Hello, hello. I’m looking forward to diving deep into one of my all-time favorite topics here at Minerals for Migraines, the topic of mineral dynamics, and I’m giving the title of this podcast Nutrient Dynamics and Migraine because I want to be talking here about not just mineral dynamics of minerals to each other, but also the dynamic relationship that minerals have to other nutrients, especially other vitamins, as well as the dynamic relationships that minerals have to hormones and vice versa. So this is an infinitely interesting topic. It’s also one that is important to keep in mind if you’re wanting to take supplements in a way that you’re not going to actually cause deeper deficiencies or problems in your body, and it’s strangely overlooked.
There are of course some functional medicine doctors who are trained in this, and more and more information and awareness is coming out around this, and of course we also have to keep in mind that despite how much we do know about mineral dynamics, you know, there are infinite feedback loops in the human body. The human body is so sophisticated, and not just in the human body, but also in soil health and in animal health. So a lot of what we know about mineral dynamics comes from these other areas as well, but there’s a lot that we don’t know, and so we always have to kind of keep this in mind that we need to keep doing research and keep trying to understand these dynamic relationships.
So that’s what I’m excited to dive into today. If you follow me on Instagram and Minerals for Migraines, you’ve probably seen me cover a few of these topics in smaller videos, and we’re going to do a deeper dive today. It’s certainly not comprehensive.
There are many, many minerals. So in the hair tissue mineral analysis lab, the one that I run for my migraine clients and coaching clients, there are 15 nutritional elements that are the main minerals that I’m looking at in a profile, and then we also have six toxic elements. These include aluminum, uranium, as well as some of the heavy metals like lead and mercury, and then we also have additional elements that are more obscure minerals like strontium, zirconium, barium. These are some minerals that we don’t know quite as much about, and they don’t seem to be as vital for health as the nutritional elements in the first category, but they’re always worth looking at because sometimes we see anomalies there. So hair tissue mineral analysis is an amazing lab. It’s a big window. It’s a three-month long snapshot of your excretion of minerals through your hair. Hair is a tissue of excretion, and it gives us a really big window as compared to blood, which is a very short snapshot in time of nutrients. So I love this lab. That’s why I use it in my coaching. It’s certainly what gave me leverage in my own healing and healing migraine, and I found it to be incredibly useful. It also has its limits like every other lab, and it is an interpretation.
So there’s something called excretions in the hair tissue mineral analysis lab, and this is when we see an elevation of a cell that’s or a mineral that’s being lost from the cells and taken up by the hair but probably not being utilized well. You can learn more about all of this on my blog. I do have a blog post if you want to do a little bit of a deeper dive. The name of the blog post is Mineral and Vitamin Antagonists and Synergists, and there you can see some of the mineral wheels. A mineral wheel is a graphic representation of some of these mineral dynamics and mineral relationships. So if you would like to head on over to my website and look that up, that is a very good reference for those of you who are wanting a little bit more information about mineral dynamics as a reference.
So to begin, what I’d love to talk about first is just that basically anytime we have a toxicity or an extreme elevation in a mineral on a person’s hair tissue mineral analysis, we are very likely to also have an extreme deficiency, and this is because of these mineral dynamics. So just as an example, we do know that mercury lowers zinc, that zinc is needed to detox mercury, and therefore if you have a lot of mercury in your system, you’ll probably be low in zinc. This is an example of the way that a toxicity can cause a deficiency. So the reverse is also true, which is that when we’re deficient in certain minerals that our body normally uses, either to remove other metals or to balance other minerals, we end up with toxicities, right? So we can actually step back when we’re looking at health and healing, we can step back from this view and story about individual pathologies such as migraine, and with hair tissue mineral analysis, we can really just step back, look at the minerals, and look at health and this question of how to improve health through the lens of improving deficiencies and removing and eliminating toxicities, removing the blocks, the roadblocks that are clogging up the metabolism, clogging up the system, and scrambling the enzyme function, and nourishing the system as absolutely much as possible. And in my Repattern Migraine coursework, I talk a lot about nourishment on many, many levels, not just on nutritional levels or just not on the level of minerals and supplements and food, but also on the level of social, emotional, spiritual nutrition. So that’s why in these podcast episodes, I’ll kind of be alternating topics between the more cultural, emotional, spiritual, psychological aspects of healing migraine and getting nourished, and the more concrete biochemical neuroendocrine aspects of healing what is such a complex condition, chronic migraine.
So this time, we’re going to be diving in to a lot of these mineral dynamics, certainly not all of them. I’m just going to be giving you a few examples from each of these areas of the major electrolytes, and then I call these level one minerals, and then the level two minerals that I go over in the Repattern Migraine coursework are the minerals iron, copper, zinc, selenium, iodine, and manganese. And these are minerals that are needed a lot for thyroid function. That’s one reason I focus a lot on them as level two minerals in my Repattern Migraine coursework. And then I’m going to address the topic of heavy metal contamination and also talk a little bit about the dynamic relationship that hormones have with minerals and vice versa. So this won’t be comprehensive of all the minerals, but I’m just going to highlight a few key points for each of these categories.
So let’s start off with the major electrolytes, and I did a few videos on Instagram recently on this. And we start with the major electrolytes, this level one category of minerals, because the major electrolytes are macronutrients that we really need a lot of. They’re super important for conducting electricity, that’s why they’re called electrolytes, and they help us to have a better voltage in our body. And this is important because the level of pain that we have in our body results when the voltage in our body is low. The voltage in our body is a measure of oxygen level and pH in the body, and many of these electrolytes are very alkalizing. So the major electrolytes are the first minerals that we see on the Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis Lab. The first four that we see there are calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. And the calcium and magnesium are more building minerals, they’re what we need for our bones and teeth, whereas sodium and potassium are more solvent minerals, they break down they break down crap in the body. So calcium and magnesium have a relationship with each other in that magnesium is needed to make calcium in ionized form, make it bioavailable in the body. And so what we often see in an HTMA is we often see either low magnesium in relation to calcium or a magnesium loss or excretion when magnesium shows up elevated because it’s not being utilized well by the body. Magnesium and potassium are both lost from the cells very easily, which is why we look at these two minerals whenever we’re looking to interpret whether something is a true elevation or an excretion. It is very hard to get toxic in magnesium and potassium, so it is almost always an excretion when we see magnesium and potassium elevated on a hair tissue mineral analysis. We’ll often see this so-called excretion in magnesium and potassium when we have very very high elevated calcium in a person’s HTMA. This elevated calcium is often an intelligent adaptive mechanism by the body when the body is full of acids to buffer these acids, and this usually indicates a deeper problem in the body with a person’s pH balance, which is regulated through breathing and through the kidneys and through the pancreas. So when we see an elevation of something like what is called a calcium shell, we need to think about how is it, you know, how do we need to really see this as an intelligent mechanism and address the root cause rather than just trying to lower the calcium. Although it is true that utilizing the magnesium and potassium, which are very alkalizing minerals, to help to lower the calcium will also help to lower the or help to alkalize the body. So they do work in tandem in that way.
There’s a lot to be said, of course, about calcium, and I go in great depth in about all of these minerals in the Repattern Migraine coursework, but the key point, the key take-home here I think for just for people listening is that calcium is not a mineral that you should be supplementing. It is also a reflection of parathyroid function, and so some people have very high calcium, some people very low calcium, and so without knowing lab results, this is not a mineral you want to be supplementing, although there are some other minerals like potassium and magnesium that I think even without knowing your lab results, it would be wise and it would be good to supplement. The most common mineral deficiency that I see in people with migraine is low potassium, and as I’ll talk about a little later, there’s a relationship between potassium and progesterone. We know that chronic migraine is a condition characterized by low progesterone levels, and it’s interesting that there’s literature showing that people who have transitioned to gender and who take supplemental progesterone therapy end up with higher potassium levels. So the potassium is regulated by the kidneys, and sometimes there’s issues here with not only with intake amount, how much of a mineral that you’re taking in through your diet, but how well you’re absorbing it and whether you’re retaining it. So the kidneys are what filter the blood and either excrete or lose minerals or recirculate them back into the blood if they’re needed. When the adrenal glands and the kidneys are not communicating well, sometimes the kidneys can lose more minerals than optimal, and often the cause of a person’s mineral deficiency of course is not getting sufficient in their diet. So it’s always valuable to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables for this reason. Fruits and vegetables are very alkalizing, they’re full of the major electrolytes, and there’s a few key vegetables specifically that I recommend in the Repattern Migraine coursework that are especially good not only because they contain large amounts of potassium and magnesium and small amounts of calcium and little amounts of sodium, but because they clean the liver and they do many other important and valuable things. There are other amazing healing compounds in fruits and vegetables and these minerals are in very bioavailable form, plus getting your minerals from fruits and vegetables provides a lot of hydration as well and major antioxidants. So everyone with migraine should try to get as much potassium as possible, and there are other ways to get potassium besides fruits and vegetables, but generally because you need a lot of the major electrolytes to function, you need thousands of milligrams a day, it is not advised to just simply try to get it from supplements, but really to be eating a lot of foods that contain a lot of magnesium and potassium especially. And just using, you can use some supplements to try to top it off, but because you need so much you shouldn’t be trying to get all of it from a supplement. I mean that’s generally the case overall, but yes you need a lot of these major electrolytes.
Sodium is something that people with migraine especially need a lot of. I generally, not always, but generally mostly see people with migraine who have very very low sodium, this is why they crave salt, this is why you can actually slow down or stop a migraine with salt, because it will help to improve and increase the blood pressure. When our blood pressure is low, the volume of blood and therefore the amount of oxygen in the blood available to the brain is also lower, right? Then when you increase your blood volume, say for example if drinking a lot of water and you take a little salt to constrict your blood vessels and increase your blood pressure, all of that will allow more blood and the oxygen in the blood to get to your brain. So having very low blood pressure, which goes hand in hand with low sodium, is a very common feature of people with migraine and this is a result of and an indication reflection of the neuroendocrine function of the adrenal glands that produce a hormone called aldosterone which regulates our sodium. When our adrenal glands are burnt out because we’ve had so much stress that we’ve used up the grandmother hormone pregnenolone from which cortisol and from which many of the other hormones are made, when we’re stressed in such a prolonged way like that, our adrenal glands ability to produce aldosterone is compromised and with it our ability to regulate sodium. So aldosterone regulates sodium and low sodium is an indicator of compromised adrenal gland health.
So even though there’s a lot more I could say about the major electrolytes, since I’m going to try to fit this into 30 to 40 minutes, I’m going to have to move on from this category, but I will also mention in passing that the mineral boron is excellent for helping to retain magnesium and also for regulating calcium. It’s also amazing because it helps to detoxify fluoride. Please check out my previous blog post if you want to learn more about why fluoride is such a problem for people with migraine.
And now let’s move on to the topic of the level two minerals. This is a big category and I’m going to have to go pretty briefly over each of these, but the main point of this podcast is just to illustrate how and why we need to keep mineral dynamics in mind, not just how important each of these minerals are as the building blocks for different enzymes that make our hormones, make our neurotransmitters, but also to keep in mind that all of these minerals have dynamic relationships with each other. So looking at these minerals, we have iron, copper, zinc, selenium, iodine, and manganese. That’s a lot of minerals. All of those minerals are needed not only for thyroid function, but many of them are also needed for stomach acid and for many other functions in the body. Like for example, in the case of iron making serotonin, we know that chronic migraine is characterized by low serotonin levels and you just can’t make serotonin efficiently without sufficient iron. We know that people with migraine also often have anemia and that iron is needed alongside copper to bring oxygen into the cells via hemoglobin. Migraine is a hypoxia issue. It’s a condition of low tissue oxygen. So without sufficient iron and copper or a good balance between iron and copper, it’s not surprising that people will have migraine. So a pattern that I often see there is sometimes post-menopausal women will have higher iron in relation to copper and will often, but not always, benefit from more copper than iron, whereas many menstruating, bleeding women are low in both copper and iron and will need a little bit of both along with the cofactors that make that bioavailable. And then we also have this relationship between zinc and copper and of course zinc and iron. So iron lowers zinc, iron lowers copper, zinc lowers iron, copper lowers zinc, zinc lowers copper. That’s why we have these mineral wheels to look at these dynamic relationships. And zinc and copper are part of the copper-zinc ratio in the neuroendocrine ratios in hair tissue mineral analysis. This is called the hormone ratio and this is in part because copper and zinc are really needed for hormones. Zinc especially is needed not only as an antifungal but and not only as a chelator but for testosterone, which is really important for converting glutamate in the brain. Copper is associated with elevated estrogen. When women have elevated estrogen, their body absorbs more copper, which in turn will lower zinc and will lower iron. And I talk a lot about these relationships that copper especially has with these other minerals in a little mini course that I created about how to help women keep their minerals balanced when they’re on hormonal birth control. And this does include the copper IUD, although the copper IUD is not usually considered a hormonal birth control because it lowers zinc, which you need to make testosterone. It will have a very similar effect on testosterone levels as the hormonal birth control will. So women can really spare their health by basically keeping these mineral relationships in mind if they are on birth control. So I mean there are hundreds of different functions that these different minerals have in the body. Copper especially is important for breaking down histamine and for elastin in the body for the elasticity of the blood vessels, which is super important because we know migraine is a cardiovascular disease and the rigidity of the endothelium and the blood vessels will of course have an effect on blood flow into the head and oxygen transport to the brain. So having sufficient copper is important for the elasticity of those blood vessels so that your body can modulate blood flow to the head. So iron, copper, and zinc are also all needed for thyroid hormone and thyroid function. We know migraine is a hypothyroid condition. That’s one reason why fluoride is so problematic as I explained in previous episodes. Fluoride displaces iodine needed to make thyroid hormone, but any deficiency in any of these minerals that the thyroid needs to make thyroid hormone can cause hypothyroidism or can cause a goiter. It’s not only low iodine that can cause a goiter. Low copper can cause a goiter. And selenium is a critical mineral for glutathione and for making thyroid hormone, but it is also a copper antagonist. So many of these thyroid formulations that we see online or that we see doctors prescribe to patients have a lot of selenium and that’s quite dangerous actually to give people a lot of selenium without knowing their copper status. We wouldn’t want to deplete the body of copper since that is also needed for thyroid function. The thyroid regulates our temperature, our body temperature, and when our temperature is too low as in hypothyroidism, the molecules in our body are coiled too tightly to work efficiently. The enzymes don’t work well when our body temperature is low. This is called multiple enzyme deficiency. It’s a coin termed by Dr. Wilson, I believe. You can see an article I wrote about that on my blog. And so the point is that you can really cause damage if you end up any of these minerals at the expense of other ones also needed for thyroid function.
Iodine is an amazing, amazing mineral. It’s so critical for thyroid health and it’s also a very controversial mineral. I have a friend who has Hashimoto’s and she is terribly afraid of iodine. It is true that iodine can accumulate in the thyroid gland, especially in people who have hot nodules in their thyroid and too much iodine taken without the cofactors can lead to Graves disease in those who have a hot nodule. But the majority of other people will benefit from iodine, but they may also experience negative reactions from it. Although this is not the majority of people, iodine is a potent heavy metal chelator. It’s also antifungal, antibacterial. And so people can often feel discomfort if they’re going through a detoxification at the same time that their thyroid gland is speeding up. However, iodine is by far one of my favorite minerals. Probably iodine, copper and boron would be the top three if I had to pick, not that I could pick as far as getting leverage and healing migraine. But again, they all have dynamic relationships with each other. Iodine lowers copper and vice versa. And this is in part because they’re synergistic. So when we’re talking about mineral dynamics, often you’ll hear this terminology antagonists and synergists, and some minerals are considered synergists and some minerals are considered antagonists to each other. But this is actually a little bit misleading and I’ll tell you why. So some minerals are clearly synergistic. For example, boron is synergistic with calcium and magnesium. This is because you need those to make calcium bioavailable. They work together. However, as with any mineral, any two nutrients or any nutrients that work together in an enzyme process, although they could be seen as synergistic, they’re actually, if you take too much of one that works in tandem with other minerals, you can actually cause a depletion, even though they’re synergistic, because too much of that one mineral will speed up the enzyme process using up the other minerals that it’s synergistic with and thereby depleting them at a faster rate. So the point is that the synergistic minerals need to be taken together in order for them not to create further depletions and become antagonistic. I don’t really like the word antagonistic. I don’t think that minerals are antagonistic with each other, but it is true that they have different functions depending on where they are in the body. So on the level of absorption, for example, copper and zinc compete for absorption or could be seen as antagonistic on the level of absorption. But within the cell, copper and zinc work together. For example, copper and zinc and manganese all work together within this family of the superoxide dismutase antioxidant family. And manganese being especially critical for the antioxidant, the manganese dependent superoxide dismutase that is utilized for the mitochondria, for the oxidative stress in the mitochondria. So manganese is super critical for that. Sorry, I can’t turn off this text notification. Hopefully people will just stop texting me. And I really love manganese for other reasons. Manganese is often very low or the enzymes that utilize manganese are not working properly in people who have scoliosis like myself, and many people with migraine have scoliosis. I’ve also found manganese, it’s so good for connective tissue health, including the strength of the tendons. I have a tooth that gets slightly loose because it has a short root and it was destabilized by braces that I had when I was younger. And so long as I take my manganese, the strength of the, I guess it’s the ligament or the tendon on my tooth is strong and stable so long as I’m taking manganese. If I stop taking manganese, it becomes more wiggly and loose. So I adore all of these minerals and that’s what, six minerals right there. I could go into so much more detail, but I would just be talking for hours if I didn’t on to the next topic. But just to keep in mind that many of these minerals I just mentioned, they play a critical role in thyroid health, serotonin levels, dopamine levels, histamine, the ability to break down histamine. They play a role in our sex hormones as well as in chelation, our body’s ability to move out heavy metals. So selenium, zinc, and iodine, as well as copper actually are all really important for moving out heavy metals. So if we’re deficient in any of those, there will be issues with toxin buildup. So much gratitude to those minerals for how much they’ve done in my life. And also so much gratitude to Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis for teaching me how to be able to take these minerals and benefit from them without causing further problems.
Moving on to heavy metal contamination. I just mentioned iodine, copper, and zinc especially are very important for moving out heavy metals. And zinc especially for moving out mercury. Copper also moves out mercury. And this may be one reason actually why people who have high mercury cannot tolerate copper or iodine and actually may even have a worsening of migraine symptoms when they take zinc as well because these metals are pulling out that mercury or binding to that mercury. Sulfur also pulls out mercury. Sometimes when people have high levels of mercury that can cause issues when they take sulfur because it starts pulling it out. Many of the minerals that I mentioned in the last category are also great at removing fluoride. Copper and iodine both remove fluoride from the body, which is super helpful because it accumulates there. It is not necessarily just metabolized and flushed out immediately. Unfortunately, it binds to calcium and it builds up calcifying soft tissues in the body. So by using copper, iodine, and boron, as well as a few other amazing minerals that I go over in the coursework, we can create a strategy for removing fluoride in a way that the body can handle. Fluoride isn’t technically a heavy metal, so really I should just say metal contamination, but I see many heavy metals in the hair tissue mineral analysis labs. Although I’m not trained in heavy metal chelation and I actually don’t believe, especially for someone with migraine who is that chronically ill, that very aggressive heavy metal chelation is healthy, I do believe very much that when we get replete in the minerals and nutrients that our body normally uses to move out metals, I not only believe but I have seen that most people’s heavy metal load will go down. And so my approach is very much the low and slow and gentle approach when it comes to heavy metal contamination. There are times where I’ve seen people with extremely high levels of heavy metal contamination, in which case I refer out because I do not know how to deal with levels that high. There was one woman who lived in rural Vermont, had horrible migraines, and she had sky-high levels of cadmium, much higher than I had ever seen on anyone. She was a weaver and she would dye her baskets or the willow for her baskets using dyes that were high in cadmium and she had been a weaver for about 20 years. So the HTMA lab, although I was not qualified to help her get that level of cadmium out, it was able to identify and detect a contamination in her system that she had not been able to detect for 20 years. And she was, of course, with that information also able to stop contaminating her body since we were able to discover where the source of the contamination and the cadmium was coming from.
So just to wrap up here, the final category I want to talk about when it comes to nutrient dynamics is the nutrient dynamics between minerals and hormones. And there’s a whole other category that I didn’t really go into, which is the relationship that minerals have with other vitamins. I meant to go into that, and I’ll just quickly mention right here, some of the common ones that I see are high copper from hormonal birth control depleting vitamin C in the body, high levels of calcium in the body depleting B1, which you need in the Krebs cycle for making ATP in the cell, and which you also need for processing oxalates. People with very high calcium often have very low thiamine B1, and therefore issues processing foods high in oxalates. These are just a few examples. For example, boron has a relationship with vitamin D in that it helps vitamin D to become bioavailable. And there’s infinite relationships like this. I would suggest you just go to read the article that I already wrote on this topic if you want to do a deeper dive and see the mineral vitamin relationships. The name of the article is Mineral and Vitamin Antagonists and Synergists on my website mineralsformigraines.com.
So moving on to the relationship with hormones, I already mentioned that progesterone and potassium have a relationship. When I see low potassium, I often assume low progesterone, especially if they have other symptoms of hypothyroidism. And I already mentioned that elevated levels of adrenaline, cortisol, and aldosterone are usually associated with higher amounts of sodium. So low sodium on an HTMA can often indicate that people are low in those hormones. Magnesium is really important for insulin and blood sugar regulation. So that’s why we look at the magnesium and the neuroendocrine ratios to give us a sense for how well someone’s blood sugar is regulated, and we can improve blood sugar regulation with magnesium. The parathyroid hormone is regulated in the body by boron. The highest concentration of boron in the body is in the parathyroid gland. So boron is to the parathyroid gland what iodine is to the thyroid gland. Very, very important and obscure and overlooked, but very wonderful mineral boron, especially because it also helps us to remove fluoride. It’s also antifungal and increases antioxidants in the body, as well as all the steroid hormones in the body. So it’s a very important mineral. And finally, there’s this relationship between estrogen and iodine, which is just fascinating, which is that too much estrogen in the body is a reflection of low iodine, and it also depletes the body of iodine. Estrogen lowers iodine, perhaps because the body needs iodine to convert the more toxic cancer-causing estrogens into the healthier forms of estrogen. So high estrogen equals low iodine, and usually we see estrogen dominance going hand in hand with hypothyroidism. That makes sense, because we need iodine for our thyroid gland to work. If we don’t have sufficient iodine, perhaps because we’ve been poisoned with fluoride, our thyroid gland won’t work, and we will not be able to also convert estrogen properly into the proper form.
So I hope that was interesting for you, a good rundown of these fascinating dynamics that exist, including how nutrients and minerals affect hormonal dynamics in migraine and vice versa. There’s always more to learn. I love learning about all of this. It is complicated. It is also frustrating at times, because sometimes if we know about these mineral dynamics, that means that when we take something, we often need to take its co-factors with it, right? And that’s one reason why hair tissue mineral analysis is such a great lab, and why learning about these mineral dynamics is very important in terms of what’s going on with your particular mineral profile. If you’d like to get your own HTMA mineral profile and learn about how to heal your migraines holistically and learn all about these mineral dynamics, you can join the Repattern Migraine coursework. I also analyze your labs for you when I get your lab results, so you don’t have to understand all these relationships in such detail, especially if you don’t find it interesting. But I find this endlessly interesting, and the important thing to realize is just that these are very, very valuable and very powerful leverage points in healing. When we see where we’re deficient and we see where we’re toxic and we understand these dynamic relationships, we can really start to make a much more specific and tailored nutritional balancing plan for your particular metabolism and heal your particular migraine pattern.
So I hope you found this enjoyable and interesting. Thanks so much for listening to my podcast. Please spread the word to anyone who you think may benefit from this information, and we’ll see you in the next episode.
