Brain Food | Magnesium On The Brain

Professor Guosong Liu, Director of the Center for Learning and Memory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and her team have shown that increased levels of magnesium as a dietary supplement boosts brain power.

Smart Mouse

Smart Mouse

“Magnesium is essential for the proper functioning of many tissues in the body, including the brain and, in an earlier study, we demonstrated that magnesium promoted synaptic plasticity in cultured brain cells,” explains Dr. Liu. “Therefore it was tempting to take our studies a step further and investigate whether an increase in brain magnesium levels enhanced cognitive function in animals.”

Dr. Liu’s team created a new magnesium compound, magnesium-L-threonate (MgT) to increase magnesium in the brain’s of rats of different ages and studied the impact on the brain functions of the rats.

“We found that increased brain magnesium enhanced many different forms of learning and memory in both young and aged rats,” says Dr. Liu. They also saw increases in the number of synapses, activation of key signaling molecules and an enhancement of short- and long-term the synaptic processes critical to learning and memory.

*** The issue is, according to my supplement contacts, that magnesium chelates (like the new one mentioned in the study – MgT) are only 4 to 12% magnesium – which means you have to take 10grams (16 capsules) to get 500mg Magnesium. Brazil Nuts and Chocolate are the top Magnesium foods groups. ***

The control rats in the study ate a normal diet widely accepted to contain sufficient magnesium. The observed effects, the authors conclude, derive from an elevation of magnesium to levels higher than provided by a normal diet.

“Our findings suggest that elevating brain magnesium content via increasing magnesium intake might be a useful new strategy to enhance cognitive abilities,” explains Dr. Liu. “Moreover, half the population of industrialized countries has a magnesium deficit, which increases with aging. This may very well contribute to age-dependent memory decline; increasing magnesium intake might prevent or reduce such decline.”

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