Metformin Is Not A Wonder Drug

Metformin was approved as a treatment for diabetes in Europe in the 1950s. It wasn’t until 1995 that the FDA approved it for use in the U.S. It has since become the most widely prescribed medication for people with diabetes who cannot control their blood sugar through diet and exercise alone. Metformin is the world’s fourth most commonly prescribed medicine; therefore, its adverse impacts on nutritional factors affect a significant percentage of the global population.

Metformin is an antidiabetic agent that manages high blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes patients. It reduces glucose absorption from the intestines, lowers liver glucose production, and improves insulin sensitivity. For better results, metformin is recommended along with dietary changes and exercise.

Managing blood sugar levels with medications like metformin can prevent complications such as kidney damage, nerve issues, blindness, amputations, and sexual dysfunction, or that’s what they think. However, statistics for all these conditions suggest that metformin is not adequate and does little to control diabetes or lower the risk of heart attacks or strokes. If metformin was so good, why is it that one person dies every 33 seconds from cardiovascular disease in the United States?

Modern medicine makes a huge mistake when it comes to putting pharmaceuticals ahead of more natural and necessary medicines like magnesium, which do not come with the side effects of a drug like metformin. For all the wonders claimed for metformin, magnesium outperforms in every case. Magnesium is essential for life; metformin is not. It is a significant problem that metformin interferes with many aspects of magnesium’s absorption and excretion.

Low serum magnesium concentrations are associated with
dyslipidemia, hypertension, endothelial dysfunction, and inflammation,
and thus the development of cardiovascular disease, including diabetes.

Doctors cannot deny that there is a trade-off between the importance of long-term administration of metformin in improving glycaemic control and its negative impact on magnesium status, a nutrient vital for glycaemic control. This is so critical that some doctors recommend routine measurement of magnesium levels as a management strategy to prevent hypomagnesemia.

Hypomagnesemia in people diagnosed with diabetes is reported to be about 31%, based on a lower acceptable limit for magnesium of 0.70mmol/L. There is a recommendation for a universal lower acceptable limit for magnesium of 0.80 mmol/L, which, therefore, noticeably increases the percentage of people with diabetes with hypomagnesemia. These are ultra-conservative estimates.