Magnesium Glycinate vs. PVCs

As is customary, I eat one junk food meal every month, in order to keep me from getting too bored with healthy food. Yesterday was my junk day, and I took full advantage: 3 small veggie burritos (including cheddar cheese on one of them) and a 100g bar of white chocolate. The latter was not just for gastronomic delight; it was intended to verify my theory that cacao -- and not the fat and sugar in a chocolate bar -- is what causes the symptoms of excessive iron consumption (a tingling sensation all over the skin, if I'm right) and indeed panic attacks.

Rewind. In a previous experiment, I took concentrated cacao polyphenols on an empty stomach -- essentially the opposite of my white chocolate experiment. However, the point of the experiment was not to induce a panic attack or the sensation of iron poisoning; it was to see if I would get indigestion if I consumed this otherwise-very-healthy powder along with my morning elixer of grape skin extract plus 500mg of resveratrol. As I had routinely ingested 100g or more of dark chocolate in a day, I was hardly concerned about the MVPS-related effects of eating this small cacao pill. (NOTE: I have since moved the grape skin extract to mealtime, as my nutritionist friend has convinced me that it's best used to counteract the ill effects of caloric intake, as the French appear to have discovered of red wine; I eat it for the polyphenols, not the incidental 25mg of resveratrol. The 500mg of resveratrol, on the other hand, is better consumed in isolation, in my case, half an hour before breakfast.)

As usual, I removed all the pill caps and dumped the contents into a few ounces of water, and imbibed. To my surprise, a few minutes after drinking my cacao-augmented elixer, the unmistakable surge of panic attack symptoms filled my brain. Fortunately, my years of self-analysis and biofeedback training allowed me to take a back seat, watching myself, as it were, on the edge of a panic attack. (It's hard to explain popping out of yourself in order to remain focussed during such explosive neural activity. But by some miracle of brain function, it's possible.) As I sat in this cognitive "back seat", watching the panic attack attempt to unfold, I was thrilled by the observation that I had chemically induced this occurrence by the introduction of powdered cacao to an empty stomach. (Had I been testing for this effect, then I would not have believed the panic symtoms to have been genuine, as they might have been placebo effect.) After a few minutes, the attack subsided, never having evolved into the full-fledged emotional dysfunction of my early days with MVPS.

Back to white chocolate.

After eating maybe 10g with my 3 burritos earlier in the day, I ate perhaps another 25g just before bed, on an otherwise empty stomach. (I generally make my "junk food meal" just a single meal, in order to prevent bad dietary habits from leaking into the rest of my month. But in this case, I was sloppy.) I was so exhausted that even the high sugar content of the stuff didn't threaten to keep me awake. I settled down to bed, happily satisfied with a full stomach. (I usually eat a single meal in the morning, and stay hungry for the rest of the day. In this case, as I said, I was sloppy, junk food day notwithstanding!)

Maybe an hour later, I started having premature ventricular contractions (PVCs). Serious PVCs, like I've never had since the pizza night from hell in April, 2007. I was experiencing the usual resultant mental resets every minute or so. I started to think back on my day, wondering what I had eaten to deserve such a pounding. The cheddar cheese in the burrito didn't help, but it wasn't enough to cause more than a few weak PVCs. I'd also had some UHT milk (yes, I'm still a minor milk addict, even though my nutritionist friend tells me that its main protein, casein, appears to be carcinogenic). But even then, I didn't have enough dairy food to warrant this level of PVC activity.

Yes, I had the white chocolate bar. But chocolate bar fat never seems to cause me PVCs. (This may be related to the observation that dark chocolate does not appear to raise LDL cholesterol, and perhaps some other blood lipid parameters.) Anyway, I've eaten 200g of 70% dark chocolate in a single day, which causes severe symptoms of the sort descibed above, but not a single PVC. If I ate that much cheddar cheese, I'd be in PVC hell.)

So I couldn't figure out the cause of the PVCs. Nonetheless, they were so severe that I reasoned that my chances of atrial fibrillation, however remote, were materially elevated, and that therefore I must take emergency action. I pried my self out of bed, and headed for the magnesium glycinate bottle.

As I mentioned previously, magnesium glycinate is an excellent palpitation killer. (I do, however, recommend safer means of reducing palpitations, such as regular cardiovascular exercise and avoidance of dairy foods (get your vitamin D, calcium, and magnesium elsewhere), after a consultation with your cardiologist. But for me, it works on those rare nights that I have pronounced palpitations.) But this night was different. I wasn't experiencing mildly annoying palpitations; I was being hammered by PVCs.

I must admit that I didn't really know what to do, apart from the fact that I had to do something. Since I live in a part of the world effectively devoid of competent medical care, I needed to rely on my dietary knowledge. So, as I said, I turned to magnesium glycinate and hoped for the best.

Fortunately, my stomach was almost empty at this point. I chewed 100mg (half a tablet), and swallowed it with ample water. Within minutes, my PVCs stopped. When I returned to bed, they did not return, despite the fact that they are usually aggravated by a supine position. I slept normally for the rest of the night.

I would imagine that the magnesium glycinate went straight into my blood -- perhaps even through buccal absorption, short-cutting the digestive tract. Arriving at the heart, it penetrated the neural timing apparatus therein, and worked its magic. Yes, that's an extremely course and potentially inaccurate model of this supplement's method of action, but it's all I can hypothesize from my observations. Somehow, this stuff really works!

Back to the mysterious PVCs. When I got up in the morning, I had a second look at the chocolate wrapper. When you drop from 70% or 85% cacao to almost none at all, you need to replace the lost volume with filler. In this case, the filler turned out to be "milk powder" and "cream milk powder". Combined with the milk I drank and the cheddar that I ate, these concentrated sources of PVC and palpitation fuel could certainly have accounted for this awful attack. And I thought white chocolate was just lethicthin and sugar!

After all this trouble, my white chocolate experiment did at least produce results consistent with my cacao theory of panic attacks: I experienced no such symptoms, other than the brief justifiable nervousness derived from excessive PVCs. So the good news, it would appear, is if you have MVPS, you can safely eat white chocolate. But then, if you have MVPS, you probably also have MVP, in which case you can't, because it will induce PVCs. Sorry folks, I think the antichocolate advice has to stick. A small portion of 85% dark chocolate per day is probably safe, but if you're like me, you'll end up eating ever-increasing portions until you get so jacked by MVPS symptoms that you quit cold-turkey. It's a shame, as cacao is excellent for circulatory and brain health. Oh well. Stick to grape skin extract and mercury-free fish oil.

One other thing about dark chocolate: in high doses (over 50g per day, in my case), it appears to reduce my tolerance for toxins. Around here, I encounter massive amounts of pollution on a daily basis -- diesel exhaust, metal polish, insecticide, etc. I have consistently noticed that my tolerance for such abhorrent chemicals is much less when I have eaten large amounts of chocolate. This is counterintuitive, as in theory, the high epicatechin content therein should protect me from these poisons. My theory is that is that cacao somehow temporarily overwhelms the liver (perhaps due to the high caffeine, theobromine, and iron content). As a result, we feel unusually sick in response to low-level environmental toxicity; this is the liver's way of telling us that it's unable to metabolise poisons as fast as they're entering the bloodstream. I would suggest, therefore, that the longterm cardioprotective benefits of dark chocolate are best obtained in an unpolluted environment, in order to avoid the negative effects of shortterm liver overload. In my experience, this "liver overload nausea" starts about 5 hours after eating, and lasts for up to 10 more. It's also possible that the liver overload symptoms relate to the high saturated fat content in a chocolate bar, and not to the cacao; however, I seem to recall the same effect with chocolate powder.