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Comment by lambdaba | Hacker News Reader

Just give people magnesium, it's incredibly effective and deficiency is very common (big part of it is because of soil mineral depletion). In fact, a lot of hypertension is just magnesium deficiency.

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magnesium and potassium. I’ve experienced profound immediate lowering of blood pressure by taking 0.25-0.5 g of potassium bicarbonate every day or every few days. Try to get 4 g of potassium per day from diet or supplement. I’ve published some research on potassium sensing in renal physiology. Other benefits I’ve noticed are decreased heart palpitations and more mental energy. A note about magnesium: make sure you’re taking a chelated form. Most multivitamins use MgO, which is not very bioavailable. The difference in absorption is like eating a rock vs eating a gummy bear.

Yep, low potassium is perhaps why HBP is correlated with high sodium intake, which I understand displaces potassium. That's basically the typical western diet: high sugar, high sodium, low magnesium, low potassium.

This is a nice idea but unfortunately doesn't translate to significant decreases in blood pressure for most people. 4g of IV magnesium sulphate barely affects the blood pressure.

But I'd still recommend more broccoli for everyone.

This is whey we need to be talking more about nutritional genomics. Magnesium will help for people who have a need for magnesium based on their genetics.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22051430/

I do not care if a supplement works for "most people", I only care if it works for me.

Everybody has a need for magnesium and MOST people are deficient. Searches will give you a less dramatic percent, but those are measuring serum magnesium, while the important number is red blood cell magnesium.

I don't know if that's enough for everyone, but the other major factors are also evident: excess weight, lack of exercise, chronic high blood sugar, etc.

Even if it were so (no acute effect, seems unlikely based on, err, anecdata), I've seen claims of it taking up to a year or more to fix a deficiency. It's nt just a nice idea, it actually works. And blood pressure medicine, often diuretics, only worsens magnesium deficiency and thus a magnesium deficiency treated symptomatically with such medicine becomes a chronic hypertensive condition.

Do you have any further reading regarding this position?

I know of a doctor named Carolyn Dean, but there's @grimhood on Twitter who has a lot of compiled info about the role of magnesium and some recommendations (not only on magnesium). Start with https://twitter.com/search?q=from:grimhood%20magnesium.

Citation needed. Magnesium is definitely critical for living organisms, humans or or other animals or plants alike, but that shouldn't be confused with the question of whether Magnesium deficiency leads to hypertension.

I only have anecdata and directing you to a search engine. The simple query "magnesium hypertension" yields multiple results going in that direction. Also, magnesium is used to "relax" cells from "contraction" by calcium. Anyway, that's my layman understanding, but magnesium deficiency being at the forefront of an epidemic of "tension" diseases, seems quite evident when you look at the declining nutritional quality in diets, and the increases in stress factors (also depleting magnesium).

[Citation Needed]

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