Biohack 101: my week in supplement hell
Magnesium glycinate vs. magnesium oxide and the "bioavailability" X factor.
I’m not a biohacker. I’m not trying to live forever or hoping that I — in the hyperbolic vernacular of longevity charlatans — “don’t die.” I just want to sleep through the night; taking a common magnesium supplement has been a part of my doctor-approved bedtime routine for months. Until I ran out two weeks ago.
A cautionary tale about freelance supplementation
Instead of buying the same magnesium supplement from the same brand, I decided to optimize and overachieve. There are several different compounds of magnesium supplement, each promising a different group of supposed benefits, among them improved sleep (note: this claim is not clinically proven). Yes, foods like green leafy vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds may provide enough magnesium to obviate a real need to supplement, but….why not optimize and overachieve?
After shoulder surgery three months ago, I was still experiencing small but disruptive waves of pain in the middle of the night; if washing down two inexpensive horse pills of magnesium could help me sleep through the night, I figured, why not take them?
Below is a short, cautionary tale about making a couple small changes to a seemingly innocuous supplement without paying attention to the critical details. (I won’t go into the benefits that taking different forms of magnesium may provide; the link above provides a solid breakdown.) After some online research and consulting AI, I decided to forego magnesium oxide in favor of magnesium glycinate.
I got optimized! Glycinate, my research showed, was the recommended choice to achieve more restful sleep. It’s also much more bioavailable than magnesium oxide, I learned. Bioavailability is one of those non-intuitive science terms that refers to the extent that an oral supplement can be absorbed and used by the body.
I wanted glycinate’s greater bioavailability but didn’t consider the adverse effects it might have on my health.
Consequences of unintentionally overdosing magnesium
Ingesting a more easily absorbed form of magnesium was the first of the two changes that led to unwelcome, even disturbing changes. The other change concerned dosage: I simply continued my habit of taking two 500mg pills of magnesium before bedtime, as I had for months.
For men, the recommended daily dose of supplemental magnesium is about 400mg, meaning that for months I was taking more than double, sometimes more than triple the recommended dose of magnesium oxide — but without any noticeable negative repercussions. I’m assuming that was because of magnesium oxide’s much more limited bioavailability. When I switched to far more bioavailable magnesium glycinate, however, I may have begun inadvertently overdosing magnesium.
Caveat: I have no clinical training, so my amateur-hour connecting the dots here isn’t meant to be definitive or apply to others. What I can say with complete confidence is that taking more than 2x the daily recommended dose of magnesium glycinate had a major negative physiological impact on my body:
I developed a gaseous, highly unattractive bulge in my lower abdomen that wouldn’t go away. I looked and felt as if I’d just eaten a porterhouse steak and baked potato after a three-day fast. Staring at my body in the mirror at night was disheartening, to say the least. But I didn’t know how to fix it. So I’d simply resolve to make tomorrow a better day, pop my two 500mg pills of magnesium glycinate and go to bed.
Even more disturbing than the physical bloating was what I will describe, without hyperbole, as a de-energizing flattening of my mental and emotional well being, which was just subtle enough to not immediately notice as something more acute than the normal rough patch that we all experience from time to time.
But after a few days of feeling as emotionally inert as I’ve felt in years, I connected it to the physical bloating, on the theory that they were not separate and coincidental.
Tracking down the clues to my downturn
I began examining any recent changes I may have made to what I put into my body or expose it to each day. Chronic inflammation caused by an uptick in my tennis workouts? Lingering low-level food poisoning from a meal of highly processed food that I didn’t make myself? A delayed, monster reaction to the alpha-ketoglutarate (aka AKG) supplement I’d started a couple weeks ago?
None of those explanations seemed likely. Then, on Friday afternoon, while lying blankly supine on my leather recliner wondering “what the hell…?”, it dawned on me: The new magnesium compound! And the 1000mg doses.
Immediately, I began searching for clues on the greatest source of all known knowledge in the universe — Reddit. Specifically, r/supplements. A lot of anecdotal evidence there led me to dive deeper into online research and specific, AI-sourced answers that quickly revealed the bigger potential problems overdosing magnesium can lead to. Including, in extreme cases, kidney failure and death.
A quick return to what feels like normal
That night I stopped taking the magnesium glycinate, and by Saturday, the bloating had gone down considerably, my energy pretty much returned to normal and the disturbing foggy brain feeling had dissipated.
Takeaways
They are pretty obvious, perhaps, but worth noting:
before taking or switching supplements, check with a clinician and research what differences in dosage and bioavailability might cause in your body and mind
research how any new supplement, or new variation of an existing supplement, might react with medicines or NSAIDs you take daily (in my case, I take 110mcg of daily levothyroxine, for an underperforming thyroid, and overdosing magnesium can potentially interfere with that drug’s efficacy)
sometimes, instead of optimizing and overachieving, it may be better to stick with what has been working well enough
Do you have a supplement-based misadventure? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear what other people have experienced.
Thanks for reading. ~ Paul
As a retired physician, i can assure you.that your physician knows sqaut about supplements - not part of their training. Personally, i take magnesium threonate that works just fine. I suggest you google it
Examine.com and LifeExtension offer useful advice. Good luck!
I feel like the topic of over supplementation is under discussed. More isn’t always better but does anyone know how much is enough? It seems obvious to me that you should put back only to replace the lack. Nobody talks about this, let alone what taking too much can do. Because, perhaps , we don’t really know, and we seem to operate under a ‘more is better’ bias.