Carve this in stone: Your body will balance itself no matter what you think, do or say.

This is one of the many things they don’t teach us in school.

And I’ve never seen a headline about it on a magazine cover, either.

It seems to be somebody’s secret, but we need to let that cat out of the bag right now. This is important stuff.

For instance, your body insists the calcium in your body be balanced with the magnesium in your body. Well, everybody’s heard about taking calcium to protect your bones, so we piously chug down calcium and wish our bones well.

Not so fast, Chester.

Most of us have a magnesium deficiency. Pity that, because magnesium’s involved in all sorts of activity that keeps our bodies going.

But in terms of balancing, here’s the kicker: As long as your magnesium level is low, your body will keep dumping calcium until they balance. You’ll be in the ditch when they do, but your body will be taking bows about a job well done.

And all the calcium you’re taking? In one end and out the other in not much more than a trice.

Well, not entirely. Some of the calcium seems to get lost on the way out and ends up where it doesn’t belong–in our arteries, in the pineal gland, hither and yon–none of it good.

Current dogma tells us to take half as much magnesium as calcium. Well, no. Arguments abound on whether to take the same amount of calcium and magnesium or to take twice as much magnesium as calcium.

And still research marches on. It appears we get enough calcium through diet and shouldn’t supplement with calcium at all.

As is typical in our contentious times, each side ridicules the others for their position. I recently switched to the magnesium-only camp. Magnesium takes part in more than 300 enzyme actions in our bodies every day. With all that heavy lifting going on, I don’t want get stingy.

And that’s not the end of the balancing story.

There’s also the deal where the body wants to balance sodium and potassium. When you swear off salt, your body dumps potassium, which raises your blood pressure. So the doctor says to really, really cut out salt, which ends up lowering your potassium even more. And so on.

It’s kind of like a death spiral. Well, actually, it is a death spiral. Staying alive requires sodium, which requires potassium, which requires sodium, which requires . . . You get the idea.

Ditch table salt, though. They process the life out of it, then bleach it, then add bad stuff to it. Use sea salt. (Celtic is a good brand.) You get good sodium–plus more than 80 trace minerals our bodies need.

And how about copper and zinc? They also have a ratio to maintain. But birth control pills–and other sources of bogus estrogen–raise women’s copper levels big time, and the balance scales just about fall over. A whacked out copper/zinc ratio leads to thyroid problems big time.

If you ever wondered why I talk a lot about general health when I say I’m all about endocrine problems, now you know. It’s because the body balances everything. We can’t have a healthy endocrine system in an unhealthy body. Everything gets balanced out–and we want to all this balancing to work for our benefit.

Here’s the deal: Half the population has thyroid problems, but most don’t know it. Meanwhile, the percentage of us with diabetes is skyrocketing. Autoimmune diseases are going through the roof. And obesity? Yikes!

People, work with me here. We have know how things work and how the pieces fit if we’re ever going to get a handle on our out-of-balance mess.

Unless, of course, you like that death-warmed-over feeling.

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