Welcome to the Nutrition Science Podcast, where we help you cut through the noise and make informed science-based decisions about nutrition and your health.

How's it going, everyone?

Welcome back to another episode of the Nutrition Science Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Adrian Chavez.

And today we are going to be discussing one of the most important nutrients for human health.

This is the second most abundant mineral

in the human body. It is involved in nearly every single process that occurs within our body

from energy production to muscle contraction to fluid balance. And about half of people in the

United States and other Western societies

are not eating enough of this mineral on a regular basis. And this mineral is magnesium. So today,

we are going to be discussing what magnesium is, why it's important, how to determine if you're

getting enough of it, and how to ensure that you're

meeting your magnesium needs, both through food or through supplementation, if that might be

necessary for your specific circumstances. So this is the first of many episodes that I want to do

like this in the future, where we spotlight one nutrient of importance,

talk about what it is, why it's important, what food you can get it from, and whether or not

supplementation may be something to consider. And I want to do this because meeting your

micronutrient needs is an important aspect of the way that nutrition can impact our health.

If you're not familiar, I talk about this nutrition

blueprint where we look at nutrition from a lens of meeting the needs that our body has,

because our body has specific needs. Nutrition isn't just this random thing. We eat so that we can

provide our bodies what they need, And our bodies need a certain amount of

...