What hidden facts are on magnesium supplements?
Shopping for a good magnesium supplement isn't as straightforward as you would think.
We can separate the issues into:
- Magnesium type issues
- Elemental magnesium fogginess
We already covered magnesium type issues in What your magnesium supplement doesn't want you to know. So in this article, I want to talk about elemental magnesium fogginess.
Elemental magnesium fogginess is when a supplement company plays games with the front of their label to make it seem like there is more value in a bottle than there is.
They do that by playing 3 games on labels:
- The "Pure" game
- The "what do words mean" game
- And the "elemental milligram confusion" game
The "Pure" game
If you want to play the "Pure" game, what you say on the front of your label is:
"Pure Elemental Magnesium"
This could be true while having two different forms of magnesium... of differing qualities. For example, if you were to put:
- 120mg of elemental magnesium coming from magnesium oxide and
- 80mg of elemental magnesium from magnesium bisglycinate.
...This would technically be "pure elemental magnesium".
And while it is technically true that you have "pure elemental magnesium", not all of that elemental magnesium is of the same quality or absorbability.
This game works really well with the "what do words mean" game.
"What do words mean" game
To play the "what do words mean" game, you combine "Pure" with "Bisglycinate" and "200mg" on the front of your label...but then leave out the fact that there is 120mg of magnesium oxide to enable 200mg of the elemental magnesium.
You could play word games with yourself to make the front of the label make sense. But when you consider that the general impression of the label is that you'll get
200mg of pure magnesium bisglycinate
Then finding out that there's actually 120mg of oxide, and it's not pure bisglycinate to reach the 200mg of elemental magnesium, could be challenging for some people to follow.
And then there's the "Elemental milligram confusion" game.
The "Elemental miligram confusion" game
This is where someone confuses the weight of the powder that holds the magnesium with the elemental magnesium. Maybe on purpose. Maybe not.
For example,
- 1000mg of magnesium oxide powder has approximately 600mg of elemental magnesium.
- 1000mg of magnesium bisglycinate powder only has about 140-200mg of elemental magnesium
On the surface, the bisglycinate sounds worse because it seems like you get less magnesium. But remember that the magnesium oxide is not absorbed as well, and it leads to gastrointestinal issues (farts).
So if you start selling magnesium bisglycinate, the amount of elemental magnesium drops to the floor in comparison to magnesium oxide supplements.
So that's why some people advertise that they have 500mg of magnesium bisglycinate powder in their capsules. Well, what that really means is that they have 80-100mg of elemental magnesium.
If a company plays these 3 games, or even 1-2 of them, it leads to a lot of confusion in the magnesium section of your favorite store.
And that's why we crafted Arrow's magnesium bisglycinate the way we did - with no games. We focussed on getting the magnesium type right, and eliminating elemental magnesium fogginess.
We make it very clear on the front and back of the label that you are actually getting 100% of your magnesium (elemental and powder) as bisglycinate. It is also 200mg of elemental magnesium coming from about 980mg of bisglycinate powder. We don't want to play any of the 3 games because we believe that in the long run our customers will notice what is going on - even if the front of our label doesn't make flashy claims.
If you'd like to order a bottle you can do that here.