Hi everyone
I’ve read a fair bit about the benefits of taking Magnesium to help with MS symptoms, but I’m a little confused as to which type, and indeed which method of taking it, is best.
I recently purchased some Magnesium Malate as per the picture below, as that seemed to be the type that most people talked about. However, I was speaking to a couple of fellow MS patients yesterday and they swore by Magnesium Citrate.
Does anyone have any tips / good stories / horror stories (I hope not!) about taking Magnesium?
Many thanks
Jon
I have been taking 200mg of magnesium citrate/malate for a few years now and it has definitely helped ease problems with spasm and cramp. Restless legs are a thing of the past. The type you need to avoid is oxide, because that’s the one used as a laxative.
It pays to experiment a bit with the amount and find what suits you best.
Many thanks for your reply. It’s good to hear that the 200mg are working for you. I’m going to continue with my tablets (1000mg… wow!) and see how I get on, as I suffer from both spasms and cramps.
Thanks for the tip about the Oxide - I didn’t know that!
I’ve always used magnesium citrate. Probably because they were readily available and not too expensive, but much better absorbed than the very cheap magnesium oxide tablets. I had stayed with M citrate because they seem to work for me.
I’ve had another look at what is now available and have decided to try magnesium glycinate, (also known as magnesium diglycinate or magnesium bisglycinate), as it is absorbed in a different way to citrate.
I’m contemplating trying magnesium threonate too. It seems to be a ‘designer’ magnesium and gets much more readily than the others into the CNS and brain, and in animal models increases the density of brain synapses, reverses brain aging and improves cognition. It is much more expensive though, as it is patented.
As each works slightly differently I’ll vary which I use over different days.
If you have a sluggish gut, magnesium citrate is your friend: I can vouch for this from experience. If you have a sensitive gut that doesn’t need any livening up, on the other hand, leave it alone. 
Here’s quite a decent run through the various types you can buy as a supplement (and I have found it useful), but conventional medicine would probably dismiss most of this as a load of woo nonsense, so probably best taken with a pinch of salt.
Alison
