Most magnesium powders taste bad. There is a real reason for that. It starts with what magnesium is.
We had to solve it twice over. Once for the magnesium itself. Once for the fact that Fortify PM has no sugar in it to hide behind. Here is what we picked and why.
Magnesium needs a Partner
Magnesium is a mineral. On its own it is a metal. You cannot just scoop it into a cup and drink it.
To go in a tub, it has to be joined to something else. That partner is called the form.
The form matters far more than most people think. It decides how much magnesium your body takes in. It decides how your stomach copes. And it decides how the powder tastes.
Magnesium oxide is the cheap one. It fills a lot of the tablets on the shelf. Researchers tested US magnesium products and found that only about 4 out of every 100 parts of magnesium oxide made it into the body. The rest went straight through.
That is why people tell us they took magnesium for a month and felt nothing.
Why we chose Glycinate
The glycinate form joins magnesium to glycine. Glycine is an amino acid. Amino acids are the small blocks your body builds protein from, so yours already makes glycine and knows what to do with it.
Two things change when you tie magnesium to glycine.
The first is how much gets in. One small study looked at patients who struggle to take up minerals. Magnesium glycinate came in at about twice the absorption of magnesium oxide. Some of it seems to cross whole, riding the path your gut already uses for amino acids.
The second is your stomach. Magnesium that stays in your gut pulls water in with it. That is what sends people running after a big dose of the cheap forms. Glycinate is much kinder on the way through.
Glycine has been studied on its own for sleep too. In a Japanese study, people who had been sleeping badly took 3 grams of plain glycine before bed. They fell asleep faster and rated their sleep better in the morning.
We want to be straight with you about that one. Those studies used a set dose of pure glycine. That is a different thing from the glycine that rides along bound to magnesium in a night drink. We chose glycinate for how well it absorbs and how well people handle it. The glycine research is a reason we like the pairing, and we are not going to dress it up as the same test.
Why magnesium tastes the way it does
Now the hard part.
Your tongue has bitter receptors on it. They work like an alarm. They are there to warn you off things that might be poison, and metals sit high on that list.
One of them is called TAS2R7. Scientists have shown it fires for a whole family of metals. Zinc, calcium and magnesium all set it off.
So magnesium powder hits your tongue and trips the alarm. The job of that receptor is to tell you to spit it out.
That is why raw magnesium tastes bitter and a bit metallic. It is why some people say it goes soapy on them. Nothing has gone wrong with the powder. Your tongue is doing the job it was built to do.
You cannot sneak around it by using a tiny bit, either. A dose small enough to hide is a dose too small to be worth taking.
Going sugar-free made it harder
Sugar is the normal fix for bitter. Chocolate makers have leaned on it for two hundred years. Pull the sugar out and the bitterness has nowhere left to hide.
We were never going to hand you a sugary drink at 9:30 at night. So we gave up the easy fix and put the work into the flavour.
Why a chocolate base was the answer
Chocolate is the one flavour where a bit of bitterness is meant to be there.
Cocoa is bitter on its own. That is just the plant. Dark chocolate is bitter and people pay extra for it.
So when magnesium goes into a cocoa base, that bitter edge lands where your brain already expects to find it. It reads as chocolate.
A hot chocolate is also a drink you sip. You sit with it for a few minutes at the end of the day.
Many versions before we nailed it
The chocolate took too many goes before we were happy with it.
We were chasing milk chocolate the whole way through. Rich and smooth, the way a good drinking chocolate is, with the sugar left out. If you grew up on Cadbury Drinking Chocolate, that is the direction we were heading. Ours sits further over towards milk chocolate.
This version is what is in the tub. We think it is the perfect milk chocolate, and we spent five other goes earning the right to say that.
What to mix it with
Hot water is the simplest way to have it, and it is the one we would pick.
Here is why. Calcium and magnesium are both the same type of mineral. They use some of the same doorways to get into your body. Send a lot of calcium through at once and it can crowd the magnesium.
A mug of cow's milk carries about 300mg of calcium. So hot water gives the magnesium the clearest run at it.
There are two honest notes to add to that.
The first is that the research is mixed. The crowding shows up clearly in animal studies. In humans it is smaller and harder to pin down. Magnesium glycinate probably ducks some of it as well, because being tied to an amino acid lets it use amino acid doorways too.
The second is that swapping to oat or almond milk does not always help. Most of them have calcium added, and plenty carry as much as cow's milk or more. If you want a creamy version, turn the carton around and read the calcium line. The unfortified ones are the ones you want.
We should confess something here. Sean has his with skim milk most nights, because that is how he loves it best. Hot water is the cleaner option and we are telling you so. Some nights the drink you look forward to wins.
The cold one
Warm does not suit everyone. Strawberry Pineapple does the same job in cold water. It is the same flavour we use in HydroBoost, so if you drink that one, you know what you are getting.
Same formula in both tubs, same magnesium. You just pick warm or cold.
What else is in it
Next to the magnesium glycinate there is ashwagandha, tryptophan, zinc, glutamine and hydroxyproline. There is no melatonin in it. It supports your own sleep rather than taking it over.
We formulate and make Fortify PM ourselves in Brisbane, with European and Australian ingredients. There are 30 serves in a tub. It takes about two minutes to make. If you have a question about the formula, it lands with the people who built it.
We also wrote about what short sleep does to your body. You can read that one here: What lack of sleep does to you.
Where these numbers come from
- Firoz M, Graber M. Bioavailability of US commercial magnesium preparations. Magnesium Research, 2001. Magnesium oxide fractional absorption about 4 percent.
- Schuette SA, Lashner BA, Janghorbani M. Bioavailability of magnesium diglycinate vs magnesium oxide in patients with ileal resection. JPEN, 1994. Absorption 23.5 percent for the glycinate form against 11.8 percent for oxide.
- Yamadera W et al. Glycine ingestion improves subjective sleep quality in human volunteers. Sleep and Biological Rhythms, 2007. 3 grams of glycine before bed.
- Wang Y et al. Metal ions activate the human taste receptor TAS2R7. Chemical Senses, 2019. TAS2R7 responds to zinc, calcium, magnesium and other metal ions.
- Schlingmann KP, Waldegger S, Konrad M et al. TRPM6 and TRPM7, gatekeepers of human magnesium metabolism. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, 2007. Magnesium and calcium share transport channels in the gut.
- Norman DA et al. Effect of calcium on magnesium absorption. Animal work shows luminal calcium reducing magnesium uptake, while human balance studies show a smaller and less consistent effect.
