always looking to improve it. The big ones are, for example, with the different magnesiums, I'll run through these that I think will be very helpful then you can ask questions from that.

Magnesium chelate. This is one of the essential magnesiums that regulates melatonin. This is one of the things that helps quiet the nervous system. People that have trouble sleeping often do well or wake up or have a strange cycle of waking up or when they get up or when they go to bed or that sort of stuff, they are not able to regulate that. That's often because of melatonin, but the precursor to that is magnesium. Magnesium chelate works really well for that. It helps in activating various neurotransmitters, which calm the body. I think the calming effect of magnesium for me was a very valuable thing because I just think a lot of us are anxious about a lot of things.

Now, going to your part with magnesium citrate, talking about people that are bound up or having constipation. This is the magnesium that draws the water into the intestines. We only contain a small component of magnesium because we feel if your citrate is too high, you’ll release much quicker than with the other magnesium. That's the one that will draw the water into the intestine. If you're looking to just use something as a laxative, I would suggest actually just going with a straight magnesium citrate for somebody.

Just go get magnesium citrate, find out your dosage that allows you to go to the bathroom, dose up and you're off to the races. That was not our goal. We just wanted to a small amount of citrate so that we're optimally regulating water coming into the intestines, but not so much that we do it at the cost of the other magnesiums. That's how we built the design of the product.

Magnesium Bis-Glycinate. What this is great for, high blood pressure, heart disease. Magnesium's well known to decrease blood pressure. Also, type 2 diabetes because this magnesium is involved in actually breaking down sugars. That's type 2 diabetes. We think that it assists in insulin resistance. There's enough evidence in the literature to say that's true. Osteoporosis. That's another one. Risk of bone fractures and osteoporosis.

Migraine headaches. Oftentimes, people that have low levels of magnesium in their blood, in their tissues, what happens is they get a constriction of the arteries going to the brain that cuts off oxygen and that's where you get the headaches. The other source of this is depression. Serotonin for example, is the feel-good chemical in the brain. If you don't have enough levels of magnesium to reduce serotonin levels, guess what? You then have issues and oftentimes, people who are on antidepressants have to cycle off them and change different ones.

I believe this is a theory. This is not proof that there's evidence of it, that oftentimes, antidepressants will exhaust magnesium supply and then you can't make the serotonin levels. You have to either up the dosage or you have to switch to a different antidepressant because the mechanisms are different. We've got a number of people who have reported very positive benefits from using magnesium and around how they didn't feel depressed anymore.

Magnesium malate. This is for energy. A lot of people that have chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, as well as people that have high levels of aluminum in the body, magnesium malate seems to be the enzyme that's involved in removing toxic metals from the body, as well as a lot of the enzymatic processes and you know how big I am on enzymes. Magnesium malate is really good for that. Also, if you're doing a heavy metal detox, adding magnesium malate is very helpful because it binds to the aluminum and helps remove it. Especially if you do something like Dr. Silver… was it, Dr. Shades?

Melanie Avalon:                      Dr. Shade. [00:58:02 inaudible] scientific. I’ve had him on a lot.

Wade Lightheart:                     I don't know why they call him Dr. Shade. I mean, that's a terrible name for a doctor, but anyways, but combining magnesium when you're taking his catch formula, you do the liver detox and then you do…

Melanie Avalon:                      The PushCatch.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah. That's a great one and I think if you add some magnesium into your diet, it works better. You just get better results. My favorite, magnesium threonate. This is the most absorbable form of magnesium. It improves memory, assist with sleep, it helps enhance overall cognitive function and I can tell you, we go to a thing called 40 years of Zen, you probably heard it on Bulletproof Radio and we take our executive team and we go there at least once a year and we push our brains to the max.

What's interesting is depletion of magnesium is a big factor in how long your endurance is. We were able to extend our duration far past anybody else had ever gone to that while we're training and we attributed it to that we take high levels of magnesium threonate, as well as we float every day that we're in training and that has a recovery of regenerative effect on our nervous system. It also improves our cognitive function so that we can push our brains higher or faster on the neurofeedback.

We've replicated this over and over and over with people. Of course, again, we're into the clinical side of things. Does it work? Do we have extension? Are we able to go longer than the typical person? We can say yes on all of those. Magnesium threonate is one of my favorites.

Then there’s taurate. Is another magnesium that we have added to the formula. That's of course good for irregular heartbeats. Taurine is a neotropic compound, helps pump blood through the body. I think this one is also very good in prevention of migraines. We have number of people who have felt that they don't get migraines anymore since they started supplementing with one to two grams of magnesium per day and in divided dosages, I might add.

It's better to take it in divided dosages than all the once, with food is great. As well, they demonstrate people who are taking taurate, have demonstrated overall cognitive function and memory too improve and it also can help build GABA. It works similar to GABA, which is a neurotransmitter that blocks impulses to the nervous system. We create noise in our nervous system. Taurine has been used. A lot of athletes will use it in order to calm the body.

Magnesium, basically, it'll slow mental decline and it increases BDNF, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor and that's essential for the stimulation of new brain cells, particularly in the hippocampus. We can talk a little bit more about that because I've been using alternate day fasting to do that and it's been extraordinary. Taurate also helps type 2 diabetes as an insulin regulation and it lowers the risk for PMS.

Then on top of that, we've got magnesium orotate. A lot of people really like orotate. Some people like that better than the threonate or the other ones. This is the one that seems to have effects on calcification of damaged heart tissue, premature heartbeats, increase in exercise capability and capacity, also can have skin enhancing benefits that give you that kind of glow. It's also involved in the availability of DNA and RNA precursors, in the whole cellular replication, since it is a glycogen and ATP and all those things, all involved with that.

This is one of the things that a lot of athletes were using to maintain neuro function vasomotor tone, all those sorts of stuff, as well, it helps with calcium absorption, because sometimes you'll take calcium and can’t absorb it again. We combine that with humic and fulvic acid as a monotonic blend. We know that that assists in the delivery of nutrients inside the cell. We put that in there as well as vitamin B6, which will also assist in that process and manganese citrate, and all of these things have been proven to improve the absorption and utilization.

When we make a magnesium, what we did, we wanted to make a magnesium that literally would have the widest range of applications that wouldn't give you disaster pants too soon and that you could actually reduce the amount of magnesium you had to take overall to get all of the potential benefits of magnesium from these different levels, and that's how we came up with Magnesium Breakthrough.

So far, it's been a smashing success for people and when they try it, like all our products, they try their first bottle, is on us. For example, they try it, they don't like it, it doesn't work well, we'll take the bottle back, whatever you paid, and give you your money back. That's not the case with magnesium. Almost every single person not only just liked it, has raved about it. I think it's largely part, there's just such a widespread deficiency of magnesium that we're covering all the basis.

Whatever, if you've got deficiency in your heart or deficiency in your brain or deficiency in your nervous system, we're setting a bigger spread on the shot, if you will, to hit more of those deficiencies specifically in your body and people get results faster. Longtime magnesium users are finding they're cutting their dosages in half using our product and so we're just delighted. It just came out because I was struggling. I had to figure this out myself.

Melanie Avalon:                      I love it. That's the best way when it's coming from…

Wade Lightheart:                     I think so.

Melanie Avalon:                      I think so. I have some really quick follow-up questions about that. First of all, that was amazing. That was very comprehensive. I learned a lot about the different types of magnesium. It's malate that was good for heavy metals or detox, which one?

Wade Lightheart:                     Yes. Malate is the one for aluminum.

Melanie Avalon:                      I don't know how I never came across that in my whole heavy metal journey. That's really fascinating.

Wade Lightheart:                     Well, it wasn't on the Metallica album. It's a bad joke.

Melanie Avalon:                      Oh my gosh. That's hysterical. Quick question now, for listeners who are taking this, is this a situation where, since it does have all these different types of magnesium, I imagine any given person… can everybody take it at the dose that's prescribed and does it regulate to the body? Is there ever a reason that it might not be appropriate for somebody in a certain dose and on top of that, can people take a higher dose if they feel like it's benefiting them?

Wade Lightheart:                     Great question. We have a philosophy, going back to the bucket theory that I illustrated, and for people who want to know more information about that they can go to bioptimizers.com. Go to our 12 Week Double My Energy course. Go to the bucket theory of nutrition and I actually display it and I show it on the board and I give you the visual illustrations of that.

There's three things when it comes to any nutritional supplement and this foundation happens in orthomolecular nutrition, which was started by Dr. David Hawkins, Dr. Abram Hoffer and Dr. Linus Pauling. Way back in the day when they were treating all sorts of psychiatric conditions with high level dosages of nutrition. That's what orthomolecular psychiatry or orthomolecular medicine actually means, is finding the nutrients and then treating patients specifically. That should always be undertaken with the guidance of a professional.

You want to look up the orthomolecular societies. There's a lot of great information for people who are really struggling. I highly recommend that you go and dive deep in that, but out of that came this. There's three levels of dosages that people can subject themselves to. There's what I call the minimum effective dosage, there's the maximum dosage and then there's the optimum dosage. Typically, the fastest way to produce results on any given deficiency is first off, you can go take a SpectraCell test.

If you want to just get out of the realm of opinions and theories, go take a SpectraCell test and basically, that breaks down all the nutrient deficiencies that your body has with all your minerals and all that sort of stuff and it also addresses which ones that you have difficulty absorbing and utilizing. That test just squares away everything and then when you start taking nutrients supplements, for example, you can pound whatever you're taking at a highest level possible and see the difference.

I'll start with the maximum doses. We always recommend starting small, starting with the minimum effective dosage, whatever's recommended, and then increase the dosage until one of the two things happens. One, you get the runs, that's called breaking the GI barrier. You took too much, your body can’t absorb it and that's the highest dosage or two, that you have whatever the symptom that you were taking the product for became alleviated. That would be the two components that's going to determine.

What we have found is oftentimes, you can take the maximum dosage, going up from the small dose up to the maximum dose. Stay there at a period of time until whatever symptoms you were dealing with go away and then start titrating down so that you only are putting back into your body what you require. If you look at it from a visual standpoint, it's like, “Hey, my bucket is empty. My burn rate, the hole in my bucket is more than ever and if I only put the amount that I'm using right now, I never get to experience what it's like to have a full bucket.”

With magnesium being essential for so many enzymatic processes, so many different vital processes in the body, almost every different function you can imagine in such a wide stray of deficiency, I'm more partial to, start with your initial dosage and start going up. For most people, two capsules, two or three times a day takes you up into that optimal/maximal dosage. I've taken up as high, as high as six grams in a day in divided doses. You don't take it all at once. I'm not suggesting everybody do that, but keep in mind, I'm a 200-pound guy with a lot of muscle.

A hundred-pound Yogi who doesn't have that much muscle tissue or body mass is going to need half of that. Find it, you titrate, you go up, you go up, you go up in that divided dosage. For example, you take two capsules in the morning, two capsules in the afternoon, two capsules in the evening with food. If you want to go higher, you would just add one capsule to your first meal, then go for a couple days and then one capsule the next. You hit your dosage when you get the runs. At that point, you start titrating down and then you'll find over trial and error your optimal level.

When I got started on this process, I was up at literally five, six grams a day and then I got to a place where I was calm. I got to a place where I could tolerate caffeine again. It took me a year. It took me a whole year to get to that point and now I'm down to, I take one and a half grams a day. I literally take two capsules three times a day and I literally almost nothing rattles me now. I've got high levels of stress running a company, we all got family stuff. We're traveling around. We're all in this COVID thing. None of it seems to be bothering me.

It's like, “Okay, well, that's fine.” I wish it was different or this was better. I sleep great. I don't feel stressed in my work. My muscle tone’s never been better and I feel absolutely fantastic. Here's a guy that was doing all the other things, but it doesn't mean that you can't burn yourself out. We get a lot of the reports all around from feedback from different influencers, different nutritionists, stuff and they are like, “Well, we're so glad that you made this because now I don't have to take five different bottles of things,” which I was doing at first.

Melanie Avalon:                      This is so incredible. I'm so excited for my audience in particular, to try it out and report back. I can't tell you how many times I'll do a random post or an Instagram or something and ask, “What is everybody's favorite bio hacks?” and so many people say BiOptimizers as an answer. It's really incredible. I'm really excited to see how everybody responds to this. You do have an amazing offer for my listeners. You can actually go to magbreakthrough.com/melanie10. That's M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H, magbreakthrough.com/melanie10, M-E-L-A-N-I-E 10.

That will get you 10% off your order of Magnesium Breakthrough. Super grateful for that. I'll also put all this information in the show notes as well. One last question to end with, because I just have to ask you, you mentioned that you're experimenting with ADF. Are you or I don't know if you were doing it historically as well, but are you doing it 36 hours straight type thing with no food, or do you do a low calorie a day or what does it look like for you?

Wade Lightheart:                     Keep in mind, I guess a lot of people would call me a middle-aged man now. I'm in my late forties and I have been doing, I do 12 hours. I do from 8:00 AM to 8:00 AM. That's my food window and then I do 36 hours of no food.

Melanie Avalon:                      Wait, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.

Wade Lightheart:                     Then I do 36 hours. I will not eat the next day and then I'll start again at 8:00 AM and I'll do that three days a week with Saturdays. I do Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays where I'm not eating and then Friday and Saturdays, I increase my… I don't watch what I'm eating or anything else and what's really radical about this is the types of food I can have, the kinds of food I can have. I've done experiments where I've really gone off the reservation and ate a bunch of stuff that I would not normally eat to see what would happen and it seems to make absolutely no difference.

I incorporated this experiment during the lockdown because I didn't have access to a gym and I'm a guy that goes to the gym five, six days a week. I love the gym. I love working out. I love the environment. It's a great stress reliever. I just feel good. That’s how I operate and so when I had no gym, I'm like, “Okay,” well, I had a little band set and I got some dumbbells delivered to me about three weeks into this thing. I thought someone brought me a new Ferrari or something. It was awesome.

I got these regulating dumbbells and as I started from that point that I could not do the same type of workouts that I was normally doing and the results were extraordinary. Not only did cognitive function stay great, it seemingly improved. My ability to think through complex problems and have brain and mental endurance. Fasting, isn't known to increase BDNF, Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, which increases brain cells.

I had just gotten out of 40 years of Zen, which was... one of the things that he suggested, was doing lots of… you could do fasting as a way to supplement your brain activity because the results are six to 12 months. I did that. I was actually originally doing that because I thought, “Oh, well I just want to improve my brain function,” but little did I know, I ended up dropping, I think it's been just over 20 pounds, about 21 pounds during that time.

Melanie Avalon:                      How long of a timeframe?

Wade Lightheart:                     I started about; it was at the end of march. I started, literally, I think it was the last day of March. We're here filming today in the middle of May. It's just probably 10 weeks, eight, nine weeks.

Melanie Avalon:                      Oh, wow, and that's with less gym?

Wade Lightheart:                     That's with less gym. Now I'll do a caveat. I was out in the sunshine a lot as I indicated, I came over here to Sedona, Arizona so I was getting a lot of sunshine. There's certainly a vitamin D effect that I was getting that I wasn't. Although I love being in the sun, I certainly didn't get as much as I am getting now. The interesting component is, after my first month, of course, I was so excited about the results. I started sharing with my insiders and they all started doing it.

The jury's still out on its effect for females. Katrine is doing it now and she's noticing some benefits, but she's about three weeks in. She hasn't gone through a couple of full hormone cycles. She's regulating and optimizing that for women, particularly because I think there's some differences, but what I like about it is food regulation. If you have an unhealthy psychological relationship with food, you don't have to worry about creating guilt around what you're eating on the off days or on your calorie days because 36 hours of fasting automatically regulates and mitigates the calorie consumption right off the bat.

I've done it super clean weeks. I've done weeks where I ate things like pizza and chocolate bars and stuff like that to see what was going to happen. Not regular chocolate bars or kind of a… I'm a bit of a cacao snob. Some for you could go, “Confessions need to be buried, right.” The same thing, we've noticed this with my friends. Matt is doing his version. He's doing a Keto version of his, I'm doing this one. Then I've got another fellow of mine who's up in his 60’s and then now it's proliferating. It's gone wild in my network because they're looking at me and they're like, “Wade, you look amazing,” and I'm like, “I've actually not felt better in my life.”

I'm doing that. I'm slamming the magnesium and doing my capex and all my enzyme stuff. All that stuff was pretty regular anyways, but that was the big difference. For those people, I think looking at a very simple and easy weight management system, I think alternate day fasting, I think it might come out that less maybe two days a week would be sufficient for some people. I don't know. We're still early into it but we're very excited about the results because it's been the easiest thing I've ever done in my life.

Melanie Avalon:                      We are going to have to talk about this more. I know, I think, we're recording next week for the Intermittent Fasting podcast. I feel like we should open the show with this discussion because this is fantastic. Our listeners are going to love that.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah, we should. I literally had a birthday, so I got to eat my cake. They say, have your cake and eat it too. I literally did that. I had this beautiful cake on my birthday a few weeks ago and you know what, at the end of the week I was down in weight and I was going, “Everybody needs to know about this.”

Melanie Avalon:                      Actually, to that point, so I'm not saying listeners, if you're doing ADF that you should go and just eat all the processed things but my current obsession right now is I've been diving in deep into the literature, comparing the effects of fasting compared to cold exposure because they actually have very similar effects in the body and they upregulate similar genes and they lead to obviously weight loss, cold exposure because the body is raising metabolism, creating brown fat to heat the body, fasting because obviously, the body needs to feed itself.

But what was fascinating and the way these ties into ADF was that actually cold exposure basically creates all of these effects with really honestly, no side effects. There's not any issue or potential of weight regains. It's pretty much all good things. Whereas with fasting, at least this was wrote in studies that I was looking at, but it actually in the longer fasting state, and I don't know how long of a  fast it would correlate to humans because this was in 24 hour fast [01:17:41 inaudible], which I don't know what that would correlate to. That might be more like a three day fast.

But during the fast, the brown fat in the body in the subcutaneous tissue, which normally in fasting we burn the visceral fat first, the brown fat in the subcutaneous tissue, which is actually the type of fat that you want to have, it actually genetically turns into white fat, which is the storage form of fat because it's prepping to become a backup reserve if you burn through all your visceral fat. The point is, if you're doing a longer fast, you actually create genetic changes that may make your subcutaneous fat, and it's a crazy rabbit hole, may make subcutaneous fat actually less “healthy” and more inflammatory.

But the researchers found it was mitigated if there was adequate refeeding, I’m going to actually talked about ADF so you can actually switch back those genes in that fat. Basically, if you do ADF and you're not adequately refeeding, not having those feasting days, you could probably put your body into too much of a stress state. But, when you're doing it properly, sounds like you are and the people that you're working with are, feast away.

Wade Lightheart:                     It's really fun. When we get on that podcast, we'll dive into more of it because you can get both perspectives. Matt’s been what I've been experiencing and then hopefully, we'll get some of our female listeners to participate because I do know my Chief Researcher, Katrine, she's working on it and working out some of the nuances, so I should get some feedback from her for that as well.

Melanie Avalon:                      That would be awesome. Has he ever done Carnivore?

Wade Lightheart:                     Matt? Yeah. He's done it all. I mean, we're pretty wild. He's done Carnivore, I've done raw food. That's as extreme as it gets.

Melanie Avalon:                      Raw Carnivore.

Wade Lightheart:                     I don't think he's done Raw Carnivore. No, I did.

Melanie Avalon:                      Because I've done Raw Carnivore.

Wade Lightheart:                     Yeah, I know. I know people do it. I've done the raw side.

Melanie Avalon:                      I'm crazy. I'm in your camp, I'm in your guys’ camp.

Wade Lightheart:                     That's why we get along so well and I think there's value in that. If you're pushing it and you have all the, I would say stop gaps and you have the right people around you to support you in that journey, then it's fun to be in the experiment zone and then we come back and we tell people, “Hey, here's the mistakes I made. Here's the things I learned and here's how every day person can take advantage of it and apply it in a way that makes sense as opposed to being on the crazy train like we can be at times.”

Melanie Avalon:                      Exactly. I can't tell you how many times people are like, “Melanie, what do you do?” I'm like, “Don't ask me what I do.” I’m like, “I can tell you what I think maybe might help you but don't do what I do,” because I tend to try everything in the extreme.

Wade Lightheart:                     What was that thing within the ‘70s, “Please don't try this at home.”

Melanie Avalon:                       Yes, exactly. Literally. This has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. Like I said, I don't even know how many times I've interviewed you, but you were the best and I'm super excited that we have next week to dive in even deeper on the other show. Also, in the future, I would love to bring you at some point to do an episode on more about reverse dieting and getting out of issues that people walk themselves into with chronic dieting, chronic bodybuilding, things like that. I think that would be an amazing episode.

Wade Lightheart:                     It’s a huge one and especially for people that's gone down those extreme routes. It's something that you really have to be considerate of so that you don't get on that horrible metabolic damage program that happens so often for those extreme diets.

Melanie Avalon:                      Yeah. Maybe in the future we can have an episode on that because I think that could be so valuable for so many people.

Wade Lightheart:                     Sounds great.

Melanie Avalon:                      All right. I will talk to you next week.

Wade Lightheart:                     Thank you.

Melanie Avalon:                      Bye.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

​​