What You ACTUALLY Need To Know About Magnesium

And what they discovered by testing the blood levels of magnesium on people before and after Epsom salt soaks is that you actually do absorb it through your skin. And the form that you absorb really easily is— Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I have been treating people with complex chronic illnesses for decades. I've also been involved in teaching and research in the integrative medicine space for 30 years at this point. So today I want to discuss something that we introduced in a little way, And then I had promised to circle back to, and this is the one, and it's about different forms of magnesium. So let's get into it. The first thing is we hear about it all the time, like one of the most commonly talked about nutrients as far as supplements and diet goes online and, you know, all over the place. Why so important? Why people talk about it so much? Well, the first thing is, is that magnesium is a cofactor, and what cofactors do, they're sometimes called coenzymes, right? But a cofactor actually goes along And it helps an enzyme to do whatever its process is at the proper speed. And most enzymes use 2 cofactors. One is an organic cofactor, and that would be like a vitamin usually. And then it has a paired cofactor that's inorganic, and that's a mineral. Magnesium turns out to be in hundreds of different enzymatic activities. So magnesium, from its perspective as an inorganic cofactor, has hundreds of different enzymes it helps out. So we use lots of magnesium every day. The next reason magnesium is important, which is what came up in the other video that triggered the question, is that magnesium, it turns out, the level in the cell, which is where most magnesium's inside of our cells, or it's supposed to be, the level in the cell has a direct relationship to the amount of glutathione and the function of that glutathione. So the lower the cellular magnesium, the lower the glutathione amount and function. You go back to that other video if you want a deeper dive on that, but glutathione's a core antioxidant. It turns out that it's really supported by magnesium as well. The other thing is because of its effects on enzymes, its effects on glutathione, its effects on neuromuscular transmission, what we call excitable tissues. There's always a movement of sodium and potassium and calcium and magnesium. Magnesium is super important on all of those fronts. So we see magnesium affecting our digestion, our sleep quality, our brain health, how every organ in our body functions, how our muscles work, et cetera. So it's a huge player in the body. Now, in order to talk about these different forms of magnesium, I just want to define one term, and that is what you often see as a mineral chelate. Now, the term chelate, we think of chelating, you know, heavy metals or something. That chelate, chelate means claw. And so chelate means to grab onto. Well, in addition to heavy metals, you often have stabilizing of minerals, the good minerals for our body, as a mineral chelate. So that's why you don't normally see the ionic version of magnesium. You see magnesium and a second word. The second word is the chelate. Here's what's important. The good chelates should be able to go to your digestive tract, hit the stomach where the acid is, and then you disassociate the ion, in this case magnesium, from the other chelate part. And so when we're talking about it, we're going to see that we have direct effects of that ionization taking the magnesium off and then that chelate doing other things. And then we have indirect effects where maybe that chelate is better absorbed. Maybe it helps me with certain organ functions, et cetera. So when we talk about magnesium and fill in the blank, the next word is that chelate. And in many cases, that goes and does something different or new. Now, these don't go in any particular order. Just want to go through them. The first one is magnesium chloride. Now, we use magnesium chloride a great deal in intravenous nutritional medicine. So IV nutrients, if you're in the hospital, you might get it in, say, a TPN formula, total parenteral nutrition through a central line. You might get a PPN formula, peripheral parenteral nutrition, but you might also go to a doctor, especially integrative medicine type doctors, and they might give you an intravenous infusion to help you with energy. Or some other thing. And there's 2 main kinds of magnesium in there, and magnesium chloride is one of them. Now, it's been said in other videos, I did a number of years doing research that was funded by the National Institute of Health in people with cancer. And one of the sub-research projects we had was trying to give high-dose vitamin C with the correct minerals so that the vitamin C worked well, but it also kept the electrolytes, the mineral levels, as level as possible. Turned out that if we used chloride chelates, magnesium Chloride, for example, that worked better afterwards. So the chlorides are good, especially in the intravenous form. Now you might take a magnesium chloride orally. The reason it can absorb reasonably well is that the chloride, so the magnesium and the Cl, the chloride, are going to break apart in the acid of the stomach. Now, just as a side note, if you don't have enough stomach acid, you're not going to absorb most of your minerals very well because this thing has to happen there, right? But mag chloride as an oral supplement is much less commonly seen. It's more in the parenteral or the IV world. Then there's magnesium citrate. So that is like a citric acid bound to the magnesium. Again, comes apart usually in the acid of the stomach. Magnesium citrate can be a reasonably absorbed magnesium, but here's a commonality we're going to see with some of the forms. Sometimes magnesium is used as an osmotic agent to help you with constipation, right? What's that mean? If it's an osmotic agent, that means it's going to pull water into especially the colon, and hydrate the feces so that you have an easier time having a bowel movement, decreases your constipation. The citrate form is sometimes used for this. And so here's what you also have to think. If I take magnesium at a normal dose, high dose will always give you diarrhea, but a normal dose, and it gives me real loose bowel, that means I'm not digesting that and absorbing it very well. Because if it gives you loose stools, it means that magnesium, some got absorbed, but the rest went down to your colon and is pulling water in. So that is another sign. Some people are very intolerant of certain types of magnesium because they get loose stools. And what we know is either they don't have enough stomach acid or it's just the wrong form for them. So mag citrate for some people works great for physiologic reasons because they absorb it well. For other people, they get looser stools and then it would be used more in the case of constipation. Then there's magnesium aspartate. Magnesium aspartate, and a lot of times you'll see this combined with potassium magnesium aspartate, aspartic acid. That comes off a little easier than citrate. So the magnesium will usually absorb better with the magnesium aspartate. So for a lot of people, especially where they're using it for, you know, crampy muscles, tight muscles, maybe cardiac dysrhythmias, other things where you might need magnesium, magnesium aspartate is often one of the go-tos there. Magnesium malate, that's malic acid. So magnesium and malic acid together. This is often used for people with chronic pain, and that can be for a couple reasons. One reason is it does dissociate well, so it absorbs the magnesium good. And the higher your magnesium levels go, the slower some of your pain receptors work. So that's one reason MagMalate might help you with pain. The other reason is, remember, the chelate comes apart in the digestive system, and so the malic acid doesn't just go flying away. Malic acid helps your body to detoxify particular things. One of the things which is in groundwater and we're always exposed to it and we hope it just sort of moves through the body, but that can cause chronic pain and other stuff. That malic acid does is to help your body remove aluminum by helping it be excreted through the urine. So in people with high aluminum, and they've researched this in the nephrology world, the kidney doctors, because when they're doing dialysis, there's a lot of fluid involved and a lot of times aluminum levels go up. And so malic acid is often used as a way to decrease aluminum storage in the body. Aluminum storage is one of the many things that can cause a lot of pain, but also a lot of dysfunction in the body. Then there's one of my favorites, magnesium glycinate. And magnesium glycinate dissociates very, very quickly so that glycine and the magnesium fall apart real quickly in the stomach normally. So the magnesium goes and does good magnesium stuff, but now I have glycine. Now glycine in the peripheral nervous system and in the central nervous system has an effect where it Calms down the nervous system by opening chloride channels. So we talked about chloride earlier. We think of the movement of sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium as excitatory activity, and that's true. And when they cross the membranes in the brain or the nerves peripherally or the muscles or wherever, they cause excitatory activity. But what's the emergency brake for all that? Well, it's chloride channels opening up. So if I open a chloride channel, I calm things down. So magnesium glycinate, in addition to highly absorbed, can be very good to help people sleep, calm down, help muscle cramping, muscle twitching, things of that nature, because you're getting the magnesium, but you're also getting the glycine with it. And there's ones that, that we see more and more now because it gets a lot of play on the internet, and that's magnesium threonate or magnesium L-threonate. And the threonate basically, again, the magnesium comes off, the threonate goes, and It it has an affinity for the nervous system. We use this a lot with people. It's kind of like the glycinate story. It will help sort of modulate in the nervous system. But magnesium three and eight also can help with a neuroinflammatory picture, such as neurological autoimmunity, healing nervous system after an infection like long COVID. We see this a lot. Magnesium three and eight. Then there's magnesium taurate, which is taurine and magnesium, and they generally fall apart pretty well. But taurine actually is one of those things. Things that helps the minerals at the cell membrane. So we give people taurine because it's a gatekeeper. In biochemistry, they call it an osmolyte. But basically what it means is without taurine at your nervous system membranes, your cell membranes, etc., what's going to happen is the movement of the sodium and potassium and calcium, magnesium back and forth to create action potential nervous system activity and stuff. Without enough taurine, those don't move as fluidly. So taurine is the osmolyte helps with the transfer out the different channels. So if you give magnesium taurate, you're giving the taurine and the mag together, and that can be very helpful as well. Then there's a real workhorse called magnesium sulfate. Now, going back to the intravenous use, we use magnesium sulfate in IVs a lot, and people will often ask me, because I'll do trainings about these different minerals and IVs and stuff, why does your formula for pain control have magnesium sulfate, but your formula for high-dose vitamin C has magnesium chloride? Well, the reason is, is that in the high-dose vitamin C, I want the chloride salts to dissociate and I want to use the chloride to help balance the electrolyte activity. In a pain formula, I want the magnesium to be available very quickly without a chloride because then it's going to have a quicker effect because there's no chloride tagging along with it than the chloride salt would. So mag sulfate is more immediately helpful in the intravenous form for Calming muscles, dysrhythmias, and a number of other things that go on. Now you might say, well, that sounds almost magical. How else is magnesium sulfate used? Well, you can take it orally. It can cause some stomach upset and diarrhea. But starting in 1917, there have been publications about magnesium sulfate used in a different way. And there are publications up to a couple years ago, probably this year, using magnesium sulfate transdermally. And most of you have heard of Epsom salts or magnesium Magnesium baths. That's what they started publishing research on because it's been sort of a folk medicine forever. And what they discovered by testing the blood levels of magnesium on people before and after Epsom salt soaks is that you actually do absorb it through your skin. And the form that you absorb really easily is magnesium sulfate. So a lot of times you'll see Epsom salts, there'll be other forms of magnesium, but there'll be magnesium sulfate in there. So again, works really well. That's why those soaks, Epsom salts baths or Epsom salt foot soaks, work for neuromuscular hyperactivity, help calm your muscles down, et cetera. Then there's magnesium oxide. There is a prescription. It's really an over-the-counter supplement, but a lot of times a doctor will write for Mag Ox, which is magnesium oxide. What are they using that for? They're not using it for the magnesium. They're using it as something to help you go to the bathroom, something for your constipation. And that's because the magnesium oxide stays together very well and it just pulls water into the small intestine. in the large intestine. And so if you take magnesium oxide, you're not gonna get a ton of mag into your bloodstream, but you are gonna go to the bathroom. So that's why that's used at— remember, it's osmotic agent. One that we sometimes use, it's, it's not as common in supplements, but you'll find magnesium lactate. And this can be helpful for people who have digestive upsets. I'm not as much the diarrhea thing, but there are some people who take oral magnesium and they'll just get stomachaches and things like that. So magnesium lactate is often used with those folks. Now, another thing that goes on with people is they'll say, well, I can take, let's say, 100 milligrams of magnesium glycinate twice a day, don't get any loose stools, no problem. But I've tried to take 200 milligrams twice a day, I get loose stools. Or they say, gee, I took magnesium oxide and I really, you know, I was going to the bathroom all the time. And then they go and they get maybe an intravenous magnesium and they say, well, won't that magnesium give me diarrhea? And the answer is no. And the reason is That the reason magnesium loosens your stool or makes your bowels work more is when I take it orally, it pulls water into the GI tract. If you get magnesium intravenously or transdermally, like an Epsom salt soak, most of that magnesium, all of it with an IV, is going to go in your bloodstream and it's not going to have anything to do with your GI tract. So we can give people higher doses of magnesium intravenously than they would ever tolerate orally. So the things you want to keep in mind is every form of magnesium has a different target. I haven't mention them all because there's a zillion of them. The next thing is, is that the name tells you what's riding along with the magnesium, what the chelate is. So magnesium oxide, it's made— it's literally oxide. Magnesium citrate, citric acid. Magnesium glycinate, glycine. Tells you what that is. You can easily now with the internet look up each one, and you may have some that you tolerate better than others. All right. I'm Dr. A. It's been great talking to you. I'm glad I was able to answer this question in more detail. We got a lot of comments on it. We're going to link below a that was real popular about glutathione. We get into magnesium in that, but it kind of gets to that connection a little bit more. So, I'll see you guys on the next video. Thanks.