Inner Circle Forums
Portions of the Undoctored Inner Circle Member Forum and its vast wealth of knowledge, are available only to our Members.
Becoming an Inner Circle Member will allow you to post topics, ask Dr. Davis questions, and view all replies.


DIY MoM for Mg Water


Member Forum >> Magnesium >> DIY MoM for Mg Water

Bob Niland
No Avatar
STAFF
Join Date: 7/7/2014
Posts Contributed: 22961
Total Likes: 3830
Recommends Recd: 11
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 2

Posted: 7/15/2023 7:42:27 PM
Edited: 10/16/2024 5:30:22 PM (11)

Do-It-Yourself Milk of Magnesia (MoM)

Page Edition: 2023-07-17

Introduction

MoM was originally just a suspension of magnesium hydroxide (a laxative) in filtered water. The program Magnesium Water recipe uses CO₂ (from carbonation) to convert the hydroxide to bicarbonate. The Mg bicarb reaction transforms this 🧻 laxative to a highly-absorbable periodic table element cell: Magnesium Mg mineral supplement:
Mg(OH)₂ + 2 CO₂ → Mg(HCO₃)₂

In 2018, retail MoM in the U.S. market began showing up with sodium hypochlorite (bleach) in the Ingredients list. Now 5+ years on, unadulterated MoM has vanished, and it doesn’t appear that this situation is going to change. Bleached MoM is unsuitable for making magnesium water (nor, frankly, would I employ it for its labeled use, due to its likely antiseptic effects on gut flora).

If you still have any unadulterated MoM, check the expiration date, and if lapsed, discard the product. See the ⇩final discussion below for the apparent back-story of how things ended up this way.

Mg Water Ingredient Choices Today

Although you can’t get clean MoM anymore, you can get simple Mg hydroxide powder. With it, you can either:

  1. ⇩make your own MoM, or
  2. ⇩just add it more-or-less directly to carbonated {seltzer} water.

The challenges with Mg hydroxide powder are that:

  • a single day’s portion of it is merely 1.08 gram (450 mg of Mg), which is too low a weight for typical kitchen scales,
     
  • the density of the powders varies, so the package portioning amount (cc or tsp.) isn’t sufficiently reliable for practical use with kitchen measuring spoons, and
     
  • even if the daily amount volume was reliable, at ~⅓ tsp., it’s very hard to measure precisely by volume.

Product Sourcing

What is required for DIY MoM is food grade magnesium hydroxide powder. It must be only Mg hydroxide with no other ingredients, flow agents or preservative. Topical or bath forms of Mg are unsuitable. All other forms of Mg supplements (e.g. citrate, malate, glycinate, etc.) are unsuitable for making Mg-water (those you consume directly).

You are unlikely to find Mg hydroxide at retail, or at on-line food resellers. In some countries, it can be hard to find, period. Check with a local chemist or pharmacist. Beware of buying Mg hydroxide from on-line “marketplace”⚠sites, as it’s expensive enough to attract counterfeiters who take advantage of the SKU co-mingling defect in the marketplace model.

Ordering directly from the brand might be ideal. Although it may be a bit more expensive than at a reseller site, the cost per portion is trivial: a 1 kg bag will serve a single person for 2½ years. Seek a brand that offers COAs. The numbers to check on the COA are lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd) and arsenic (As). If any of these are unreported, that may not be mere oversight. You may need to have your bag in-hand to request a COA, but you’ll then get a COA specific to the lot. As member reports about COAs arrive, some brand biasing may emerge.

In the U.S, there are multiple brands offering suitable products. Perhaps the top two in use by members are:
⎆PureBulk® Magnesium Hydroxide
⎆BULK SUPPLEMENTS.com® Magnesium Hydroxide

DIY MoM

This approach allows ⎆the program recipe (3 tbsp. MoM in 2 liters of seltzer) to keep working, and does so by employing larger amounts of Mg hydroxide powder, that are practical to measure.

You will need:
🥛 one or more containers of known volume
⚖ a scale accurate to the nearest gram
🌢 a source of filtered or distilled water. Tap water usually has serious problems.

The amount of Mg hydroxide powder needed to make MoM depends on the volume of water. Retail MoM is 1200 mg of Mg hydroxide per 15 mL water (~1500 mg of  periodic table element cell: Magnesium elemental magnesium in 3 tbsp. or 45 mL of MoM, used to make 2L Mg-water).

DIY MoM Amounts
Volume Mg hydroxide
1 U.S. pint (473mL) 38 grams
1 U.S. quart (946mL) 76 grams
1 litre 80 grams
2 litres 160 grams

Add the measured amount of the Mg hydroxide powder to the container. Fill with filtered or distilled water to the level for the target volume. Cap and shake well. It may take some time for all the clumps of hydroxide to break up. Store in refrigerator until needed. There is no preservative, so this suspension is at some risk of contamination.

Shake well before use. This is a suspension, not a solution. Make Mg-water per program recipe, using this home-made MoM.

Direct to Mg-Water

You will need:
⚖‍‰    a gram scale accurate to the nearest 10 milligrams (0.010 grams)
🍾‍🫧 carbonated filtered water (seltzer) or a home carbonator and a source of filtered or distilled water. Do not use sweetened, flavored, colorized, mineral or otherwise fortified sparkling waters. 
🌢  a source of filtered or distilled water if you need to make a MoM slurry.

 

Direct to Mg-Water Amounts
Volume Mg
hydroxide
MoM Slurry
Water
Elemental Mg
in Volume
1 U.S. pint (473mL) 0.85 grams ¾ tbsp. (2+ tsp.) periodic table element cell: Magnesium 354 mg
620 mL* 1.1 grams 1 tbsp. (3 tsp.) periodic table element cell: Magnesium 458 mg
1 U.S. quart (946mL) 1.7 grams 1½ tbsp. (4 tsp.) periodic table element cell: Magnesium 708 mg
1 litre 1.8 grams 1½ tbsp. (5 tsp.) periodic table element cell: Magnesium 750 mg
2 litres 3.6 grams 3 tbsp. (9 tsp.) periodic table element cell: Magnesium 1500 mg
* this is the size of the smaller sodastream brand glass carafes.

 

Note: ⇛⌛⇚
Regardless of how made, the Mg-water process is a non-trivially hypobaric (negative pressure) physical chemistry reaction. If using a glass bottle, the cap may be hard to remove. If using a polymer bottle, it is likely to dimple, weakening it over time. If using a single-use retail seltzer bottle, the dimpling may be of no real consequence.

If you are doing your own carbonation, ignore the Slurry column. You can add the table amount of Mg hydroxide directly to the filtered water, shake well, carbonate, cap, shake again, and allow 20 minutes or so to react.

If you are not doing your own carbonation, and are using pre-carbonated water (seltzer), adding the powder directly to seltzer starts a spitty irregular immediate reaction. So make a single portion of MoM by first mixing the shown amount of Mg hydroxide powder with the shown amount of slurry water, in a separate small container. Shake well, then pour into the seltzer. Cap, shake, and let react for at least 20 minutes.

Why Bleach?

Why is the sodium hypochlorite in current MoM products?

I have several bottles of now-expired pre-bleach MoM, and they have this interesting statement under
Other Information
■ does not meet USP requirements for preservative effectiveness

Current products omit this advisory.

Back in the 2010s, there were at least two instances of recalls of contaminated MoM … and two of these were for professional unit-dose MoMs intended for clinical use. Here’s a ⎆forum mention of one of those cases. Clearly there is potential liability here that the MoM industry would like to shoo away, particularly for multiple-use containers of MoM.

Further, the usual customer for MoM is someone on a standard diet, with constipation, and thus almost certainly with SIBO. An antiseptic added to the MoM is likely to clobber {all} microbes in the GI tract. For the usual customer this might actually knock down the SIBO a bit {along with any beneficial microbes}. If so, the MoM producers could even possess trial data that let them cluelessly conclude that the bleach made the product both safer and more effective.🙄

If these observations and conjectures are correct, don’t expect a suitable MoM to return to store shelves anytime soon.
___________
Bob Niland [⎆disclosures] [⎆topics] [⎆abbreviations]


Tags: magnesia,magnesium,milk,MoM,recipes,water

Bob Niland
No Avatar
STAFF
Join Date: 7/7/2014
Posts Contributed: 22961
Total Likes: 3830
Recommends Recd: 11
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0

Posted: 7/15/2023 7:43:36 PM
Edited: 12/10/2023 8:16:38 PM (3)


Reply Content Hidden!

Post replies longer than 250 characters are restricted to Full Access Members (make certain you are logged-in!).

Sign Up Today!


Tags:

Join Date: 2/7/2023
Posts Contributed: 11
Total Likes: 0
Recommends Recd: 0
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0


Join Date: 2/7/2023
Posts Contributed: 11
Total Likes: 0
Recommends Recd: 0
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0


Hi Bob,

Is there a supplier of magnesium hydroxide that you recommend?  Is bulk supplements ok?

Do you use a Soda Stream machine to carbonate the water?

Thank you,

Bethan
Tags:

Bob Niland
No Avatar
STAFF
Join Date: 7/7/2014
Posts Contributed: 22961
Total Likes: 3830
Recommends Recd: 11
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0



Reply Content Hidden!

Post replies longer than 250 characters are restricted to Full Access Members (make certain you are logged-in!).

Sign Up Today!


Tags:

Join Date: 10/7/2023
Posts Contributed: 25
Total Likes: 2
Recommends Recd: 0
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 1


I wonder if anyone on here has been successful in finding a source of the proper Milk of Magnesium (flavorless and with no bleach) and would care to share that source with the rest of us?
Tags:

Bob Niland
No Avatar
STAFF
Join Date: 7/7/2014
Posts Contributed: 22961
Total Likes: 3830
Recommends Recd: 11
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 1



Reply Content Hidden!

Post replies longer than 250 characters are restricted to Full Access Members (make certain you are logged-in!).

Sign Up Today!


Tags:

Join Date: 6/9/2024
Posts Contributed: 53
Total Likes: 9
Recommends Recd: 0
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0


Thanks Bob! Just used one of the suppliers you recommended. Much appreciated!
Tags:

Join Date: 6/28/2024
Posts Contributed: 11
Total Likes: 2
Recommends Recd: 0
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0



Reply Content Hidden!

Post replies longer than 250 characters are restricted to Full Access Members (make certain you are logged-in!).

Sign Up Today!


Tags:

Bob Niland
No Avatar
STAFF
Join Date: 7/7/2014
Posts Contributed: 22961
Total Likes: 3830
Recommends Recd: 11
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0



Reply Content Hidden!

Post replies longer than 250 characters are restricted to Full Access Members (make certain you are logged-in!).

Sign Up Today!


Tags:

Join Date: 6/28/2024
Posts Contributed: 11
Total Likes: 2
Recommends Recd: 0
Ignores Issued: 0
Likes Recd: 0


Thank you Bob for your informative response.
Tags:


DISCLAIMER

The information contained within this Forum and website is of a general nature and intended purely as background reading for the participants taking part in Forum discussions and projects. It should not be construed as professional medical advice. Please read the website Medical Disclaimer for more information and limitations.

Changes may occur in circumstances at any time that may affect the accuracy or completeness of the information presented within any section of the Forum and website. This Forum and Track Your Plaque, LLC have taken reasonable care in producing and presenting the content contained herein, however, we do not accept responsibility for any loss, expense, or liability that you may incur from using or relying on the information sourced from this website, its forums and/or blogs.

Third-party content and links

This Forum and Track Your Plaque, LLC accept no responsibility for the accuracy of third-party content or links, or your reliance on any information contained within any such content available through our site. The comments published on this Forum represent a wide range of views and interests of the participating individuals and organizations. Statements made during online discussions are the personal opinions of the commentators and do not necessarily reflect those of others participating on this Forum. Track Your Plaque, LLC at all times and at its absolute discretion, reserves the right to remove reasonably offensive comments in line with our Moderation Guidelines.