How to Increase Magnesium in Your Child's Diet Naturally

Studies show that magnesium (Mg) deficiency may be a factor in many common childhood maladies. Mg is literally used for hundreds of different functions in the human body. If your growing child is short on this important mineral, any one of those hundreds of functions may be effected, like his ability to sit still, relax his facial muscles, stop twitches and deal with loud noises.

Banana - 15% DV		Potato - 21% DV
One ounce peanuts (shells removed) - 12% DV		One ounce of Brazil nuts - 26% DV

Nutrition surveys show that most Americans on a typical modern diet high in convenience and processed foods do not get the recommended amounts of Mg each day. If your child has any of the health issues listed above and fills up on foods such as cereal, pop tarts, white bread, soda, cookies, hot dogs, pizza and potato chips, it would be logical to consider nutritional deficiencies, especially deficiencies of Mg, as a possible cause for his health issues. Recent research from the National Cancer Institute found that nearly 40 percent of calories consumed by children in the U.S., ages 2 to 18 were empty calories, the unhealthiest kind of calories. The best way to help your child to get more magnesium and other important vitamins and minerals into his body is to keep him from filling up on nutrient depleted, processed junk food.

The tips below are some easy diet changes you can try to make to get more magnesium into your child.

Table 1 - Magnesium Rich Food Substitution Chart

1. Personally, I think the ideal diet for most people is probably a quasi-cave man type diet made up of mostly lean meats, some variety meats, soups with bone broth, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, tubers, beans and small amounts of yogurt or other cultured foods with helpful bacteria. If everyone ate a diet like that I suspect it would be almost impossible for most people to be low on magnesium. However, it is a tough diet to follow living in today's world, where many parents work full time and the kids are at day care or school most of the day.

So factoring in what most kids like, are not allergic to, and will really actually eat, it is possible to make some minor substitutions and still easily double or triple most kids' average magnesium intakes for a day. The table above has some food substitutions that can easily increase a child's Mg levels significantly over time. By making some simple substitutions, the magnesium rich foods in the second column provide, when totaled, almost 3 times as much Mg as the foods in the first column. (The Mg values from the table above were obtained from looking up food values from the web site www.nutritiondata.com.)

2. The first step in helping your child is to establish a baseline, i.e. figure out how much Mg are they actually consuming on an average day right now. You can accomplish this by writing down each food your child eats or drinks in a day and then add up the amount of magnesium (Mg) he is currently consuming. If your child is eating an average American diet, a variety of recent surveys show that he most likely won't even be getting the basic minimum daily Mg requirements, let alone enough to correct a deficiency.

The easiest, though most expensive way I've found to do add up food values is to use a software program called Nutribase (available from Amazon). To use it you enter all of the food a person eats in a day and it calculates a wide variety of nutrient totals such as calories, protein, magnesium, calcium, zinc, etc. I thought my kids were eating pretty healthy compared to most of their friends, but I was surprised at how lacking their diets were in some important nutrients after using this program for a few days. One thing to keep in mind is that magnesium and most other nutrients have many cofactors as well as antagonists, so it is important to get a wide spectrum of many nutrients each day, without getting massive quantities of any single nutrient.

Getting Your Child to Eat Healthy If your child simply refuses to eat healthy food, then then I'd recommend the book Setting Limits by Robert J. MacKenzie. You can get it from Amazon. The basic idea is to reward positive behavior and set consequences for negative behavior. It works. I'd give it five stars.

A cheaper, though more labor intensive way, to track how much magnesium you child is getting is to simply write everything down in a notebook or enter into a spread sheet everything he eats for a few days and look up the magnesium values online or in a book with nutrition data. You can buy books with nutrition data from Amazon, or for a cheaper alternative, I often buy used nutrition text books with magnesium tables at local used book stores.

Online the best web site I've found to use is www.nutritiondata.com. You can use their online search tool to find foods highest in any given nutrient, by category. For example, if you are planning dinner and want to know if you should serve corn or peas, you can use their database to find out which one is higher in magnesium. (The nutritiondata web site also has a feature to track nutrients, but it requires registering and the registration form requests a lot of personal information so I have not tried it.)

3. Many children like to fill up on fruits, which most parents view as healthy compared to known junk food snacks like potato chips and soda. However, it is important to note that few fruits have appreciable amounts of magnesium compared to other food groups like vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds.

4. Be aware when looking up magnesium values that some foods may have high levels of Mg but may have other ingredients, such as phytates or oxalates, that prevent mineral absorption. I know whole grains are a popular health foods these days, but studies show that high levels of phytates in unleavened whole grains can actually lower mineral levels after consumption.

5. A diet low in alkaline fruits and vegetables may produce an acidic load on the body which can also lower magnesium levels.

6. For young children, you may want to have a chart on the fridge with pictures of magnesium rich foods they might like, such as baked beans, bananas, cashews, etc. Have them check off the food each time they eat it and when they have eaten a certain number of healthy foods each day or week, let them have a reward. This can be something like a small toy, a coupon to stay up late by 30 minutes or a "get out of picking up your toys one time" for free card. When my kids were little I used to go to garage sales, thrift shops and dollar stores to buy used books, used DVDs, small toys, etc. and keep them in a special box to use as rewards. Little kids really like surprises, so another trick is to wrap up the toys and books in the reward box for an added incentive and then let your child pick out the wrapped package of his choice as a special reward.

I get a lot of emails from parents telling me that their kids don't like to eat healthy foods. I understand that. I have kids. Kids don't like to do a lot things like homework, brushing their teeth, going to bed at a reasonable hour, not playing video games all day, etc. You just have to set limits and reinforce positive behavior. Set limits in place such as if they eat their vegetables, they can watch a favorite video after dinner. Or if they eat their vegetables, they can have a cookie for dessert. If they don't eat a healthy dinner, then there is no TV after dinner.

Think about it. Do you let your child stay home from school, not do her homework or stay up all night? If you are taking the time to read this article, then I'm sure you do not because you are a concerned and loving parent. Eating healthy is just as important as getting enough sleep and going to school.

In the Feakonomics video, Steven Levitt, a behavioral economist, talks about how he can get his kids to do anything with positive reinforcement. One of his children was having trouble staying potty trained, so each time she used the toilet he gave her some M&Ms as a reward. Pretty soon she was using the toilet every few minutes, a few drops at a time, just to get the M&Ms. She went from not being potty trained to having total bladder control in a couple of days with the right incentives. I wouldn't use M&Ms as a reward for eating healthy as that would send a mixed message, but you can use something else your child values as a reward in place of the M&Ms. You can view the Levitt video here.

If your child simply refuses to eat healthy food, I recommend getting the book Setting Limits by Robert J. MacKenzie. I have tried it on my kids and it works.

7. Remember to be a good role model by eating a healthy diet with magnesium rich foods yourself!

8. If your child is into sports, explain to him how higher magnesium levels help to increase energy levels.

9. You can increase the levels of Mg and other nutrients by substituting vegetable broth instead of water when making dishes such as rice or condensed, canned soup. To make vegetable broth, just heat any vegetables along with stems, peels, etc. in a crock pot on high for a half hour or so, then strain. You can freeze the broth in ice cube trays for later use, if needed.

10. For pasta, I try to buy the kind colored with dried vegetable powders for some additional nutrition.

11. When our younger son would have problems with sensitive hearing as a young child when we were on vacation, the best way we found to fix him up was to go a Mexican restaurant and order a dish with refried beans. Beans are very high in magnesium. Canadian researcher found that bean consumers had higher levels of Mg as well as other important nutrients.

12. Encourage your child to help with healthy, whole food (not whole wheat or oats!) baking and food preparation in the kitchen. Most kids love to help with recipes and baking projects, and are more inclined to eat foods they have helped to prepare.

13. Calcium is a magnesium antagonist. Too much calcium from milk, yogurt, cheese, and other dairy products may lower magnesium levels.

14. Many multivitamins contain magnesium antagonists but little, if any Mg. Multivitamin intake has, not surprisingly, been linked to asthma and allergies in kids, and breast cancer in adult women.

Magnesium takes up a lot of space, too much to fit the government recommended daily values in pill form, so the manufacturers usually just leave it out!

The Consumer Science for the Public Interest states on their web site that, " We didn’t require 100 percent of the DV for magnesium for one good reason: it wouldn’t fit into a single pill. " What they don't realize is that leaving it out may do more harm than good. Vitamins and minerals work in balance with each other, and too much of one nutrient can mean a shortage of another.

As with many problems, just even being aware of the under publicized issue of how common magnesium deficiencies may be in many children is half the battle.

Related Pages in This Site:

How to get your daily values of magnesium from the foods you eat.

Sensitive Hearing - Explores the links between a lack of magnesium in the diet and noise sensitivity.

Facial tics and twitches in kids - how simple diet changes might help.

Tourette Syndrome - can diet changes help? The links between Tourettes and low Mg levels.

Magnesium Deficiency - Part I, Part II

Food and Other Factors Associated With Migraines - loud noises, stress, certain foods can lead to migraines. These triggers are all very similar, if not identical, to the factors that can cause a magnesium deficiency.

Magnesium Status and Acid-Base Balance

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