My wife Jennifer has had symptoms of a racing heart for around 8 or 9 years until early 2023. When the symptoms started, she had been taking Vitamin A for about a year, and she had also begun supplementing salt. We finally fixed the problem last year, and within the last year she has not had any racing heart symptoms. We diligently investigated everything that we could and encountered a lot of contradictory advice, and we tested things continually. Some things worked, but only partially. A bit more magnesium worked a little. Stopping Ashwagandha helped quite a bit, as it was causing low blood pressure. Adding molybdenum helped quite a bit, but was not the complete answer. Drinking more water seemed to help, especially if the heart began racing. The entire protocol helped a bit, but it was still there happening on occasion. The final thing we did was to cut back sodium even more, (such as limiting soy sauces, salty crackers, and salty meats) and increase potassium even more (from 700 mg to 2000 mg through the use of NuSalt which is potassium chloride), and that was the best and final solution, and this article is my attempt to explain why this finally worked, and also, why it is not an instant fix for some people, and how to help them fix it as we did.
I have learned from the occasional critic that if I don’t at least start with acknowledging what the mainstream says, they wrongly assume that I’m ignorant of what they say, and thus, when I begin to correct them and contradict them, they will wrongly assume I’m both ignorant and wrong, rather than bringing correct insights to the table.
So here’s what the Mayo Clinic says regarding Arrhythmia and causes:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-arrhythmia/symptoms-causes/syc-20350668
I note that they are short on solutions. Also, they miss quite a few causes, and they lump electrolyte issues into a broad category of “imbalances” and “problems of deficiency and excess” regarding calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium, and they don’t offer any solutions to the problems of electrolyte imbalances.
They also miss that dehydration, Vitamin A, and fluoride are causes. They also completely neglect to mention copper, iodine, zinc, and molybdenum. So, once again, mainstream medical information, even so-called “cutting edge” medicine is below mediocre.
I’ll start with my summary of causes and solutions:
Causes: Excess Vitamin A, excess sodium, excess fluoride, excess toxins, medications, diuretics, dehydration, excess magnesium, excess calcium. Also, molybdenum deficiency, copper deficiency, iodine deficiency, water deficiency, low and high blood pressure, and nerve degeneration.
Solutions: Lowering Vitamin A consumption, lowering sodium salt intake, lowering fluoride exposure (drinking distilled water), avoiding toxins and detoxing, stopping medications and diuretics that cause dehydration, (drinking distilled water), not taking more than 400 mg of magnesium in a day, fixing blood pressure problems, fixing the nerves with copper and iodine, stopping sodium salts like sea salts or Himalayan salts, lowering intake of salty foods and meals such as soy sauce and chips and crackers, and eating more fruits and veggies and taking potassium chloride and slowly adjusting, and taking copper, zinc, iodine, potassium and molybdenum supplements and slowly adjusting to them.
I will discuss a few mechanisms of action for why some of the things cause the problems, and why the solutions work.
Finally, with that understanding, I will explain the apparent paradox of why some people get racing heart problems while trying to correct it when doing the right things, why this can occasionally be a problem when initially detoxing, and why it will pass. It will be next to impossible to understand that this is a detoxing effect until after you understand the scientific mechanisms of actions first, so we will start there.
Mechanisms of Action:
Many of the electrolytes help to increase hydration. Hydration fixes the twin problems of low blood pressure and low cellular function.
Why sodium causes heart problems, or at least part of the reason:
There is a sodium/potassium pump in the cell membrane of all animal and human cells. There are no humans that do not have this pump, and you are no exception. It is constantly pumping sodium out of the cell, and potassium into the cell, and it takes energy in the form of ATP to run this pump to do this. During an action potential, or nerve impulse that travels down the nerve, the cell gates open, and sodium and other electrolytes rush into the cell, and potassium and other electrolytes rush out, and this causes an electrical cascade that travels down the nerve. It is thus assumed that sodium is necessary for this process, and that has become common knowledge.
However, we must take into account the key facts regarding sodium. Sodium in excess is known to cause racing heart problems, and most people get far more sodium than they need. The fluid outside the cell has sodium in average concentrations of up to 33 times more than inside the cell. The fluid inside the cell has potassium in average concentrations of up to 15 times more than outside the cell.
It makes sense that these are the averages, because most people take in too much sodium, and not enough potassium.
Water flows to where the minerals are located. If sodium is in excess, water will flow out of the cell. If there is more potassium than sodium, then water will flow into the cell.
Thus, excess sodium dehydrates the cell.
Excess sodium causes edema, or tissue swelling, and excessive urination at night.
Daily salt intake is associated with leg edema and nocturnal urinary volume in elderly men
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32460398/
This dispels and refutes the common understanding that sodium helps us “hydrate” by helping us “retain water”. Yes, water is retained, but the water is in the wrong place, it’s outside the cell and causes edema, or tissue swelling, and makes the body look fat.
Many people end up with racing heart symptoms after a meal. Of course. Many meals are high in sodium, and this is when people become the most dehydrated due to excess sodium.
Most Americans already get far too much sodium, (3500 mg average rather than 2000 mg recommended, and some get up to 10,000 mg just from salty foods) and thus, do not need to supplement any more sodium, nor any form of salt whatsoever. We cannot avoid sodium in foods. Even a diet of plenty of fruits and vegetables, with zero sodium added, eating only low sodium foods, will contain a whopping 500 mg of sodium, therefore showing that we do not need to supplement sodium. So some, like us, believe in the science that shows 500 mg of sodium, or zero added sodium intake, leads to the most healthy outcomes.
Almost all of the dangers of low sodium do not happen with diet, they happen with diuretic drugs that artificially lower sodium in the body.
We cannot drink seawater because the kidneys cannot put more salt into the urine than is contained in seawater. So salt builds up and becomes toxic. Seawater contains 28 to 37 grams of sodium chloride per liter. Therefore, drinking seawater causes sodium to build up, which causes dehydration. Supplementing salt does the same thing. Sprinkling dry salt (far more salt concentrated than seawater) onto salty foods does the same thing.
If salt tastes good, this is a key sign of sodium addiction and a sign that the body is in a state of sodium toxicity.
Most Americans are in a very advanced state of sodium addiction and toxicity.
Most Americans have around 40 grams of sodium in the body.
Many Americans consume up to 10 grams of sodium per day, which is the same as about drinking a third of a liter of seawater!
Yet 20 grams of sodium is a lethal amount. This implies that most Americans are 2/3rds to 5/6ths (40/60 to 50/60) of the way to a full lethal dose of sodium buildup in their body.
Once again, the facts prove that supplementing with sodium is a very bad idea.
Yet, people will insist that sodium is necessary for their health.
Alcoholics will also call their alcohol “medicine”.
Did I mention that sodium is addictive? I sure did.
Similar to alcohol, the body builds up a tolerance to sodium, and a craving for sodium.
Similar to detoxing anything, when the body’s cells are finally able to actively release sodium, they can release too much to process at once, causing excess sodium outside the cells, and leading to increased symptoms of sodium toxicity, such as racing heart, and edema or swelling.
Detoxing is a multi-step process. First, toxins have to be released from the cells. Then they have to get released from the body. We pee out sodium, but we need enough clean distilled water to help. Tap water and bottled water is high in sodium. Sodium is the most common electrolyte in water.
Paradoxically, when people try to quit sodium, some people, estimated to be about 1 in 20, have racing heart symptoms, because the sodium starts to leave the cells and concentrate in excess outside the cells. In my experience, the people who are most likely to have this symptom are the most addicted to sodium, and the most addicted to the false idea that they need sodium.
This also happens when people try to add potassium, or copper, or iodine. Their bodies are suddenly able to detox sodium for the first time in a while, and symptoms of excess sodium start to happen, such as racing heart symptoms.
Copper fixes racing heart problems in perhaps the most ways of any supplement that I know. It repairs the heart from heart disease. Copper increases muscle strength. Copper clears out arteries. Copper makes healthier red blood cells. Copper increases collagen for the strength of the walls of the blood vessels. Copper increases ATP so that cells can fuel that sodium/potassium pump so that cells can excrete sodium. See the connection now?
Iodine can similarly cause racing heart symptoms, before making them better, because we need thyroid hormones to send the signals for the mitochondria to start making ATP for energy the fuels that sodium/potassium pump.
When we first started The Copper Revolution, there was an idea in our forum on Facebook that “copper helps people retain salt”. Furthermore, people noticed that they craved salt less on copper. So, it seemed to match up. After about 6 people mentioned this, I began repeating this idea in my articles. However, and this is a good lesson, other people began to question the source of this. I went looking and I could not find any scientific source to prove this idea up, that copper helps the body retain sodium salt. I had to eliminate and remove my statements. Now, it appears to me to be the opposite; that we really do need less salt, because we detox salt on copper, and the need for salt is also a false idea. We need electrolytes like copper and potassium, and sodium is a very poor substitute.
There is a similar idea out there in the HTMA community of hair tissue mineral analysis interpreters. Some of them claim that people high in sodium salt do not do well on copper, and that in such situations, copper can cause racing heart issues. I now see they get the correlations right, and the cause/effect partly right, as people who are high in salt who take copper can get racing heart problems. But their idea is that copper is toxic, which appears now to be a dramatically wrong conclusion because copper is the solution to the problem of being toxic with sodium. They have misidentified the toxic mineral.
So if a racing heart symptom happens when starting the good minerals, the solution is to drink more distilled water, to slowly increase the good minerals, and take a smaller dose of things like copper, potassium or iodine, and to cut back sodium intake and all forms of sodium salts such as table salt, sea salt, Celtic salt, and Himalayan salt. Since the body can only pee out sodium at a certain rate, it is important to detox sodium a bit more slowly.
Copper deficiency is a known cause of 80 different biomarkers related to heart problems, and copper is one very good solution to heart disease. So, once again, copper is not the cause of racing heart problems.
Potassium also helps our bodies make use of copper, and potassium’s long list of benefits is very similar to the list of copper’s benefits. Both help fix dehydration, both help build muscle, both are important for nerve health, etc.
Finally, there are other good things necessary to make ATP: sugar (food) and oxygen, Magnesium, the good B Vitamins, (B1, B2, B3, B5, B7 and B12), copper and iodine, and of course phosphorous (creatine phosphate) to make Adenosine Tri Phosphate ATP. So all of these good things increase ATP production, and increase energy so the sodium/potassium pump works better, and this can induce a sodium detox and sodium excess reactions like a racing heart.
Again, to clarify, increased ATP is not bad. The sodium detox is temporary.
Decreased ATP is far worse, which can lead to heart disease, diabetes, and death. https://www.aatbio.com/resources/faq-frequently-asked-questions/what-happens-if-the-sodium-potassium-pump-fails-or-is-inhibited
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