Thyroid Thursday #81: The Vitamin D – Magnesium Paradox

Everybody, it’s Dr. Eric Balcavage back for another edition of Thyroid Thursday. And in today’s episode of Thyroid Thursday, I want to talk about the vitamin D/magnesium paradox. So, right now on the blogs, there are so many people talking about how you need to increase your vitamin D, vitamin D deficiency, it’s winter, nobody’s getting sufficient levels of Vitamin D, and they need to keep taking this stuff. The problem is, and what people aren’t talking about on these blogs, is that vitamin D doesn’t work without sufficient levels of magnesium. Every step in the conversion of vitamin D to an active form of vitamin D 1,25 OHD, which is the active form, and all the metabolism of vitamin D, requires magnesium.

And so, I talked about to D or not to D, whether you should be taking vitamin D to begin with, you have to task three things to determine if you have a vitamin D deficiency. You have to test RBC magnesium, 25 OHD and  1,25 OHD. Doctors make the mistake of only testing, 25 OHD, and if it’s low, assume that you’re deficient. The problem with that thinking is, if you have some type of chronic inflammation or infection, the body dramatically increases 25 OHD to 1,25 OHD. If your 1,25 OHD is greater than your 25 OHD, you don’t have a deficiency. Your 25 OHD is up-regulating to the 1,25 OHD, due to some type of stress and chronic inflammation, and you probably don’t want to continue to take vitamin D in that situation.

If 25 OHD and 1,25OHD are both low, then you probably have a magnesium deficiency. So before you flood the system with more vitamin D, you’d need to check and see if you have a vitamin or a magnesium deficiency. Because you have to have sufficient magnesium to metabolize vitamin D. And if you don’t have sufficient magnesium, you are going to pull it from other systems, essentially what we call magnesium steal, and that’s going to result in more negative symptomatology.

So, before, please, before you start pounding your body with vitamin D because it’s winter, make sure that you have three things tested: RBC magnesium, 25 OHD, and 1,25 OHD. You have to test all three things before supplementing with vitamin D. And please, go back and watch the Thyroid Thursday videos on vitamin D and magnesium. Go back and watch the Thyroid Answers podcast on “to D or not to D”, where I lay this all out on what you need before you start supplementing with vitamin D.

Hope that helps. If you have questions about your thyroid health, schedule a free 15-minute health evaluation, here!