I always like people coming back checking out of the channel. Is magnesium any good for small intestinal bowel overgrowth or SIBO?
I’ve spoken a lot about magnesium on this channel. Magnesium is a fantastic element to have in the body. I think it’s the fourth most abundant element in the body. It’s critical. It’s critical for proper nerve function, but also for proper function of the blood vessel wall, the endothelium in particular, so it allows it elasticity of the blood vessel. It’s great for keeping blood pressure perfect.
But magnesium does so much more than that. It’s estimated between three to 400 different biochemical processes in the body are affected by magnesium, so even your teeth, your bones … Your bones are about 40% made out of magnesium. So the uptake of magnesium really depends a lot on the integrity of the gut of the person.
But from what I can gather from looking at many different studies, about 30 to 40% of the magnesium you swallow actually gets absorbed, and younger people tend to have a higher absorption rate than older people. So when you hit 60 or 70 years old, sort of a bit my realm, when you’re pushing into an age bracket, the absorption for a lot of minerals just starts to nosedive. And so conservative estimates are about … Well, being 60 now I would probably absorb about a third of what a really young person would absorb, basically. So the healthier the stomach and the small bowel is, meaning the better the balance of bacteria, keeping yeast at bay, beneficial bacteria at good levels. When things are humming well in the body, and particularly when the enzyme levels are good, the uptake dramatically increases.
So whenever you drink alcohol, have coffee or tea, or have junk food or stuff like that, when you start affecting your gut, it will also affect how magnesium is taken up. And this can explain also why many people feel different when they take supplements. Some people have got a gut in poorer state, needs to be brought up before it can accept those minerals, really absorb them.
So the ilium or the terminal part of the small bowel, is where most of the magnesium is taken up in the body, also in the colon in certain parts of the large intestine. So there is no doubt that magnesium will have a good effect on small intestinal … There goes my flashing light again that needs replacing. Bing, you see it flashing. And so magnesium is a good one for gut products but you need to be careful when you take magnesium, particularly initially take it as it powder, or a capsule, or a tablet, with SIBO or a gut problem because it can exacerbate things first.
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So just be wary of that. It can make the bowel work a bit faster, or a bit slower because it will affect the nerves in the gut. It will affect a lot of processes in the gut. But a healthy gut like mine, not a problem. I can easily take between four to 600 milligrams of magnesium without any issues. It’s a fantastic supplement to take. I really recommend it.
Now you’ll generally find magnesium bound to something, often an amino acid, we call them chelates. So chelate, I think it means to claw in Latin, to grab hold of. So when they bind magnesium, for example, to glycine, magnesium glycinate and it disassociates easier that way. That way you get a little bit of glycine in your body, but also a fair bit of magnesium. The older forms of magnesium, like the oxide for example, and the phosphates tend to be much harder to absorb. But then you have modern ones in most supplements now will absorb quite well.
But is it any good for SIBO? Yes, it is. But take it easy when you first start taking magnesium. That’s why I like it as part of a multivitamin. It tends to work better that way initially. And when you get more experience with supplements, you can actually just take the element itself.
