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my own anecdotal experience with magnesium : i was generally prone to leg cramps even when young that usually subsides when i take salty water. i had developed hyperthroidism in late 90s that was treated eventually with radio-iodide. subsequently i went into hypothyroid state. soon after was a violent cramps episode which became regular that even if i took few hundred steps my legs would start cramping up. A steep descent into quality of life had me try many many tests as the initial suspicion was some kind of clot. Quite painful nerve conduction velocity tests were done. I was the subject of academic curiosity at stanford hospital. I was on codeine and other pain medications. After a year of this, one day happened to talk to a regular doctor (no specialization), who treats patients from asian subcontinent. He said that i may have magnesium deficiency which was apparently common for my ethnic background. Since by that time i had tried everything, this was an easy choice. Just a couple of weeks in with cal-mag citrate (400mg/day), felt something different in my legs and the whole nigthmare just lifted. I was able to return to hikes etc and would only occasionally need magnesium. It has been 2 decades since, and i dont take magnesium anymore and do strenous workouts and never again triggered any cramps episode.
Seems like you would benefit from magnesium no? Our bodies don’t produce it (correct me if I’m mistaken).
Magnesium Glycinate makes me sleep like a baby at night.
Increasingly hard to get Mg tablets without Vitamin B and so increasingly easy to get excess B12. Australian formulations of magnesium sold by Swisse don't have B. The same branding in HK does. I wrote to them about it, interesting response: "check the therapeutic goods administration site for canonical ingredients we don't commit to labelling the jar" they do list the neutral filler and Mg they just don't say "no B12"
B is typically included for synergistic uptake reasons I believe.
Excess B12 is really bad. Neuropathy. Considering you take Mg to get rid of muscle cramps (pain, conducted by nerves), a bit ironic. It's increasingly common in Australia now.
Excess Mg is unlikely. I think the body chucks it out in Urine pretty rapidly. I still take it, the cramps after sport return within a few months when I stop. I have a fruit and veg rich diet, I get plenty of natural Mg and K which is also good for muscle cramps. Age related insufficiency I suspect (63) malabsorption comes with age.
Maybe you mean B6, which is associated with small fiber neuropathy.
B12 has to jump through a number of hoops before it‘s even converted into a usable form [1].
I‘m sure you‘re meaning well, but B12 deficiency is a wide spread problem [2], and it’s questionable that excess is worse than deficiency.
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19832808/#&gid=article-figur...
2: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7792587/
EDIT: After posting, I saw your other comments. Maybe you can update parent.
> Excess B12 is really bad. Neuropathy.
Do you have any source for this? I can find some "it-might-be-bad" studies through a quick googling, but in general the idea seem to be that excess B12 is thought to be unproblematic ("it's just peed out").
> Excess B12 is really bad. Neuropathy.
How much really is dangerously excess? How do methylcobalamin vs cyanocobalamin compare in this regard? I noticed B12 supplements usually exceed the RDA by some orders of magnitude.
> Increasingly hard to get Mg tablets without Vitamin B
Same problem with iron supplements. Not particularly easy to find iron without folic acid. Folic acid can be very harmful for people with methylation problems (an extremely widespread genetic thing) who should supplement methylfolate instead. Whoever feels stimulated and harder to sleep after taking a folic acid pill - beware.
Excess B12 is also very easily excreted in urine being a water-soluble vitamin so it's really hard to "overdose" on
Whatever you desire:
https://purebulk.com/search?type=product&q=magnesium
Or grab these next time in Europe. 0.50 Euros effervescent tablets https://www.rossmann.de/de/gesundheit-altapharma-brausetable...
I never heard about the B12 problem. But effervescent tablets without artificial sweetener are unheard off.
My doc said there is no scientific proof that Mg works against cramps. Is that true?
How about Epsom salt? I've never known that to have B added.
> Increasingly hard to get Mg tablets without Vitamin B
Really? I found plenty at popular online stores. Or are you saying that the vitamin B is undisclosed on the labels???
Some more anecdata: magnesium greatly reduces annoying muscle twitches for me. I get them quite frequently when I don't take magnesium for a while. Magnesium citrate is easily available here, without added vitamin b6. No side effects from what I've observed over the years.
Also muscle cramps. I like to stretch out all my muscles when I first wake up while still in bed and when I don't supplement magnesium this has sometimes triggered cramps in leg muscles. When supplementing magnesium this never happen, and the stretched muscles feel better, more relaxed.
Also lowers blood pressure for me.
Always love to see a Gwern article on the front page. I threw some cash his way for changing my life over a decade ago with his page on spaced repetition, and more recently for his page on using pure nicotine to form other habits.
Magnesium — cheap & plain-as-possible magnesium pills — are a great laxative. I suspect that this has follow-on psychological effects. All the expensive pills are just to avoid the laxative effect. No further benefit. So if you think a good dump contributes to your wellbeing, consider the plain stuff.
There is no such thing as “plain”. You can’t eat pure magnesium. mg oxide is cheap, but apparently mostly laxative. Mg citrate is part laxative but also absorbed. Mg glycinate is more expensive but avoids the laxative effect.
For the muscle relaxant effect (other than perhaps bowel muscles), mg oxide is hardly useful.
> avoid the laxative effect
Why not consider that it might alter the gut flora?
> All the expensive pills are just to avoid the laxative effect. No further benefit.
Different substances may have seriously different subjective (e.g. on mood, sleep) effect in at least some people (e.g. me). I may be a good idea to try bisglycinate, orotate, threanate to check whether some of them act the way you like.
Ah. I just checked a formulation for my old supplements v my new ones. I see increased magnesium. This was helpful
My understanding is that the human body stores magnesium, said stores sufficient for approximately 30 days.
As such, daily magnesium is far less important that the 30 day moving average.
In theory, there is enough magnesium in your bones (~12 g) to cover your RDA (~400 mg) for 30 days [1]. However, only a third of that is available without strongly negatively affecting your health. So if your Mg stores are full (if!), then you have about 10 days worth "stored". However, your day-to-day Mg homeostasis is done by your kidneys, i.e. on a much, much shorter time scale. So your daily intake does matter, but sporadic deficiencies can be compensated for about 10 days.
[1] Alawi et al. (2018) Magnesium and Human Health: Perspectives and Research Directions; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5926493/
> There are no published human trials as of October 2015
This has changed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9786204/
Notably, though, their results indicate effects on cognition and memory, which the OP's experiments don't seem to address.
Another thing why magnesium oxide could not be the optimal compound for you: It's a laxative. That might be good to know before you start daily supplementation. Personally, I have bisglycinate.
I’ve tried probably most forms of Magnesium and they all upset my digestion, unless I take a small dose.
I struggled with sleep for years and years. If I exercised the insomnia would be the worst. Lately I've figured out that magnesium and B6 (p5p form) are the missing piece I have needed. I've been taking magnesium for a long time, but B6 finally allowed me to actually experience improved sleep after exercise.
Be very careful about that B6 dosage. It's possible to overdose on b6 at surprisingly low doses. It doesn't usually cause permanent damage, but anecdotal reports suggest it can take months to a year to recover from b6 neuropathy.
Neat!
For me: I need 0.3 mg melatonin almost every day to control my sleep and do a bunch of other things. The onset is between 1 to 3 hours. In practice it means I need to be okay with an early wake-up if it kicks in within 1 hour.
When I feel jittery/trembly I need magnesium as my jitters stop when I take it.
Refer to Magnesium-based Lifeform from Disco Elysium, it is very accurate.
Some people say magnesium doesn’t really do anything and you just need to quit. What do we tell them?
I always had cramps no matter how much magnesium I took. It wasn't until I went low carb that cramps dissapeared, even without taking magnesium.
Are you a Type II- diabetic? Night cramps seem to appear in diabetics when their metabolism is not well adjusted. Did you let check your A1C?
Cramps can come from Calcium and Potassium too.
This is great and all but how can you objectively measure something like "mood" or "productivity"?
There are a lot of variables, even in your day to day work activities (e.g. you never debug & implement a fix for the exact same bug twice...one bug might be a satisfying and enjoyable activity, another might be a frustrating, difficult, and tedious pain in the ass)
I've done similar trials with magnesium glcyinate and personally not noticed any difference. But then I have not found any way to accurately measure differences between what a "good day" is Vs a "bad day". Even without supplementing, it feels like dice roll at the best of times
I haven’t seen any cognitive / mood difference for me when taking magnesium supplements in any form.
But then I went to one of those sensory deprivation chambers, where they use magnesium salts to change the water’s buoyancy.
I felt the most content and happy in my life for a week after. It was really bizarre - I would “just not care” about pressures at work, failing personal relationships, any stress really.
And I remained effective, just with a higher EQ because I wouldn’t overthink things.
Tried it some more times with similar effect. So now when I end up in a situation where I build up stress and can’t seem to get to a chill state - just go for a deprivation tank and align myself back, though I try not to get into a situation where I need one altogether.
> There are a lot of variables, even in your day to day work activities
I consistently find the only thing I can correlate reliably is sleep quality assessment upon waking up. If I feel great and rested I know my performance during the day will be better at pretty much everything.
Chess puzzles work quite accurately IME to assess my mental capabilities for the day. Especially the puzzle storm on lichess. There are enough puzzles there to not repeat themselves too often and they are rated so they have similar difficulty for the same rating. In my good days (lots of sleep in previous nights) I have way better scores than on my bad days (30-40% better)
I don't know but we can measure stress reliably by HRV. It correlates extremely well with fatigue in general. For me personally, I think it correlates with mood and productivity directly, or at least the preconditions for them.
The same guy concluded that LSD microdosing is without any effects so I'm ready to dismiss his ability to reach any conclusion worth listening to.
But he do excel at making a site a pain in the ass to navigate and bulking up the volume of text without adding anything useful to it.
It reeks of some effective altruist flavored breed of pomposity.
An aspect missing from the article and comments here is that magnesium is also available as a topical application. I have some in a spray that I can apply to my knees before bed, we also get some from a local source in a cream base for massaging into muscles. That lets you focus the application without dosing your entire system with it.
It is worth noting that these topical applications are quite controversial in the medical literature. The evidence supporting a dermal absorption of magnesium (or other electrolytes) is pretty poor [1].
Kinda what he stated when he mentioned Epsom Salts in a bath. Which would be magnesium applied 'topically' (externally)
Just some input on Magnesium Chloride for me. I have found it is the best for me as Chloride has no “effects” of its own, unlike things like Glycinate. Glycinate is good if it works for you, but I get wired and can’t sleep. I take citrate-based supplements for Calcium and Potassium, but mag citrate causes a lot of GI distress for me. None with chloride.
The bad thing? Mag Chloride is highly hydroscopic. You really can’t make it into a pill or they get all weird and goopy. So to get Mag Chloride you have to get it in a liquid form and it is moderately expensive. Worse than the expense, it tastes positively horrid. Still, it has the best impact on my sleep than other forms, so take that for what it is worth.
Those charts aren't very clear; given that GGPlot is already on the scene it'd probably pay dividends to bin the data in some form. I'd be starting with geom_boxplot grouped by week myself. Trying to interpret that sort of wild squiggling in the 2nd plot is not the path to happiness.
I have similar experiences to gwern with mag, surprisingly easy to overdose leading to a less than optimal state. After 25 years of messing with supplements I've settled on just thiamine and b12 with any regularity, and only inject-able at that.
Magnesium solved my muscle tightness, and insomnia.
These are the products that work for me: Magnesium Lysinate Glycinate from Doctor's Best, and Magnesium Taurate from Double Wood.
Is anyone aware of an app that can facilitate these types of experiments ?
Ideal features:
Notification to self report things such as mood, quality of sleep.
Tracking of custom activities/actions (whether you worked out, drunk, or whatever)
Data export in csv :)I've been advised that Magnesium supplementation improves the efficacy of ibuprofen and acetaminophen in treating tension headaches by my physician.
These "self experiments" all feel like an elaborate ruse to validate their substance abuse.