The Dr. Hyman Show
The Brain-Body Fix: How Magnesium, Omega-3s, & Vitamin D Transform Your Health
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 Deficiencies often go undiagnosed due to outdated testing, yet they’re strongly linked to conditions like depression, fatigue, diabetes, and heart disease.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
Full Episode
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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