New York - Five years ago, migraines were making Nelson Zotelo miserable.
"I am a waiter. Can you imagine, when you have a headache, how hard that is?" says Zotelo of the bad old days. "The pressure is that when you are busy you have to be always in a very good mood, feel no pain, with your head not being bothered by anything."
Seeking relief, Zotelo, 46, went to Dr. Barbara Levine, a nutritionist at Rockefeller University. She suggested he take 200 milligrams of the mineral magnesium daily.
"Just taking the magnesium, that's it," says Zotelo. "I used to have heavy pain. Now I feel very good."
So does a small cadre of top-flight scientists who, despite years of laboring in the shadow of calcium, the "sexy" mineral that builds bones, are proving the importance of magnesium with first-rate research.
"Magnesium is essential for keeping everything in the body working well -- cells, muscles, nerves, organs, bones," says Levine, who has set up the Magnesium Information Center, a national hotline.
Studies show that not having enough magnesium can promote and even bring about heart disease, stroke, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis.
Yet few doctors talk about magnesium with patients and Americans rarely get enough, says Dr. Lawrence Resnick, an endocrinologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center.
"The average intake is 200 milligrams a day. The requirement is around 400."
Magnesium is a mineral of motion. "It activates every enzyme that produces energy, new protein, almost all the energy in every single cell in the body," says Dr. Mildred Seelig, who has studied it for decades.
Minerals work together to achieve a delicate, beneficial detente in the body. The other top guns are calcium, potassium and sodium. But magnesium is especially relevant, Resnick suggests.
More than 300 enzymes -- proteins that tell cells what to do -- need it to function. Without it, cells "can't do a lot of things automatically" -- whether it's contract the heart muscle, line a blood vessel or make bone.
Magnesium, Resnick says, is a "cell buffer" that monitors physical needs -- external heat or internal hormonal commands -- and activates the proper response.
Without enough magnesium, Resnick says, cells grow hyper: "Whatever that tissue does, it will overstimulate or underdo it."
Eventually, the cells and the body stop reacting as forcefully as they should.
Moreover, most life-threatening diseases that start in middle age are connected, Resnick says, counting off: "Getting overweight and progressively so, tending to diabetes and getting it, high blood pressure, gout and accelerated atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which leads to strokes and heart attacks."
Studies done in Resnick's lab show that magnesium deficiency underpins this entire constellation of ills -- what is known as Syndrome X, or insulin resistance, a term coined by Dr. Gerald Reaven.
Magnesium works "very closely" with potassium, says Dr. Michael Brodsky, a cardiac arrhythmia expert at the University of California at Irvine. Arrhythmias -- erratic heart contractions -- can kill.
"If potassium gets too low, the heart gets irritable, and if it gets too high, the heart can stop," Brodsky says. And potassium levels may depend on the magnesium, because "magnesium is driving the potassium process."
Magnesium "can treat dramatic attacks," he says. In one patient, nothing helped, not even an implanted defibrillator, which kept shutting off, or oral magnesium supplements the patient could not absorb properly.
"I told his doctor we needed to give him intravenous magnesium," Brodsky says, and they began infusing him with magnesium three and four days a week.
"His implanted defibrillator started working, and now he is down to one infusion a week."
Dr. Jerry Nadler, top endocrinologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a diabetes expert, says simply of magnesium: "We believe in this."
Different studies show a link between low levels or intake of magnesium and increased risk of getting Type 2 diabetes, the form that develops over time but is increasingly striking children as young as 8 or 10.
Nadler studied Zucker (zucker means sugar in German) rats, which all develop diabetes in time. "Put the rat on a high magnesium diet before they get (diabetes), and they are highly protected," Nadler says.
In another study, he gave healthy people a liquid diet with everything except magnesium. "Within about three weeks, they were deficient, and most became insulin-resistant," an early sign of encroaching diabetes.