Magnesium Supplementation: Everything You Need To Know About Dosing Magnesium, Timing Magnesium, Forms Of Magnesium & More!

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. I hope you are ready to talk all about magnesium, but that kind of didn't sound right because you don't have to talk about it. You get to listen to me talk about it a lot with my friend Thomas DeLauer, who's really smart. I'll introduce him shortly so that I can make this quick and snappy for you because I know you're in a big hurry.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. Show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And if I had a nickel for every time I get a question about magnesium, I would be a relatively wealthy man. Even though nickels aren't worth as much these days as they used to be back in the days when Grandpa could buy a hamburger with a nickel. I digress. Anyways, I get tons of questions about magnesium, like what form of magnesium is best, and are different forms better for different needs like sleep or brain or digestion? When should you take magnesium? How do you test your magnesium levels or know if you have a deficiency? How do you actually get magnesium to be absorbed? And the fact is, although magnesium is an incredibly important mineral, there's lots of unanswered questions and confusion around it. So I thought it was high time to have my friend and Nutrition researcher Thomas DeLauer back on the show for this would be the third time I first interviewed Thomas. In the episode about inflammation, we did an episode on the Ultimate Guide to Quelling Inflammation. We also did an incredibly popular episode on alcohol and whether alcohol makes you fat and what kind of alcohol is the healthiest and hidden ingredients in alcohol and even how to mitigate the damage from a night of hedonistic partying. I'll put links to all of those previous episodes with Thomas and everything we talk about today over at BenGreenfield Fitness.com Mag BenGreenfieldFitness.com Meg. Not to be confused with the actress Meg Ryan. Who else? Meg Foster. Megan Fox. Also an actress. Meg. Like M A G. Not Meg, folks. So anyways, BenGreenfieldFitness.com Meg is where I'll put the show notes. Who is Thomas? He's in addition to being one of the world's leading experts in the world of chronic inflammation and the response of the body to a low carb diet and even alcohol, he's also noted for his personal transformation. He went from, and we told this story in the last episode, a 280 pound overweight corporate executive to not only being on the COVID of health and fitness magazines around the world, you've probably seen him if you stand there at the grocery store and ogle the COVID of men's magazines. But he's also pioneered some of the mainstream awareness of autoimmune diseases and inflammation and has been highlighted in Ironman magazine, Muscle and Performance magazine, Muscle magazine, Icon magazine, Platform magazine, the list goes on and on. His actual background is in sports psychology and he's currently working on a project with some docs at UCLA to identify a strain of bacteria that could help to modulate inflammation within the body. We actually talked about that in the last episode in which I had him on. So Thomas lives in California. He has a relatively newly born son. So if Thomas sounds sleep deprived and completely out of it, that's probably why. How old is your son now? Thomas?

He's, he just turned 11 months. So fortunately we're getting out of the, the crazy sleep deprivation stage.

That's not too bad. Are you, I, I get this question a lot, man. Are you using? Somebody even asked me this this morning. They said, are you, are you detoxing your boys? And I wrote back and I said, well, young, young folks, kind of like young cars, don't necessarily need big overhauls and detoxes and tons of mechanic work done. And my kids certainly do take a little bit of glutathione here and there, some, some lion's mane before school and a good multivitamin. But are you doing anything kind of out of the ordinary, I suppose, to enhance your son's health or development out of the ordinary?

I wouldn't necessarily. It's out of the ordinary, but I guess, I guess it is actually. I mean, I'm really focused on keeping his blood sugar stable. That's like the biggest thing for me is like, you know, I pay close attention to that. So I wouldn't say he eats. I mean, he does eat a low carb diet. In the grand scheme of things, he's definitely not keto. I would, and I'm not saying I'm going to make my baby keto, but I focus big time on making sure that he doesn't have any big surges in blood sugar, keeping it nice and stable. And so my wife and I are big on it. Seems to be working tremendously because, I mean, he started walking at eight months, which is quite early. He started developed motor skills really early. And I mean, so we just really focus on that. Okay. We're not going to deprive him of glucose. We're not going to deprive him of carbohydrates, but we are going to introduce them in a way where he stays consistent.

He's not doing breath ketone measurements probably like my kids. We just never had like a kid's menu at our table. We would. When we'd have sardines or liver or avocado or anything else, we'd literally mommy bird our kids. We'd chew stuff up, put it on their plates, and they would just eat what mom and I eat. And there wasn't like the separate children's meal of Cheerios or macaroni and cheese or, you know, God forbid, chicken wings and pizza. Right. The kids just eat what the adults eat. And since mom and I kind of control our blood glucose just indirectly, the kids do, too.

Yep, that's exactly what we do. He just. He has just a. Some sometimes slightly modified from us if it's a little spicy or something. But, like, other than that, it's. Yeah, he's eating what we're eating.

Yeah, yeah. Is he breastfeeding?

So she breastfed for about the first six months, and then her supply she ended up getting. Actually she got E. Coli, so her supply ran out. So we ended up using, having no choice but to go over to Holly makes a organic goat milk formula. So I wasn't about to put him on any kind of other formula. So since we had to supplement, it was interesting that there was a goat milk formula. So obviously utilizing a, you know, an A2 strain of. Of casein versus the typical A1.

Yeah.

So it was. It was a lot easier on his body and actually worked quite well considering the unfortunate.

You're speaking my language. A lot of parents don't even realize that a lot of the cattle are bred now with a 1 protein. And so if you're going to feed your kid a milk, choosing a goat milk or. I mean, this sounds out there, but you can get it in even like a camel milk or a water buffalo milk. The proteins are smaller and it's that a 2 protein that's less allergenic for a kid. So, you know, especially when you consider that that breast milk itself is. Is highly ketogenic. In terms of ketones and triglycerides. If you're not going to do that, you might as well choose, you know, like you're doing a good absorbable, non allergenic form of milk from some other mammal.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. And he, he was doing baby. He was doing baby lead weaning from the time he was about to five or six months anyway, so we started introducing solid foods pretty, pretty darn early in terms of kind of mama birding it to him and just getting him introduced to food. So. Good. Yeah, good.

Cool. Well, we're gonna make an extremely awkward transition from breast milk over to magnesium, because that's the. The topic of the day, obviously, the elephant in the room. So I, I guess the first question I have for you, Thomas, is this. A lot of people already know the importance of. And frankly, and we can talk about the best way to test your magnesium levels here in a little bit. But a lot of people are low in magnesium or know that quite a few folks are low in magnesium. So they might be too, especially if they're athletes, if they sweat a lot, if they've got a lot of mineral turnover. But the biggest complaint I get from magnesium, the number one thing that I want to address first, because I know everybody's wondering this, is magnesium can freaking make you spray out your backside the next morning and completely destroy the toilet bowl, the wall behind the toilet. Sometimes. I've heard stories of people who take like a magnesium citrate supplement at night in the form of 400-500mg and literally just have to clinch their ass cheeks all night long and wake up and blow themselves wide open. So is there a way around that when it comes to topping off your magnesium levels without getting this notorious loose stool or. I think it was Dr. Chris Kresser, who I heard describe it. Consterrhea, like a mix of constipation and diarrhea.

I've never heard that term before. That's perfect. Yeah, it's. It's pretty simple. So magnesium is what is called hydrophilic. So it's. You've got hydrophobic and hydrophilic. Hydrophobic means afraid of water or deters from water. And then hydrophilic means attracts water. So what happens is magnesium in general creates this thing called passive diffusion where it draws water into the intestine. And that's why, when done properly, it's beneficial for the occasional constipation because it draws the water in, gets everything moving. It's great. The problem is when it happens really fast. There's nothing to modulate how fast the water floods into the small intestine and the large intestine. So you end up with this situation where you can have this uncontrollable bout of diarrhea and there's just nothing you can do about it. So the trick is having it absorb slower. And it doesn't really matter. Since magnesium is a mineral. It all depends on what the mineral is bound or the kind of magnesium that it is, because that plays a big role. It's not like you can say, take a. Take some Epsom salt or something like that and consume it with fat. Fat is going to slow it down. It doesn't work like that. It's like the mineral is going to absorb, it's going to do its thing, and it all depends on what the actual mineral itself is bound to. So, like Epsom salt, although it sounds like a salt, is technically a magnesium, and that's what's going to really have the biggest laxative effect. You know, it just draws it in immediately. So that's the main mistake that people are making if they're taking any kind of magnesium citrate or anything like that at night. Yeah. They're lucky if they wake up with a clean mattress.

Okay. But magnesium citrate is one of the formulas that's often sold as and marketed as something that does help with the bowel movement or helps with sleep. I mean, is it true that there are certain forms of magnesium that work best for different functions? I know it's kind of a loaded question because there's a lot of forms of magnesium, but we've got time. So can you walk me through the different forms of magnesium and what someone would want to use if they weren't going to use, like, a citrate?

Yeah. So, I mean, magnesium citrate is definitely one of them that is used. It has a high bioavailability, but the problem is it's such a high bioavailability, and it happens so fast that it generates a laxative effect. So you end up in a situation where you've defeated the purpose, because when you have diarrhea, you're losing water, which means that you're losing more minerals. So you're kind of pissing up a rope. So you end up having this high bioavailability, like, oh, magnesium citrate is the best one. It's going to absorb, but then it's just. It's absorbing so fast that it's just not getting absorbed. It's going right through you.

So that's the problem is it's absorbed really fast.

It's absorbed way too fast. So it interferes with the cerrelloplasm, and it can cause all kinds of iron issues, too. So we can talk. I'll talk more about iron later because I could go on and on about iron. But he's got magnesium chloride, which is one that you don't see a whole, whole lot of. But that's one that's used. Usually people want to use magnesium chloride when they're doing forms of detoxing or when they're looking to. Sometimes they'll be given in heavy, heavy dosage in clinical settings to support kidney function because it has a direct correlation with the kidneys. But it's usually only about 10 to 15% magnesium. Even though the magnesium is bioavailable, it's not the kind of magnesium you typically want to use.

The magnesium chloride, you mean.

Yeah, it's not the typical one that you just want to add into your daily regimen.

It is. Not to throw you off the rails here too early, but magnesium chloride is very popular with detoxification protocols. I did one recently, me, and it involved, like, drinking this nasty, you know, like a tablespoon of magnesium chloride. And I just use the same magnesium salts that I take a bath in because they do seem like a big bag of magnesium chloride. Seems to be work better than, say, Epsom salts for, like a hot bath for the muscles. But a lot of magnesium chloride is recommended for detoxification. Why is that?

Simply because of how. Well, for one, it does have an effect in terms of the laxative effect.

Which you're telling me.

Yeah, that is a part of the detoxification. And then again, it comes back down to the hydrophilic aspect. So a lot of times people think because you've got magnesium chloride, because it's a lower amount of actual magnesium in it, they say that, oh, it's not going to give you as much of a laxative effect. So it's the best one that you can use for detoxing. It's supposed to help, by its own definition, kind of chelate some of the extra minerals. So you have magnesium that balances out calcium, that has an effect on iron, that has an effect on copper, that therefore transcends into zinc. I mean, it's a whole pathway. That's. That again we can talk about. So by bringing in a small amount of magnesium like that in a bioavailable form, you're basically telling the body to chelate some of this excess iron Some of these excess minerals and also chelate with some of the heavy metals and things like that.

So things like metals and iron are chelating to magnesium chloride. And in addition, it's having a little bit of a laxative effect. And those two things put together are why it's recommended for, say, like a detox.

That's. That's the simplest way to put it. But, yeah, it's. It's sort of a co factor to some of that. But, yeah, that's. That's basically what's happening.

Yeah. And by the way, that when I take a bath, the cool thing about that is you. You get. And I. I actually want to hear your take on this. From what I understand, some amount of absorption from the topical magnesium, but because it bypasses the GI tract, you don't get a lot of the unpleasant laxative effect.

Yeah, that's correct. You do absorb some. I did. I did a video on that a while ago because it was really interesting, and it did show that. That, yeah, after taking an Epsom salt bath or taking any kind of magnesium bath or topically, you would absorb some at the serum level, but it was questionable whether you were actually getting it absorbed all the way, like, into the red blood cells, which we actually need, which again, I'll touch on in a little bit, too.

Okay. So you would get absorbed into the serum, but not the red blood cells. Yeah.

So basically, I mean, to make a long story short is only about 1% of the magnesium is ever really measured. And that's the magnesium that's in the serum in your blood plasma levels. And that's usually an ind. That's not the bulk of the magnesium. Most of the magnesium we want in our red blood cells, we want in our bone marrow, because that's, like, where it's actually going to be functional. But when it's. When we have elevated levels of serum magnesium, a lot of times that can mean that what's happening is you're deficient in magnesium. So it's pulling it from the red blood cells, it's pulling it from the marrow and putting it into the bloodstream. So it can be totally confusing when people go to get their magnesium levels checked because they're like, oh, cool, I'm high in magnesium. Well, that's. Being high in magnesium could mean that you're actually low in magnesium because you're measuring serum magnesium. Precisely. Yeah, so. So you can ask your doctor. Some. Some labs do offer RBC magnesium, which stands for red blood cell magnesium. And that's really what is that's really what matters and comes down to how your magnesium levels are actually affecting you.

Yeah, that. That's what I test, by the way, is rbc. I do a longevity panel once a quarter with Wellness fx and they. They do an RBC Magnesium.

Yeah, that's the one you got to do.

Okay, so if you're going to get your magnesium tested, it's a blood RBC magnesium test. That's like the gold standard.

Correct.

Okay, good. All right. So you. You were just getting started talking about the different forms of magnesium, and you had gotten to magnesium chloride. So we established that that would be something you would like, take a bath in or use for, like a detoxification protocol. But it's probably not like a good daily source of magnesium just to keep your levels topped off.

Correct? Correct. Yeah. And then you've probably heard of MAG glycinate before. That's the one that a lot of times doctors will recommend. It doesn't have a laxative property. It's transported through the intestinal wall. So it can still have a laxative property, but it's not nearly as intense. It is a high bioavailability, too. So it is considered ideal. The problem is it's an expensive form. It's definitely a more pricey form. It's a little bit more calming because glycine in and of itself is a calming amino. So when you took it glycinate, you're talking about mag that's been. Basically, it's already been chelated, and then it's bound to glycine. So that's what we're looking at here. So it can be really calming and have a strong effect on what is called the NMDA receptor. The NMDA receptor is a portion of the neuron that acts as sort of a gateway. And this NMDA receptor, if you picture a neuron, you picture it an NMDA receptor being sort of the gate. What will happen is magnesium will usually sit on the NMDA receptor and occupy it to protect it from calcium, believe it or not, because calcium is excitatory. So what will happen is if calcium's running rampant through the body and it goes and it hits this NMDA receptor, it can trigger an excitatory response, causing anxiety, literally. So it can make it so that neuron is firing like crazy. Well, it can only do that if magnesium is not present. So magnesium sits. So magnesium will sort of nullify calcium in this sense. So if magnesium is sitting on the neuron on the NMDA receptor, then calcium counteract or counts with or excuse me, rebuts with the actual magnesium, makes it so it can't get in. But if you're deficient in magnesium, there's no magnesium sitting on the NMDA receptor. Consequently, calcium can get in. So when you look at glycinate, because glycine is already having an effect on some of our neurotransmitters, we're really having a powerful effect there. So I would say that it's one of the better ones, without a doubt, the glycinate. Yeah.

Okay. And that would be because glutamate, that's an excitatory neurotransmitter that would normally interact with that NMDA receptor. And what you're saying is that like calcium magnesium imbalance would cause excess excitatory activity. But if you were to take magnesium glycinate, say prior to bed, you would actually inhibit some that glutamate excitability that could potentially keep you awake at night.

Yeah, you definitely could. And that's. And that's generally what you'll see doctors recommending. Like I said, it's hard to glycinate because it's pretty expensive. So it's not always a little bit cost prohibitive for people. Then there's magnesium malate, which is a really good one. Magnesium malate is usually set up in such a way that, where it's like dimagnesium malate, where it absorbs very, very slow, where it's a little bit more of a sustained release and you're not having any laxative effect, a lot more powerful when it comes down to the energy cycle and also aiding in ATP production and everything like that. Because malate itself is very, very powerful when it comes down to energy production. So when you actually have magnesium malate, you're really focusing on it from kind of the energy side of things and the muscle pain side of things a little bit more. More of in a way that like an athlete or someone that's focused on how they feel would actually be able to register a difference. Like they'd really be able to see a difference in how they feel. Not just and be like, oh, I sleep better or oh, I'm able to go to the bathroom better. I mean, this is a little bit more of like, okay, wow, my muscles feel relaxed, I feel good. I'm not getting cramps, I feel more energized. Things are happening at more of an enzymatic level there.

Okay, interesting. So magnesium malate, is that something that would also cause sleepiness or relaxation?

Well, I wouldn't say. Cause I Think. I mean, I don't know if it would cause, like a sleepiness, but it definitely causes relaxation. It's definitely not going to be making you groggy. It's not one of those things like I take diamagnesium malate in the morning and in the evening because I actually like the sleep effects that it does give me in terms of a restful sleep. But I also like the calming effects. It's one of the tips, the tools that I use in my toolbox when it comes down to filming. I mean, those of you that know me know that I'm on camera a lot. So for me, having to be calm and having to be able to be collected and being able to be articulate while I'm on camera is really important to me. So, you know, there's a few things that I sort of have in that arsenal, and magma late is definitely one of them because I feel like I'm nice and even keeled. And I don't feel like things affect me nearly as much, you know, because what will happen is. I mean, a perfect example is like, I'm filming, but I also run a business. I run multiple businesses. So things stress me out, things hit me. But what I don't want to have happen is be in the mode of filming and have something happen my phone ring and get stressed out and have it completely throw off the rest of my filming. I find that that magma laid especially in a pretty decent dose for me. I mean, maybe it's not a dose I would necessarily recommend for everybody, but I'm a bigger guy. I've got a good amount of lean body mass, so I up the dose a little bit more. But it definitely keeps me even keeled. Yeah, that's what I like about that.

And that would be considered another chelated form of magnesium because it's chelated to malic acid.

Correct.

Okay. Oh, and by the way, just so folks know, in case they're at a cocktail party and they want to impress their friends, can you give me the 32nd overview of chelations?

Yeah. So chelation basically means that it has the ability to. Or already has been able to lock to usually heavy metals. So, like in this case, like, it has the ability to bind and help excrete or essentially nullify something. So sometimes it can even be where it enhances the effect of something. It all depends on what you're actually chelating. So an example is like the chelation of iron, meaning that it's binding to the iron and it's. It's rendering it either useless or more effective, depending on whatever enzymatic pathway is being utilized. Okay, so the simplest way that someone could impress someone is just to use it kind of in a different context of almost a nullify. I mean, that's a good word to use for it.

Okay. Yeah. The late, great Charles Poliquin, he was a fan of magnesium malate. And I saw an article from him where he was recommending malate for a lot of the same things that you say it's good for. Like, like anxiety and kind of allowing you to relax during the day without falling asleep. But he also commented on it because he was really into supplements for performance. How when you combine magnesium with malic acid, it could contribute to ATP production. Is there anything to that?

Yeah, so, I mean, when you look at malic acid in general is actually really powerful when it comes down to ATP production. It actually has to do with how it accompanies potassium, believe it or not. So like, when you're looking at the uptake into the guard of the cells in general to maintain electrical balance, when you have malate, it allows potassium to come in. So if you have that balance, then magnesium can do its job better too. So when you have this accumulation, the cell ends up decreasing its potential, so it allows water to enter the cell and ends up making it work more fluidly and more effectively. In essence, it literally aids the magnesium in producing ATP, but it also aids the potassium in producing ATP.

Okay, got it. So magnesium malate and magnesium glycinate, both of those chelated forms of magnesium, those seem like they are pretty good options for some of the targets that you've just talked about. But there's a lot of other forms of magnesium. And we talked about magnesium citrate a little bit, we talked about magnesium chloride. What about some of these others? Like magnesium oxide is one, magnesium orotate is another. Can you address a few of these other popular ones?

Yeah, so mag oxide is another. It's a decent one, but you have to take it in small doses throughout the day. It's a non chelated form, so it's usually bound to either a fatty acid or an organic acid. That way people will actually use it in more of like acid reflux treatment. And it still could be used as a laxative as well, but it doesn't have a lot of bioavailability. So it's less than, I think it's less than 5% bioavailability.

That's magnesium oxide.

Yeah. So it's something you'd have to take consistently but it kind of has almost a. Almost like an antacid effect. But usually an antacid is obviously with calcium. So it has that sort of effect because how it functions within the body so people will use it. It's even in some pharmaceuticals for acid reflux. Not one that you're going to really want to be taking frequently unless you just really know what you're doing. But it's such a low bioavailability, it's not the best bang for the buck.

Okay, got it. Is that why you wouldn't want to be taking a lot? Just a waste of money?

It's kind of a waste of money.

Okay.

And it's getting how much you'd have to take.

Okay, I'm gonna throw another one at you here. What about magnesium orotate?

So there's. Have you heard of taurate as well?

Magnesium taurate? Yeah, I've heard of it, yeah. Is it similar to orotate?

Yeah. So taurite and orotate I kind of put in the same category. So like Ornate's, they're using the body to help with DNA and RNA production. So we're kind of looking at a different pathway here. The unique thing about both torate actually torate, even more so than orotate, it's actually able to penetrate the cell membrane. So it can actually help with the magnesium delivery to the inner parts of the cell. It's good for really that DNA and that RNA cycle. So where we're actually changing a little bit more of our gene structure and how things are happening and helping out with even gene mutation and expression because you're actually getting it deep into the cell. So it's more of a long term kind of thing. Like there's. But it's pretty absorbable too. It is another chelated form, like taurate is technically chelated. I'm actually not sure if orotate is chelated or not. I know that taurate is. I have to double check on the orotate. But taurate is bound to the amino acid taurine. So that's got high bioavailability already. And it's usually seen kind of in calming situations. So like if people are. I know a lot of people that are just big into meditation, like really big into meditation. And they would megadose taurate or orotate because it would put them into this like ultra calm state to be able to meditate almost to an extreme. But I'd say the more clinical side of things, they're using magnesium taurite more so for like cardiac benefits, just because of how it affects A heart cell, it gets into a little bit more of the cell that way versus affecting on the surface like the NMDA receptors and some of the stuff like that.

Yeah. Low mineral availability is of course one of the things we've talked about on the show as being the culprit for the vertical. A very fit executive who drops dead halfway through a marathon, or the ironman triathlete who has some kind of a cardiovascular incident in the water and drowns. And in many cases that's due to nervous system issues due to magnesium deficiencies or other mineral deficiencies. And so in a case like that, would you, would you suggest that magnesium orotate or magnesium taurate might be a good thing for the back pocket of an athlete who's beating up their body and is also stressed out in other areas of life?

It certainly can, it certainly could be. You do have to still be concerned a little bit with the laxative effect. So it's still going to have a little bit with that. So we don't want to run a situation where you're of course already mineral depleted, you're already working, you know, you're already going through a marathon or you're doing a tough mud or something like that, and then all of a sudden you're having to find a porta potty.

That's just part of the race, man. That, that's, that's, that's the, the fourth leg of the race. A lot of people say it's nutrition, right? Swim, bike, run nutrition. But, but I think it's swim, bike, run, port a potty.

Yeah, that's why they call it a tough mudder.

Yeah, exactly.

That's gross.

Okay, so magnesium orotate and taurate, they're pretty similar. Taurate is chelated, whereas orotate is not. And those would be more for like the heart cells and the nerve cells. And then what about lactate, magnesium lactate? Are you familiar with that one?

You know, so other than just a couple high level things, I don't know much about magnesium lactate. I know that it's been played around with athletes messing around with it. Do you know much about lactate?

No, No. I was going to wait until this episode to ask you.

Yeah, magnesium lactate is one that up until the last five or six years there hasn't been a whole lot of research done on it. And I just know that obviously being bound to lactic acid, so it's being something that's a little bit more people will use it post workout because then they're already going to have a higher bioavailability of it as is. So that way any of the magnesium that becomes unbound can still be bound.

Because I'm sense. Yeah.

So other than. But I don't understand what people are getting out of it. So I feel like people are wanting to utilize mag lactate simply because it sounds cool and I don't. So I don't really know much about it other than why someone would want to take it. Right. Surrounding a workout. Because a higher availability of lactate already.

I haven't seen a lot of chatter about it. I haven't seen many supplements with that in it. So it might just be an inferior form. For those reasons, I realize it's incredibly unscientific specific analysis, but magnesium lactate doesn't appear to have a lot going for it.

We.

I mentioned Epsom salts recently and obviously people are very into this concept of float tanks. Right. Where you go in and you float in a giant bed of magnesium sulfate, which is technically often sold as Epsom salts in terms of sore muscles. Like I mentioned, I'm a bigger fan of magnesium chloride because I've. I've messed around with Epsom salts. I've messed around with these magnesium bath flags. I buy them from ancient minerals, these big bath flakes, and I'll dissolve them in water. And I literally drag an infrared light into my bathroom and I bathe myself an infrared light to assist with the health of the mitochondria while at the same time taking a bath in magnesium chloride. But magnesium sulfate is the more popular one that people take baths in to do things like relieve sore muscles. Are there any other benefits aside from that for something like magnesium sulfate or the oral use of something like that?

Well, the oral use is going to be probably one of the most powerful laxatives that you can have. It's pretty easy to overdose with sulfate, even though it's a high degree of, again, biod availability. So you're going to be in this situation where it's absorbing fast but also causing a laxative effect. Epsom salt baths are really interesting. I've been actually wanting to conduct my own study on this because there's one or two smaller scale studies that have found that you don't really absorb it through the skin in such a way that people think and that it can affect your serum levels just temporarily. But the interesting thing was, and you're going to kick out of this is when they actually backed some of the research out, they started to say, well, we actually don't know if people are absorbing this because they're sitting in it, or they're absorbing it because they're breathing it in when they're sitting in the bathroom.

Interesting.

Yeah. So the higher levels of magnesium that show up in the blood, they're like, wait a minute. Well, is this coming in through the skin or is this actually coming in through the breath? Because when they actually measure through the breath, you get almost the same amount of absorption as people get when they're sitting in a bath. So, like, which one is happening? And there's just not enough research out there. So I'm like, I kind of want to look at my own study and do that, because it was just really wild, because it actually makes sense, like, considering the kind of blood flow that you would end up getting when you breathe something in that you might get a better absorption that way. Which makes me wonder, if you were to, like, hover over just a hot bath of Epsom salts, are you going to ultimately end up with a laxative effect at some point? I don't know, because eventually it's going to hit your intestinal tract, but not to the degree as if you took it orally.

I'd want to be the person in that study who gets to take the nice warm bath versus hovering over the bathtub, just sucking in the fumes.

Yes. Hard life. Sit there for six hours in a bath.

It's related to a bigger picture question, though, because you're no doubt aware of all the companies that sell magnesium sprays, topical magnesium lotions, and they're often advertised as a way to not only relieve sore muscles, but also to actually get transdermal absorption through the skin. Have you looked into that much or seen much data on the amount of magnesium that gets absorbed from some of these lotions and sprays?

Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, I dive into it more and more all the time because it's really intriguing, because anything transdermal, but when it hits, when it actually gets inside the body, when it actually has its degree of absorption and enzymatic reactions that occur, especially in the skin, so many things change. So whatever form of magnesium that you might be trying to get topically might be a completely different form when it enters your body. That's what's wild. It's kind of the same thing with testosterone creams and stuff like that. You have the DHT conversion, and that entire process changes the entire makeup of the entire compound. But when you look at magnesium, it's the same kind of thing, and it's along the same vein as the magnesium sulfate baths. It's like you're putting yourself in this situation where you don't know how you're increasing your magnesium levels. And if it's truly doing anything directly, I can arguably say that you're not going to get a spot relief. You're not going to rub magnesium in one given area and just see relief in that area. You might get a more pronounced effect on upon application. But the whole purpose of, you know, you like, are you saying that magnesium is absorbed better topically or are you saying that you can just isolate a spot by putting magnesium topically? The problem I have is with a lot of the topical marketing is they kind of have these catch 22s in there. They say, oh, you're going to get it right to the location without all these other effects. But then in the same vein, they'll be like, oh, well, you're getting it all absorbed. It's all absorbing. Okay, am I isolating it in one spot or am I absorbing it it throughout its entirety? So it's like, makes me wonder. There's just no real solid evidence either way.

Yeah, yeah, I think that, I mean, obviously we know that the skin is a mouth and a lot of things become topically absorbed through the skin. There are all those studies, for example, they've had men use shampoos that have parabens and PCBs in them and then test them afterwards and found them in the urine. And I also, just from a pure anecdotal perspective, this might be a bit of a rabbit hole, but. But I'll use topical CBD on muscles and definitely feel relief. And I, even myself and my wife use a THC sex lube. And you can actually feel almost like a localized high for your crotch. It's actually a very cool kind of hack for the bedroom. We use this stuff called Bond. And THC seems to get absorbed very readily through the skin. So I definitely don't discount the idea that magnesium gets absorbed. I certainly feel some amount of muscular relief. And there was one situation after Ironman Hawaii. This would have been 2000, and I think this was the 2014 Ironman Hawaii. I had what appeared to be an alien popping out my stomach because my abdominals, my rectus abdominis went into an intense cramp right after the race. I laid down and my friend and podcast co host Brock was standing there and he witnessed this whole thing. I mean, my abs just began to pop out and I always had that magnesium lotion on me post race and I grabbed it and just rubbed it into the muscle and the cramp subsided almost immediately. So I realized that's purely anecdotal, but I think there's something to this topical application even if it's just for muscle relief or cramp relief.

Yeah, I mean I'm careful to say anything one way or the other about it just because I just feel like there's just not enough research yet. It's. I've had experience. It's funny, I don't know if you're at liberty to say what brand of the topical CBD you've used, but I've kind of messed around with it as well. And it's kind of like not the, not the cannabis sex lube or anything like that, but I've messed around with topical CBDs and stuff like that and I've actually felt a better effect from that than utilizing cbd.

Yeah, I usually use the. You would like this because it's got curcumin in it. The bio CBD stuff.

Stuff. Oh, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I've seen some ads on that, so interesting. Okay. Now I was just curious.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So we, we covered a lot of the forms of magnesium that are out there. We, we just finished up talking about magnesium sulfate or bath salts. There was one other that I wanted to ask you about and there might be some others I'm unaware of that, that you could speak to as well. But what about magnesium carbonate? Have you heard of that one?

You know, so I'm not too savvy in magnesium carbonate. I was hoping you were going to talk about threonate.

Okay. Yeah. All I know about car and then I'd love to hear you talk about threonate is that, that's what you find in chalk, right? Like chalk in a CrossFit gym or the rock climbers or weightlifters use. I have no clue what its bioavailability is, but I know it's a form of magnesium because I've looked at the label of some of that stuff and magnesium carbonate is a prime ingredient. I just wasn't sure if it's prevalent in supplements or if there's any benefit aside from avoiding your hands breaking open and bleeding from kipping pull ups.

No, I mean it's usually like an alternative to a calcium form of chalk. So I mean unless someone like has. Has an ability to. Or a desire to use something, it's not going to be as it's going to be more hydrophilic than say calcium would be. So maybe if you're. I believe rock climbers would probably want Something that's going to like draw the water out so that they can get a little bit more of a grip versus other kinds of chalk. So I think it's a little bit more of like a practical application for it rather than being in say, a supplement. But I know that people will put it in a supplement as a little bit of a filler sometimes, but usually not as something that's directly what they want to have a true application for.

Okay, got it. And then that other one you just mentioned was threonate.

Threonate's a fun one to mess around with every now and then because threonate can really have a powerful effect across the blood brain barrier. So threonate really came to be. Got a lot of fame with PTSD treatments, so it was even used in the military to treat these guys that were coming back. And it was actually a blood, like almost help them reset their brains a little bit. So I actually have a guy in my office that's total biohacker and he's been messing around with like high doses of 3 and 8 and just says that he hits up with some trippy dreams and gets into this really deep sleep. He kind of has some fun with it. So I mean, sometimes that's kind of just a cool thing. But that's, you know, obviously might not be the most practical way to utilize it. It's not something that everyone just wants to put themselves into this kind of woo woo state, but it's. I can't remember the name of the study either, but there was another study that showed it was a, it was an animal study, but there was a pretty, pretty big improvement in short term memory with it too. So proving that it definitely has an effect.

Got it. You want to have trippy dreams? I've got, I've got something for you that I literally have used with 100% efficacy for these deep vivid dreams. Not lucid dreams, but just crazy dreams all night long. It was traditionally used to ward off evil spirits and to induce visions or hallucinations. And very small amounts taken before bed give you these amazing dreams. It's a mugwort essential oil. Like you can take the oil of mugwort. There's this company called Essential Oil Wizardry that makes it and you try a few drops of mugwort before bed. And I looked into toxicity, I looked into some of the stuff like Kava, for example. Some people recommend for this and is just the alkaloids in that are pretty harsh on the liver. But this mugwort is safe and induces these amazing dreams. So there's a little tip for you if you want to biohack your dreams, so to speak.

Do you have a way of coming. The hard part is when I have these wild dreams. I can't help but wake up in the morning in kind of a weird state of mind. So I don't know, do you battle that or do you have a way of sort of resetting that? Cause sometimes I've messed around, like higher doses of boron kind of do it too. Like boron can have. Boron's pretty cool for a lot of different things. I call it like, you know, the space crystals because it's usually. Boron's usually found in like, like literally in space matter and like meteorites and stuff like that. So I call it like magic, my magic space crystals that give me weird dreams. But it's, man, if I ever take it, I wake up from the dreams and then just have a hard time. Takes me three hours to get into like real life.

I haven't noted that with mugwort. I track my sleep cycles every night with this ring and I actually get very good sleep cycles on it. So seems to work out okay. But obviously not a form of magnesium Mugwort, for those of you wondering, that's not a form of magnesium. It's a plant. Sounds like it's a plant that would grow in a Harry Potter novel. Actually, my kids thought it was very cool I was taking mugwort before bed because they literally were. They're chock full of Harry Potter books right now in the middle of a Harry Potter reading competition at school. So. So that was my involvement was mugwort. Okay, I wanna ask some other magnesium questions. Specifically with this idea of magnesium causing a laxative effect in many of its forms. You mentioned very briefly earlier that part of that might be due to the rapidity with which it is released in the GI tract. I know that for example, some probiotics, they're coated or time released so they bypass the acidity of the stomach. Time release supplements are something that are a thing. Is there such a thing as a way to make magnesium get absorbed over a longer period of time, such as throughout the seven to eight hours of sleep?

Yeah. So when you look at magnesium, you have to look at the different cofactors and what it's working with, rather than just saying, oh, let's take a magnesium and let's interroat it and make it so it's a little bit slower and doing this and, and that, that's not going to really work with a mineral, it's too water soluble. And the second that like a time release kind of coating were to wear off, you just urinate it out. It's way too difficult. So you have to look at what is actually what works with magnesium to actually support optimal health and what other vitamins work with it so that you can sort of delay this rapid utilization of it it and enhance the utilization of it just by coupling it. So coupling it with a variety of different B vitamins plays a big role too. And it all has to come down to the methylation and everything like that too. So a good example is you're familiar with P5P with vitamin B6, right?

I am, but explain that to the audience what P5P is.

So P5P is just, it's basically a fancy way of saying vitamin B6. So it's the active form of vitamin B6. 6. It's next to magnesium. It's pretty darn powerful in terms of the different enzymatic reactions that it has in the body. Magnesium has over 300 different enzymatic reactions. When I say enzymatic reactions, it basically means it helps out different random little processes in the body. Little things like, you know, the division of cells, little things like the support of cell membranes, little things, all kinds of crazy things. But B6 helps about with about 30, 32 or 33, which doesn't sound like a lot compared to the 300 magnesium. But magnesium just has a, a clear, clear advantage. It just has way more. But the big thing is the manufacturing of serotonin and dopamine in the brain. So you have like the inactive forms of B6 and then you have the active form which is P5P. So whenever I reference P5P, all it means is literally a bioactively available, like a truly bioactive form of vitamin B. And it's what the body actually needs because otherwise inactive vitamin B has to be converted by the liver to the active form. So it's one other step. Any individual that has any kind of compromised liver function, or maybe they're just exhausted, because a lot of times your liver function can be compromised. If you're just stressed out, they have a hard time making that conversion and they end up being V6 deficient in the first place. But I digress a little bit. So P5P works with magnesium simply because it actually is involved in the absorption itself. So since B6 is already difficult to get the convertance usable for, if you give it along with magnesium, you're making sure the magnesium can be absorbed without ever having to guess that this person is deficient or not deficient in B6.

That's interesting. Yeah, I never thought about combining magnesium with vitamin B6 or that specific form of vitamin B6, but it makes sense, especially when you consider how many people have this non alcoholic fatty liver disease now. I mean, that's running rampant. I was recently talking, talking with a guest on the podcast and they had mentioned it's like up to 40% of people now have some form of liver dysfunction related to non alcoholic fatty liver disease. So this idea of enhancing magnesium absorption with a bioavailable form of B6 makes sense, especially in people with compromised liver function.

Totally. And well, then we actually have to take it one step further or one step backward, I should say, because then you have to look at B9, vitamin B9, which is, is obviously known as folic acid. So people, pregnant women especially, are very familiar with folic acid. Easy to come, deficient in it. The hard thing is it's hard to convert folic acid into its bioavailable form, which is called folate. Okay, so if you've heard of folic acid and folate before, they're synonymous, except that one is available, one is not. The interesting thing is that folate, which is the bioavailable, already methylated, converted form of vitamin B9, is required to actually create P5P. So we have to take it one step further. So it's like you need bioavailable B9 in order to create bioavailable B6. So that's really important to have in a situation when you're dealing with magnesium too, because together they greatly improve magnesium's function to support all kinds of different things within the body. So it's a whole rabbit hole that you can go down, but you have to look at the entire chain reaction of how magnesium works with things.

Okay, so the other thing about folic acid, of course, is that that's added as, as a nutrient to a lot of multivitamins, fortified cereals, grains, packaged products as well. But if you have trouble, or if you even have an MTHFR genetic issue, with conversion of folic acid into folate, you wind up getting a lot of that folic acid converted via a different pathway into homocysteine, an inflammatory marker responsible for cardiovascular issues and a whole host of nasty consequences. So this idea of using an activated form of vitamin B9 is important. And I always tell people, just look for MTHF or folate on the label of your multivitamin or Your, you know, a lot of nootropics now are adding vitamin B9. A lot of supplements are adding vitamin B9, and that helps you skirt some of those issues. So what you're saying is that when you take that along with magnesium, magnesium, it's a CO factor for vitamin B6, which you mentioned earlier, this pyridoxyl phase phosphate, and that's what allows you to be able to better absorb the magnesium.

That's exactly right. Exactly. And then there's, there's one other. It's. You start realizing when you get into magnesium research how closely aligned with the whole B vitamin spectrum they are. Then you've got, you know, methylcobalamin, so you've got vitamin B12. Very important that not to be confused with cyanocobalamin, Methylcobilamin is the active form of B12 that's actually gone through the methylation process versus bound to a cyanide. But when you look at methylcobilamin, it's also another CO factor when it comes down to methylation. So methylation, for those of you that don't know what methylation is, it's happening right now. It's probably happening a trillion times in the last minute. But it's really, really important biochemical process. So when it comes down to magnesium, coming into the situation, if you are not a good methylator, which again, this all comes back to the fact that we see most people that are magnesium deficient in the first place are not good methylators, meaning they have a hard time converting inactive forms into their useful form. So by looking at that, we know, okay, well how can we support methylation? Because if we support methylation, then we can also support magnesium absorption and utilization. So that's where of course the B6 and the B9, but then also of course a usable form of B12 too, that works in conjunction with the magnesium. So B6, B9, B12 are the really important sort of trifecta to work with magnesium.

You got into those. When I asked you if there was a way to make magnesium become absorbed more slowly. Is that how you actually pull it off? You take a suite of B vitamins like that when you take your magnesium.

That and then of course using it in like a dimagnesium malic acid bond. So in a malate form. So the malate form is already a little bit slower to absorb. And again talking about kind of how it accompanies the potassium during the uptake. So it ends up making. So that when you, when magnesium works with potassium, everything Happens in harmony. So by making matters bound to malic acid or any kind of matter and bound to malic acid, you're going to have a slower, slower absorption to begin with. It's not going to absorb fast that way. But then when you have it absorbing slow along with these different cofactors like the B vitamins, that's how you get the combination of absorbing slow but also having a high degree of bioavailability because it's really hard to do both. You can't have something absorbed slow but have a high amount of bioavailability. If you're going to have something absorbed slow, you're usually going to have a slow sustained release. That's not going to have a powerful effect unless you were taking literally just a large volume, a giant pill. It would have to be a giant pill to have that absorption coincide with the actual bioavailability or the time that it takes. So the only way to do this is to make it more effective. But again, it's a double edged sword because if you make something more effective then you run into a situation like magnesium sulfate where it absorbs so fast it just gives you, gives you a laxative effect.

You ever stack malic acid or magnesium malate with creatine? The reason I ask is there was a very interesting study on sprinters and long distance runners that they did. This was in 2015 where they found found a big increase in time to exhaustion in the endurance athletes. And then they found the same thing with sprinters. Big increase in peak power, total work and even a decrease in body fat percentage. With a stack of creatine and malic acid. There appears to be some kind of a sports performance effect with malate.

Wow, that's wild. It's interesting because I've heard people talk about, yeah, malate and creatine as a nootropic effect and it probably has something to do with like a calming nootropic effect. So it's probably the same kind of thing like you're talking about athletes that are using it for a specific performance boost. I would imagine it could have a similar effect in the brain too. So yeah, yeah.

A lot of people, by the way, they might recognize the taste of male G. That's like if you have apple cider. Yeah. You find in Stone Fruits. It's like that of kind, kind of like sour taste to Stone Fruits. That's the malic acid.

Yep, exactly. And I mean it makes me wonder like this is just the biohacker in me. So if there's a If the malic acid. So if you've got like D magnesium, Malay, like if you've got a good malic acid, magnesium, and took that along with creatine, but then also stacked it with Mag 3 and 8, that could be really interesting. So then you're talking about having three and eight that can affect the brain. Specifically you've got diamagnesium malate, which is going to give you like a muscle like kind of calming effect, allowing muscles to be more pliable and soft tissue to work better. You've got the malic acid and then you combine that with creatine, you've got like a double whammy performance plus nootropic. I want to try that.

Yeah, that would be very interesting. I haven't really tried a stack of malic acid and creatine before, but it's a good idea. Have a creatine neat nap apple.

So I usually, I usually just don't like taking in creatine just because personally I retain so much water even off just like a gram or two. And like, I just. Yeah, I just don't. I, I love it because I do feel a nootropic effect. But I mean, I definitely, given what I do and some of my line of work, like water retention is nothing.

I just take plain, plain Jane Thorne creap here, just, just creatine monohydrate. And I split it because I learned this from my friend Tyler LeBaron, who I interviewed in a podcast on molecular rich hydrogen. He commented on the fact that you only absorb kind of similar to vitamin C, you can only absorb about one and a half grams of creatine at a given point. So with people who are supplementing with 5 grams a day, that necessitates three doses spread throughout the day into shakes or smoothies or in a warm glass of water, which assists with its absorption. And so that's the way I do it, is I just kind of split it throughout the day. But even when I was bodybuilding, I would sometimes take 10, 15 grams grams of creatine per day. And I didn't actually have that type of cramping response. So I'm sure that part of that is either genetic or related to endogenous creatine or phosphate availability.

True, true. Yeah, it plays a big part.

Another question that I wanted to ask you because I didn't want to ignore what you brought up very early in the show and that was you mentioned ceruloplasmin and also iron as, as important considerations in relation to magnesium. Why did you mention those?

Yeah. So I might irritate some people because, you know, we live in this world, especially with sports performance, where we think that like anemia is like just this constant issue. Like, we have to know, like, I'm going to probably stand on a pedestal for a little bit with this because I just, I'm so passionate about it because I feel like we just have such a common, just such a misconception about like iron and just minerals and the whole relationship when you look at, at like iron is when it goes from its ferro. Ferrous state, like two totally different things for one, but iron, the simplest way that I can explain iron is iron is literally iron. It's going to rust, it's going to oxidize really fast, and if we have too much of it, it's going to run around and it's going to occupy oxygens that could be doing other good things. So the simplest way to explain it is like, you got take a breath, you've got oxygen flowing through your body. If you have an overabundance of iron, iron, it's going to attract that oxygen, which means you're going to have sort of this free radical damage that occurs there. But then you're also neglecting other things that could be using that oxygen and happening at a very small level just multiple times throughout the course of every breath and things like that. So when you look at the general population, most of us have an overabundance of iron. We actually have a lot of iron. The problem is we have what is called bound iron. We don't have unbound iron. It's the unbound. It's the unbound iron that we need and the unbound iron that actually allows the mobilization of different things and allows other minerals to do their job. So what ends up happening is in order to balance that out, a lot of times we need copper and we need magnesium and this just gets into a whole world, like the world of minerals. I mean, it's like you have to think of your body like being like an electrician. You know, it's so. So it's intense. There's a lot of different things. Like if you cut this wire, then, well, what happens to this wire? Well, if you forget this ground. Okay. Well, if you put. I mean, the body is electrical with that. And the crazy thing is, like, you look at the copper and zinc relationship, the copper and zinc help regulate iron and helps the cereloplasm so that the iron can actually move around and do its job and be carried around and sort of act as sort of the. I always call it the crane operator, where it's like you've got this ceruloplasm, you've got the iron and the cerloplasm kind of acts as this crane that picks up and moves iron. And there's a little operator there that's moving the iron. And if that operator leaves, then the crane's just sitting there and the iron's not getting moved. So I always kind of refer to that little crane operator. But copper and zinc have a relationship there. But if you just add copper into the mix, then that counteracts zinc. If you have too much copper, then you don't produce zinc. And you can't just go take a bunch of zinc because it's not going to really work. It's not going to do anything and that's going to throw off your copper levels. So what ends up happening is a lot of it actually comes down to salted magnesium, where it's like magnesium is this, this balance keeper there. Like, magnesium is what allows the excess iron to go into its unbound state. So it's actually able to be used and actually able to really help red blood cell function and help what we really want it to help. But without magnesium, none of that's possible. So we don't have an iron issue. We don't have an anemia problem. We have a magnesium deficiency problem. And we have a magnesium deficiency problem that's not allowing the copper to do its job and not allowing the iron to become unbalanced. I've got a great video on this topic that kind of goes into more detail on it. But it's really interesting is, and this is really wild is you look overall like women have a longer life expectancy than men and it probably has something to do with the fact that they lose blood every month and their iron levels are generally lower, but it's their, the body's ability to release the other iron and allow it to be utilized that allows them to constantly keep fresh and ultimately live a little bit longer because they're not having this constant oxidation. I don't know. Ben, do you, are you a fan of like, do you donate blood or anything like that just to dump blood and kind of reset or do you not believe.

Dude, I'm an endurance athlete. I've, I have so much red blood cell turnover that I gotta fight to keep my iron and ferritin up.

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's, it all depends on like what you're doing and if you're, if you're someone that's a non endurance athlete, you're strength training a lot, then you can actually. Sometimes the body will kind of disrupt its cycle and you'll have these surges of high amounts of ferritin. Low amounts of ferritin is hard to predict. And you know, so you talk to like a lot of bodybuilders that go and they need to dump blood. They're usually doing it for, you know, their, their hemoglobin, their hematocrit. They're doing all kinds of things to balance that. The reality is some of it's coming back down to minerals again. So I guess my big piece of all this is that you have to look at the big picture. And I can almost promise, almost guarantee that if someone were to start focusing on magnesium a little bit more than iron, then things would start to come into play and start to balance out quite a bit better.

Okay, so the interplay with this ceruloplasmin that you talked about is that's a copper carrying protein in the blood. It helps to metabolize iron. And if you have low ceruloplasmin levels, you could have a copper deficiency, you could have a zinc deficiency, or you could have a magnesium deficiency.

Correct. And if you have. So basically that cereloplasmin is going to help with the utilization of iron. And when you say utilization of iron, it's like being able to take iron that's floating around in the body and picking it up and putting it into a true storage form where it can.

Be used like under the transport protein. Transferrin.

Exactly. So it's like, that's why keep. Like when you visualize a crane operator, that's like the perfect thing. So when I say like, okay, if you're deficient, then the crane operator is just gone. So there's no one to say, hey, iron, come here, let's go ahead and put you where you're supposed to go. Because it's like you've got this other piece of the puzzle, but you pretty much nailed it.

Okay, gotcha. So basically what you're doing when you take magnesium is you're assisting ceruloplasmin with taking iron and converting it into its active form. On transferrin, you're reducing a lot of the potential for hemochromatosis while at the same time making iron more bioavailable. So less is, you know, in layperson's terms, hanging around in the bloodstream.

That's exactly right. Yep.

Okay, interesting. Is there a way to test for. For something like ceruloplasmid activity or, you know, I know you can of course test for iron levels, but are there any, any tests that you recommend to analyze something like this?

You know, I will give you a link. You can probably put it in the show notes. There's a test called a protocol called the root cause protocol, which is pretty interesting. There's a guy, Dr. Morley Robbins, that had created it. It's wild. I mean, it talks about this entire thing basically coming down to like magnesium being kind of the root cause of everything that. And bioavailable like retinol A and things like that, which are a whole different story but very, very important.

And yeah, I'm somewhat familiar with more like I haven't heard his name in a long time, but. But I know in a nutshell, like his whole protocol is based on rebalancing magnesium, copper and iron in the body.

Yeah. Morley's a really good friend of mine. More. He's. He's a. He's an amazing guy. Like that guy is. He became a good friend of mine just because of this, you know, this clinical study that we did in magnesium and stuff, which we'll talk about a second. But it was just his involvement in the magnesium world because magnesium is a big part of his root cause protocol. That along with cod liver oil and things like that and of course just eating lots of things like beef livers and stuff like that to get that true bioavailable vitamin A. But he put together a stack of tests to get. So I want to get you a link because that's the easiest way because I don't know the name of the test to test.

Is he the magnesium advocacy group? Does he run that?

Yeah, yeah, he is.

Okay, perfect. I know what website that is, so I'll link to it in the show notes the Root cause Protocol. Because he has. I've seen his website before where he has. He basically tells you what you need to eat, what you should stop eating. And you know, a lot of what he says kind of goes hand in hand with what you're saying. And you know, and a lot of it's very, it's very intuitive, right? Like, like supplement with. With organ meats, get a full vitamin B complex, use like a cod liver oil or a very good fish oil, start taking magnesium supplate supplements in the right form. You know, like some of the things that we've talked about along with the B complex and any. I'll link to that in the show notes for people who want to really nail the nail. Kind of like the copper, zinc, magnesium, iron balance. So I'll, I'll toss that in the show notes because I'm, I'm sure I can find it. It's the magnesium advocacy group. For those of you who are just hovering over your keyboard, just type that into Google. Okay, so you, you just alluded to a study. What is the study that you're talking about?

Well, so actually, so Morley and I are both on the scientific advisory board for a company by the name of Jigsaw, which is a company that's kind of been trying to put magnesium more in the forefront for the mainstream. Like, okay, let's make a focus. Let's move this focus from calcium issues where we all know now we don't have a calcium deficiency. That's not the issue. Those got milk campaigns and calcium campaigns. Yeah, whatever. Okay, so let's try to get mainstream awareness of the magnesium now. So that's how I know morally is because we both sit on the side scientific advisory board. So Jigsaw Magnesium is a company that has a very high quality magnesium. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to say, okay, let's go ahead and let's actually do a study and let's actually really focus on getting this published in a really reputable journal about whether magnesium is really absorbed and whether our magnesium is actually absorbed. So when we actually went ahead and did it, we called it the Scottsdale Magnesium Study. It was a placebo controlled human clinical trial with 91 participants. And we were measuring serum magnesium, we were measuring red blood cell magnesium, and also of course, magnesium deficiency symptoms, which is important because sometimes the symptoms don't always coincide with the lab work. So we wanted to see that as well, because what we know is a magnesium deficiency symptom and what actually, or what we think is a magnesium deficiency symptom, and what we actually know is sometimes are different. So long story short, did the study ended up getting it published this year in the journal American College of Nutrition. So Jacn. So it was a big deal for us because we were the first magnesium company to actually say, okay, we actually are able to prove that this magnesium supplement in a dimagnesium malate form is truly absorbed and it truly did not only reduce magnesium deficiency symptoms, but also boosted RBC magnesium, the one we want to talk about about. And of course it boosted serum. Not, you know, I mean, I say of course there'd be a lot of products that would probably wouldn't even boost serum like it would Just go right through them, like literally just get urinated out. But the fact that we saw a steady increase in serum magnesium, but a big increase in RBC magnesium, that red blood cell magnesium, and a big decrease in magnesium deficiency symptoms, that was a, that was a big deal for us.

So what did you guys find when you, when you did this study?

So what was really wild is. So the Scottskill study itself said it was 91 people. So we were looking at Mag SRT, which again is a form of dimagnesium malate that we have over at Jigsaw. So it's got the diamagnesium malate along with the vitamin B6, the B12 and the folate. So overall it was just kind of a standard clinical population. So it was no one wild, just kind of a standard application there. So we had 53 people take Mag SRT containing 500 milligrams of dimagnesium malate as well as the vitamins B6, B12 and folate. And the remaining individuals ended up just taking a placebo. Then we took a measurement of their baseline serum magnesium, their RBC magnesium and their magnesium status. We gave them just a questionnaire. So we collected that prior to the actual initiation, measured their serum magnesium four and eight hours after they ingested two 250 milligram tablets or two placebo tablets. So basically just measured four and eight hours after ingesting mag SRT and then after 30 days measured RBC magnesium and they completed the magnesium status questionnaire again. So ultimately, at the end of the day, 91 of the participants ended up completing 30 days. So there are a couple people that fell out. There's always going to be a little bit of a fallout overall, but so it ended up having a 28% over 30 day improvement and a 63% improvement over 90 days with just the overall questionnaire. So huge improvement in overall magnesium deficiency symptoms. But the cool one is that the red blood cell magnesium increased 6% and 30% over 30 and 90 days. So after 30 days there's a 6% increase in RBC magnesium, but over the course of 90 days there was a 30% increase. That's the one we really want to focus on. I mean, of course we saw an increase in serum, but that's pretty easy to note. But the increase in RBC magnesium showing that after 90 days, a 30% increase in the magnesium that's actually getting into the red blood cells and getting into the marrow.

And no explosive diarrhea.

No explosive diarrhea.

That was Impressive. So, so basically you were doing essentially what you just described me, using a time release. By combining vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate, you're using magnesium chelated to a malic acid in the form of. That was this. This Jigsaw health stuff, The MEG srt.

Exactly, exactly. So, well, and then if you want to get really kind of funky about it and look at the nerdy, the serum Magnesium increased by 22% compared to placebo, whereas the RBC increased by 30%. So that's what's wild is like if you were to just test any type of magnesium, you would find that the serum would go way up, like, way way up, and the RBC would probably not go up at all or a very small amount. And no one's taking the effort to actually test their magnesium. We wanted to be the ones that did that. We're like, okay, magnesium is getting very popular. People want answers, so let's go ahead and let's get into it. So only a 22% increase in serum. I say only only, but I'm just talking relatively to the RBC magnesium, because, remember, what I mentioned before is, like, if you have a high amount of serum, that indicates that you could be deficient in the RBC state because it's getting pulled from your red blood cells, it's getting pulled from your bones. So the fact that we had more of an increase in RBC magnesium than we did serum tells us that not only are we absorbing the magnesium, but we're getting the magnesium to the right place.

So, yeah. Wow, that's impressive. So this MEG SRT stuff, is this something that you guys just did in the trial or can people actually, like, is this on the market now? Could you go to Amazon or to, like, the Jigsaw health website and buy it?

Yeah, no, it's totally available. In fact, it was available before the clinical trial where we wanted to say, hey, let's, you know, we know people say this product is good, and we know it's good, but let's go ahead and let's get some proof on this. And so that's the cool thing. And for those of you that know about clinical studies, it's like, you can't just. It costs a lot of money to do them. But also, we told everyone along the lines of doing this study that we were doing a study where we had no idea what the results were going to be. So it was a big preamble to build this study. And the point is, it was our confidence in the product. So it was saying, like, okay, we're doing this clinical study. What if the results had to come back in a not in favor of our product? You know, we would have been in a really cruddy situation, but we would have at least been honest. Right. So we were really excited that, okay, this product had been around for a while, had a great reputation, but now we're taking it to the next level, saying we're so confident we're going to do a clinical trial and if it comes back not being good, then, you know, we will eat our words, you know, because it's, it's. But of course, it did come back, obviously in our favor and in Magnesium's favor. So it was, it was, you know, it was nerve wracking for us because you never know what's going to happen. Right. You know, a product's good, but the clinical trial really speaks a lot.

Yeah, yeah, I like it. That's impressive. I always love it when a supplement is actually studied well. Well, so what I'll do for folks in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com mag like M A G. I'll link to this stuff, this mag srt, if you want to try it. Just like a little bottle of the time release stuff that Thomas was just talking about. I'll also put some other good links in there. I'll link to pretty much everything we talked about from like magnesium bath flakes to any links that Thomas sends over to me to the Root Cause Protocol we mentioned by Morley Robbins. And also there's a really good book too. I don't know if you've read this book, but the Magnesium Miracle, like an oldie, but a goodie on Magnesium by Dr. Carolyn Dean. Have you read that one, Thomas?

I haven't, but I'm familiar with it.

Fantastic book, the Magnesium Miracle. I'll link to that one, too. I interviewed her 10 years ago. That was when I first became interested in magnesium myself, was after reading her book. So that's a really good one. And we have a code you can use. You get 10 bucks a month off a bottle of this Meg SRT. The code is GREENFIELD10. I'll also put that in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SRT and it would be, just correct me if I'm wrong on timing, Thomas, but something as simple as popping this before you go to bed at night.

I like to split my dose. I like taking it at night. I talk to a lot of people that love taking it in the morning because they Get a nice calm, relaxed feeling from it. So they take all their recommended 500 milligram dose in the morning. Now, I would say, now this is somewhat off record, but I know that what has been found is that they roughly say that 5 milligrams per pound of body weight is where you want to dose your magnesium. So however you want to split that up, the nice thing about the SRT is that it is sustained release. So I split my dose in the morning and the evening time. Okay, again, off record, this is obviously, this is me. This is only what I do. I like to. I mega dose magnesium because I know that, like, I can, if I'm absorbing it, I like to mega dose it because I honestly really liked. Plus, again, it does play a part when you are a heavily muscled person. If you have a higher amount of lean body mass, then you're gonna need more because if you have 10 in general. But I love splitting it up. On my shooting days where I feel like I need to be more calm, I allocate 75 to the morning, 25% to night.

Yeah, and your shooting days on my.

On my filming days.

Oh, your filming days. Okay, gotcha. I was like, do you have a new hobby I didn't know about from our last episode now with your sniper rifle and your magnesium bottle? Okay, cool. I'll link to it. Meg, SRT. Check out the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com mag. Listen to my other episodes with Thomas too, because as you can hear, he and I really geek out on stuff. We have on inflammation and controlling that and curcumin. And then we also have an episode on alcohol, which is also a really good one. So I'll link to both of those. They're worth your while if you haven't taken a listen yet. And Thomas, it's always fun talking to you and geeking out on science, man.

Totally, man. I gotta. I gotta get you next time you're out in California and do some videos together too.

Yeah, that'd be cool. Which part California in again?

I'm in Thousand Oaks, so about an hour north of la.

Yeah. Yeah, Cool. Awesome. Sounds good. All right, folks, we'll go to BenGreenfulFitness.com mag to check out all of the show notes to grab your mag srt. I'll throw a big fat discount code in there. And in the meantime, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Thomas DeLauer, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing magnesium rich week.

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