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Comment by mancerayder

3 months ago

Which formulation of magnesium? And how long (days/weeks) of supplementation before you noticed a difference? Does it 'wear off' once you stop?

7 comments

mancerayder

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Nemi  3 months ago

I find magnesium a tricky one to get right for me. I have tried most of the kinds available and have settled on magnesium chloride in a liquid form. It has a god awful taste, but has absolutely no other side effects.

Citrate causes me to have too soft of stools. Glycinate is often recommended for sleep, but for me it has the opposite effect – it wires me. I have tried taurine, malinate, and threonate, but chloride just works the best for me.

Electrolytes do ‘wear off’ in the sense that they are constantly depleted by your body, even when everything is working well. I have come up with the metaphor that electrolytes are like gas and oil in your car. They are constantly used up and need to be replenished. This is normal.

The good news is that I noticed the difference immediately!

joe_guy  3 months ago

Not OP but I've had luck with zinc and magnesium aspartate supplements commonly available on Amazon. I take two caps that each are a net about 500mg an hour before bed, along with 1mg of melatonin.

Been doing this for a lot of years now.

  • hgomersall  3 months ago

    You need to be a bit careful with zinc. A doctor friend of mine compiled a load of data showing most zinc supplements are contaminated with cadmium, which is cumulative. I'm not sure if he's published yet.

    Edit, here's a paper by some other researchers: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0963748012005760...

    • krackers  3 months ago

      Fyi in the consumerlabs review for zinc, all products passed testing for cadmium levels with the highest (Nature's Bounty) having 0.5mcg/g.

      You basically need to be careful with any supplement since it's unregulated, and need to do a lot of careful diligence. It's a good sign if they are honest about their supplier and you trace back their supply chain. E.g. for many chelated supplements (zinc included), if you see a TRAACS trademark then the source is Balchem (Albion) which to my understanding is fairly well regarded.

      ConsumerLabs tested one such TRAACS product and found it to be 0.1 mcg/g cadmium, so likely most products using TRAACS zinc bisglycinate formulation should be similar. I also found some EU food safety application [1] which confirms that across 3 different manufacturers of zinc bisglycinate (one of which is Albion), all samples were < 0.1mcg/g

      [1] https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.2903/j.efsa....

    • UniverseHacker  3 months ago

      Thanks! It is also critical to balance zinc with copper, and supplementing a lot of zinc without copper can effectively cause copper deficiency, which is very serious.

    • joe_guy  3 months ago

      Thank you for this information. I'll either switch to a better brand or go straight magnesium.