The Dr. Hyman Show
The Brain-Body Fix: How Magnesium, Omega-3s, & Vitamin D Transform Your Health
Mon, 12 May 2025
Up to 80% of people may be living with insufficient levels of vitamin D, magnesium, and omega-3 fatty acids—three essential nutrients involved in critical functions like immune defense, cardiovascular health, mood regulation, and brain function. Modern lifestyles—marked by nutrient-poor diets, low sun exposure, chronic stress, and overuse of medications—disrupt the body’s ability to absorb and maintain these key nutrients. Deficiencies often go undiagnosed due to outdated testing, yet they’re strongly linked to conditions like depression, fatigue, diabetes, and heart disease. In this episode, I talk about, along with Andrew Huberman, how modern lifestyles and diets lead to widespread nutrient deficiencies and chronic disease—and how targeted nutrition and lifestyle changes can restore optimal health. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills, and cognitive functioning. Dr. Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, which is given to the scientist making the largest discoveries in the study of vision. His lab’s most recent work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: Do you need to take Vitamin D? How Magnesium Deficiency Impacts Your HealthHow to Rewire Your Brain For Sleep
Chapter 1: What percentage of the population has magnesium deficiency?
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. About 20% of the population is living with overt magnesium deficiency. This is full-blown magnesium deficiency, and that's like one in five people. That's a lot of people. Subclinical or insufficiency, not true deficiency, which you'd see on a lab test, but insufficiency can affect up to 80% of the population.
If you're suffering from stress, poor sleep, low energy, these are all signs you might be low in magnesium. And not just one kind. Your body needs seven different forms to truly feel calm and at ease. That's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers, a complete formula with all seven types in one capsule.
Head to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMEN10 to save 10% and try it risk-free with their 365-day guarantee. Again, that's bioptimizers.com slash hymen with code HYMEN10 at checkout. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale.
And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive.
And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Probably 80% of Americans are deficient or have insufficient levels of vitamin D, levels that don't protect them optimally from...
things that you want to have vitamin D protect you from, whether it's osteoporosis or depression or cancer or to boost your immune system so you don't get things like the flu or COVID. I mean, if you have high vitamin D levels, your reduction in flu is 75%. That's more than the flu vaccine. So it really is a powerful nutrient. It's very safe at the recommended doses. It's easy to take.
There's no side effects. It's very cheap. And it's such an incredibly important vitamin for... optimizing your health in every way, including longevity. So let's talk about vitamin D a little bit.
Now, people think they should be avoiding the sun to not get skin cancer, but vitamin D actually protects you against skin cancer, believe it or not, and reduces the risk of melanoma dramatically and many other cancers, not just skin cancer. It actually reduces overall mortality by 7%. So just having good vitamin D levels reduces the risk of death
by seven percent and vitamin d you know we used to get from sun running around naked hunting gathering and also if we were living in colder climates we would eat fish wild fish like uh herring and sardines and mackerel these these fatty small fish have pretty high levels of vitamin d also mushrooms so if you're foraging and going for mushrooms there's a lot of like porcini mushrooms have the highest levels of vitamin d but it's still hard to get enough we're not getting these foods anymore so
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Chapter 2: How can magnesium levels affect stress and sleep?
the dose that makes your skin a bit red, you know, when you get a sunburn, that might produce between 10 to 25,000 units of vitamin D in our bodies, which is great. The problem is most of us don't get that kind of sun exposure. And a lot of times we use a lot of sunscreen, which is not necessarily bad.
Well, it depends on which sunscreen you're using, but they block a lot of the benefits of getting vitamin D. So you might be out in the sun, but using sunblock and then not getting vitamin D. Now, if you live in a northern climate, you're for sure not getting enough sun and vitamin D, especially in the winter.
And you're probably not eating a lot of the porcini mushrooms and background herring and cod liver oil. Also, the other problem is as we get older, our skin does not convert the sun into vitamin D. in the way that we did when we were younger. So the average 70-year-old creates only 25% of the vitamin D that a 20-year-old does.
Also, depending on your skin color, if you have dark skin, if you're African American, you basically will produce far less vitamin D and you need a lot more sun exposure. So most African Americans are very deficient in vitamin D. I'll also recommend that everybody supplement. Now, I think it's one of those basic supplements that everybody should get. It makes such a difference.
And you should have a level between 45 to 75, let's say. And the only way to know what that is is to test. You need to test and find out what's going on. And you can guess, but you often will be off. Some people need 2,000 units. Some people need 5,000. Some people need 10,000 units to get their vitamin levels up to, you know, the ideal level.
And you can do that through your doctor or, you know, I co-founded a company called Function Health. You go to functionhealth.com. You can join the wait list and get testing that actually helps you to get your – actual levels, to know what you're doing, to check it over time. I think if you use the code YOUNGFOREVER, you can get in and actually get off the wait list.
So try that and see how your vitamin D levels are, but it's important to know. And often doctors say, oh, don't worry, just take the vitamin D, but you really want to know what your levels are. Also, if you want to get sun exposure, the best is 10 to 2. In obviously the summertime, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., full body sun exposure for 20 minutes.
I mean, you can cover your face or put sunblock on your face, but you really want to have full body exposure. I mean, it only works in the summer. It only works if you live below Atlanta. I recommend taking vitamin D and probably 2 to 5,000 of vitamin D3. It's important to take vitamin D3, not vitamin D2.
Most doctors will prescribe vitamin D2, which is unfortunate, but make sure you get the right vitamin D. And again, it depends on your age, your genetics, where you live, how much time you're in the sun, time of year. But if you're like, oh, in the summer, I don't need it. But it's actually not true. You need it during the summer unless you're out there all the time.
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Chapter 3: Why is vitamin D crucial for overall health?
As you get older, you're not so good at absorbing things. It's another group that has a risk. So you don't absorb it. You excrete more magnesium. If you have certain age-related diseases that cause low magnesium, certain medications we'll talk about in a minute can lower magnesium levels and make you pee out magnesium, often things that are used to treat high blood pressure, like diuretics.
If you look at hospitalized patients, 65% of people who are critically ill who are admitted to the ICU or intensive care unit were magnesium deficient. And with COVID-19, we saw also those who had the highest magnesium intake had the lowest levels of inflammation and had 70% lower odds of developing severe symptoms.
So just taking magnesium can reduce the inflammation if you get COVID and reduce your risk of having severe COVID by 70%. That's amazing. And this is completely safe. Unless you have kidney failure, it's an incredibly safe mineral to take. Now,
The other thing you should know is most doctors don't think about it unless you're in an extreme situation, like we talked about, whether you have preterm labor and arrhythmia or having seizures from pregnancy or high blood pressure in pregnancy. We just don't think about it. But we should.
And again, as I mentioned, if it's tested, it usually is a serum magnesium, which doesn't reflect the whole body. It's only about 1% of the magnesium in your body. 99% is in your tissues, your bone, muscle.
uh the body it has really tight regulation methods for magnesium and it pulls from the reservoirs in your bone or muscle if you won't if you need to keep levels stable so if your whole body is depleted it's going to be hard to replenish and normal quote normal serum magnesium levels are about 1.8 to 2.3 but
I think anything under two is linked to increased health risks, and optimal levels should be over two. So if you're getting a serum magnesium, it should be over two, but I don't like that. I like the red blood cell magnesium. So functional medicine looks at this a little bit differently.
We look at comprehensive testing, look at what's going on with all their biomarkers, and we look at red blood cell magnesium. It's a way more accurate reflection of whole body magnesium. It measures intracellular magnesium, which is where often it needs to be to do the job. It reflects the magnesium content of muscles and bones. It has a longer half-life.
It's less prone to fluctuations from your diet, and it correlates with clinical symptoms. So it's a really good biomarker that is part of the function panel that you're not getting when you go to your regular doctor. We're sure it's not on your annual panel, and it's probably not on any panel that they do at all if you're going to measure magnesium.
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