There are many forms of magnesium. There’s magnesium oxide, magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, taurate, orotate and so on. All of these are simple salts of magnesium and they all have their proponents. Well, all except for probably magnesium oxide. It’s inexpensive but it’s essentially a laxative. And as you experiment you will find that magnesium, in general, has this effect. It’s not harmful in itself, which is why it was once used by the medical establishment as the standard means of preparing a patient for scoping.
The key concept to understand is that the laxative effect induced by magnesium is the result of its nonabsorption into our bloodstream. Magnesium that remains in our intestines osmotically pulls water into the intestine which is not what we want for optimal health and digestion.
The problem is that to varying degrees all of those common simple salts of magnesium succumb to our stomach’s acidic environment. Their molecules disassociate into their constituent atoms and they then suffer whatever fate awaits them.
The problem of effective dietary mineral supplement absorption was finally solved by a company called Albion Minerals. Their nutritional chemists came up with a means of sneaking magnesium and other minerals past our stomachs and getting them into our intestines without being broken apart by stomach acid. The key, instead of creating simple salts to carry the magnesium, was to bind magnesium into a dipeptide. It sounds more complicated than it is. A dipeptide is just two amino acids.
There are two forms of magnesium that are highly successful and are worth taking. One is known as Magnesium Glycinate Lysinate and other is Magnesium BisGlycinate. The first one, Magnesium Glycinate Lysinate consists of an atom of magnesium bound to the two amino acids glycine and lysine. Glycine is a good choice since it’s the smallest of all amino acids and also because glycine is another substance that most people could use a lot more of. The second form of magnesium, Magnesium BisGlycinate is an atom of magnesium bound to a pair of glycine molecules. This is handy since glycine being the smallest of the aminos means that there’s a higher percentage of elemental magnesium per milligram of the combined molecule.
The upshot of all this is that either of these dipeptide forms of magnesium will strongly resist disassociation in our low pH stomach environment. They will be able to transport the magnesium through our stomach and across our intestinal lining to carry it into our blood stream where it can be used by our body.
