Tracey Yeend - Hormonal, Nutritional & Environmental Health

06/09/2026

Who watched this tonight….?!
No brainer really….

06/09/2026

You check your cholesterol.
You check your blood pressure.

But have you ever checked your homocysteine level?

Homocysteine is an amino acid naturally produced during the body’s methylation process. Your body relies on nutrients including folate, vitamin B12 and vitamin B6 to help process it normally.

When these pathways aren’t working efficiently, homocysteine may become elevated—which is why understanding your level can provide another useful piece of your overall health picture.

Know the marker. Understand your methylation. Take informed action.

NeuroThrive — Support What Matters. Every Day.

Learn more at www.neurothrive.ie

06/09/2026

This one stung when I first heard it. Then it changed everything.

Because your health is not a personal hobby. Your kids depend on your energy. Your spouse depends on your years. Your clients, your team, your parents. Everybody in your life is quietly relying on a body you keep putting last.

Self care got marketed to us as bubble baths. It's not. It's strength training. It's protein. It's sleep. It's the boring stuff that makes you dependable for decades.

You're not being selfish by taking care of yourself. You're being selfish by not.

Take care of the body other people are counting on

05/09/2026

05/09/2026

Most people take their full magnesium dose in one sitting. The absorption data says that strategy may not “maximize efficiency.”

Fine et al. gave healthy subjects a standard meal supplemented with increasing amounts of magnesium. At the lowest dose (36 mg), 65% was absorbed. At the highest dose (1,009 mg), only 11%. The curve was not linear. It dropped steeply at first, then flattened. Their model explained it as two simultaneous processes: an active transport channel that saturates, plus a passive route that absorbs a fixed ~7% of whatever is present.

The active channel is TRPM6. It sits in the intestinal epithelium and actively pulls magnesium ions across the membrane. It works well at low concentrations but has a ceiling. Once it is saturated, additional magnesium can only cross passively between cells (paracellular transport), driven by the concentration gradient. That passive route never saturates, but it only captures about 7% of the dose regardless of how much is present.

This is why splitting a 400 mg dose into two 200 mg doses absorbs more total magnesium. Each dose stays closer to the steep part of the curve where TRPM6 is still contributing. One large dose overwhelms the active channel, and most of the magnesium passes through unabsorbed. The unabsorbed fraction is osmotically active, pulls water into the colon, and causes the loose stools people commonly experience.

A question that comes up: does the form of magnesium change this? The absorption curve from Fine et al. used magnesium acetate, which is highly soluble. The form determines how completely and quickly the magnesium salt dissolves and releases free Mg2+ ions in the gut. Oxide dissolves poorly at intestinal pH, so much of it never becomes available. Citrate, glycinate, and acetate dissolve more readily. But once the ion is free, it faces the same TRPM6 and paracellular bottleneck regardless of what delivered it. Form determines how much Mg2+ reaches the membrane. The curve determines how much of that gets through. A poorly soluble form at a high dose is the worst combination. A highly soluble form split across meals is the best.

The RDA for magnesium is 310-420 mg per day. NHANES data consistently shows about half of US adults fall short. Splitting the dose is free, requires no product change, and the physiology is clear.

Fine et al., J Clin Invest, 1991.

Schuchardt & Hahn, Curr Nutr Food Sci, 2017.

05/09/2026

Power of Wordz

05/09/2026

There is a magnesium ion sitting inside one of the most important channels in your brain, and it spends most of its time blocking it. That is not a malfunction. That block is how your brain decides what to learn.

The channel is the NMDA receptor. It is central to learning and memory, and it has an unusual rule for opening. Glutamate, the brain's main excitatory signal, has to bind to it. But binding alone does nothing, because a magnesium ion is physically lodged in the pore, plugging it shut. The only way to clear that plug is for the neuron itself to already be active and electrically depolarized. Glutamate plus voltage, at the same instant, pops the magnesium out.

So the receptor only opens when two things happen together: an incoming signal and a neuron that is already firing. That makes it a coincidence detector. It is the molecular version of "these two things are related," and that is the cellular basis of learning. When it opens, calcium floods in, triggers an enzyme called CaMKII, and the synapse gets stronger. Strengthening that connection is, quite literally, the physical act of learning something.
The magnesium block is the gatekeeper for the whole process. It keeps the channel silent until the signal is real and coincident, so the brain strengthens what matters and ignores random noise.

This is where it gets interesting. That same block also acts as a brake on overexcitation. When magnesium is low, the brake loosens and these channels become easier to open with less provocation. At the mechanism level, that means the threshold for excitation drops. This is a clean, well-established piece of biochemistry. It is also exactly the kind of mechanism that gets oversold, so be careful with the leap from "magnesium gates NMDA receptors" to "magnesium fixes anxiety." The gating is real and rigorous. The clinical claims downstream of it are a separate, much messier question.

What is not in doubt: a single magnesium ion sitting in a channel is one of the most elegant control switches in human biology, and it is running quietly in your head right now.

Jahr & Stevens, J Neurosci, 1990
Hou et al., Mol Neurobiol, 2020

05/09/2026

A little Saturday funny 😂