There are probably forums with a higher concentration of food scientists than this one. I would definitely not do what you're doing to save money, but it sounds like you're trying to make something that cannot be obtained on the market, presumably for important personal reasons. Best of luck.
I'm curious why you can't just drink what you need across multiple drinks. Maybe Liquid IV in the morning and the other minerals later in the day, that sort of thing.
Taking supplement pills are off the table these days, and I'm finding I'm needing very specific ratios of mineral regularly fed in throughout the day like a traditional oral rehydration solution to keep things in balance.
Are you working with a doctor or pharmacist at all? Maybe a compounding pharmacist would have some ideas.
READ:
As for stability, I agree with the suggestion to premix the powders in the correct ratio and mix with water on demand. Letting it sit over time will change the pH due to the dissolution of atmospheric CO2, and also risk pathogen growth depending on the mixture.
But ultimately, I do think it's best to find an expert here. A pharmacist, a food scientist, someone who more intimately knows the biological ramifications of these electrolyte mixtures. There's probably a reason you haven't found a marketed solution with all these ingredients, because the combinations and the counterions matter. And as a professional chemist, I wouldn't even feel comfortable doing these calculations myself because it's not my area of expertise. It's way above the pay grade of an advice forum.
@Raenia thank you!
It's enough that I'm starting to get a better grasp on it all, especially by giving me the appropriate terminology keywords to help research with. The good news is, it looks like whatever may be interacting and precipitating out on either the mag malate or mag chloride end is mostly harmless and just different GRAS forms of these minerals and are only reacting with the potassim phosphate - they're just no longer water soluble, which means a hearty shake to re-mix before drinking. (I've yet to get to a point where I'd been able to add any sort of calcium, as getting the chloride end in balance has been a bearcat as the goldilocks zone of the chloride levels is proving to be quite a narrow band for me, and the magnesium reactions hadn't helped as they were proving to be a distraction.) Ironically, it also means that if I'm aiming for something larger batch shelf stable, so to speak, using any form of magnesium other than tri-mag citrate is my biggest PITA for random reactions... though nearly all the tri-mag citrate on the market currently is all poorly soluble forms sourced out of China. Wheee!
Not that the results from the other two appear to be dangerous. The mag chloride version actually tasted fine again the next day and I didn't have any adverse reactions - which means that hour sampling was probably just getting the full bitterness of the magnesium salts mid-reaction. The mag malate was just producing stuff that needed shaking back in, and it and the zinc gluconate were just neutralizing the citric acid, as would the calcium carbonate if I'd used any yet.
I literally shot myself in the foot and made things more difficult just trying to use more soluble forms of magnesium from a country that has a better track record of producing this sort of stuff without toxic cross-contamination issues from surprise fillers and poor quality control. Guess this realistically means I need to start looking closer at Aquamin Mg... though the additional trace elements hitching a ride from the Celtic Sea could complicate things further, in theory. Maybe I just need to make peace with the Chinese trimag citrate provided it's at least sourced from a reputable seller like NOW FOODS, and hope for mercy and grace to bridge the gaps while having to shake the crap out of the bottle to get it dissolved.
It also means that the simplest and most stable path forward without dealing with wildcard reactions it looks like and from what I'm beginning to understand is to basically use nothing but the alkalized chelated citrate forms of everything (save the sodium chloride and potassium phosphate) from calcium all the way down to zinc (which the latter is hard to source in raw powder form as a supplement), is likely to result in both the most stable and easiest to balance/buffer out using citric acid since they're basically all already stable precipitates and forms that are already where you need to be. The real art will be tweaking the citric acid quantity just enough to get the liquid to a weak buffering acid level just strong enough to impair rapid microbe growth and maybe a slight tang... and that might be easy enough to calculate out by just using a digital pH tester with a little trial and error. Though, it'll likely continue to be a moving target as I try and dial in each of the remaining electrolytes once I get the chloride levels in check.
The irony with this realization is that this was what my gut was telling me to do from the get-go, but the difficulty in finding quality tri-mag citrate and any sort of un-fillered powdered zinc citrate was a source of difficulty, and I was also just trying to work with what I could source. I mean, I literally asked this in the top post: Would I be safer going citrated forms of all the minerals in question given the citric acid usage outside of the sodium chloride and potassium phosphate salts? The answer, apparently, is yes. Yes, you dumbass... a thousand times yes! D'oh!
...that is, unless I'm still missing something, and I always feel like I know there's something important that I don't know with stuff like this. That's the real handicap of being smart enough to know how little you truly understand, and recognizing the limits of what you do know. I can make educated guesses when I don't know, but bluffing is more a risky art than anything else. Though, given where my health is tapdancing these days, along with the challenges of getting any meaningful help on that front given the general state of American healthcare, complicated by the additional defunding and privatization of social safety net services by certain powers that be, compounded by multiple misdiagnoses and the actual medical conditions that have been sussed out being historically poorly understood and barely researched by medical science... nothing like a good tapdance on the razor's edge of risk and mortality to keep the heart a pumping and keep life spicy, I guess.
*sigh* It also means I've mis-stepped a bit financially with this grand experiment. On one hand, it was only about $65, and I've already saved way more than that given how much knock-off/tweaked Liquid IV I've already made the past few months without the magnesium, never mind the financial and health savings of not giving myself a heart attack continuing to take in the amounts of table salt the real deal would have caused at the quantities I'm needing on the potassium/phosphorous end... but still. When money's tight, money's tight. Now, what to do with all this magnesium chloride, magnesium malate, calcium carbonate and zinc gluconate I probably shouldn't use?
Glad I could help!
If you want to verify what the precipitate is, you can run a binary study. Just combine two of your ingredients in the approximate concentrations you'd want in your final solution, and see if you get precipitation. Run it on as small a scale as you have the equipment for, no need to waste material. Try the potassium phosphate with one of the Mag pairs, that should confirm if it's Mg phosphate. (Potassium is soluble with just about everything).
If that is the case, you're likely to see similar precipitation with Mg Citrate, since it's the Mg that's the problem, not the paired ion. Especially for the mag chloride, you've already got chloride in the solution from the sodium chloride, plus chloride is soluble with just about everything, it's a very strong acid (in the pKa sense, not the corrosive sense).
Ultimately, though, if you don't mind having to shake vigorously before use, precipitate might not be a big problem for you. I imagine it mostly impacts absorption?
[snip]
Oh, one more thing! If you're using a batch within a few days, I wouldn't worry much about microbial growth. At my job, aqueous unbuffered solutions are considered good to use for 7 days. Now that's not for human consumption, but that's also at room temp. Refrigerating for 2-3 days? I wouldn't worry.
Alternately, heat it up and drink it at tea-like temperatures - you'll get a mild bump to solubility (true for most but not all ion pairs - double check solubility curves).
Interesting thread, not easy for me to understand as I failed chemistry twice LOL.
Therefore allow me to offer some stupid answers… Quick Googling revealed a lemon juice & salt recipe. Perhaps you don’t want the salt, but I was surprised that lemons are so high in potassium. They also have some other beneficial compounds.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/lemons#plant-compounds
I wonder if you can get the electrolytes you need from a mixture of whole foods or fresh-squeezed juices?
Here’s another recipe:
https://eatbeautiful.net/homemade-electrolyte-powder-easy-natural-diy-sports-drink/
A lot of the folks who follow Bryan Johnson (longevity guy on YouTube) seem to be hacking their nutrition in similar ways to what you describe for many reasons including specific diseases.
You may be able to find some folks with solutions (ooh, a chemistry joke!) on YouTube.
When I was through-hiking a few weeks ago, electrolytes were important and someone mentioned that some brand had a recipe online that you could use. I can’t remember the brand. (Personally I used Nuun tablets, but I don’t think it was that brand.)
Wow that is a fascinating response. I myself certainly wouldn’t grab a recipe like hers without a lot of cross-checking, but I did find it interesting that she was saying to avoid a certain brand of one of the minerals because of some kind of contamination or other issue — I was wondering what you’d say to that. And of course you pointed out a completely different issue.
Assuming you are careful to check what you’re doing with other experts to avoid cumulative toxicity I’m sure you’ll succeed.
An aside, history is littered with examples of people who fanatically believed in one element or another (e.g. Linus Pauling). Just today I watched an excellent expose of David Sinclair, who has been selling anti-aging supplements based on the now-debunked resveratrol.
Just curious why you prefer the citrate vs. chloride version for potassium?
metabolic acidosis
Heck, I can't even do the official WHO ORS recipe because of that very reason. They use potassium chloride as their potassium vehicle, and I have to use potassium phosphate and potassium citrate to keep from making myself worse.
[...]
The thing to understand is that chloride is the electrolyte that actually helps drive some forms of metabolic acidosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperchloremic_acidosis), and is actually the high level heart killer component in table salt (https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jchf.2021.07.006)... not sodium. Hyperchloremia (high chloride levels) can also strip potassium out of cells causing cellular hypokalemia (https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physiol.00006.2015), something I struggle with, and can also impair renal electrolyte balance functions (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8549658/), which can make electrolyte imbalances worse.
But regarding that Eat Beautiful recipe especially... I don't point this out to be a jerk, but it is a fantastic learning example. Their recipe is potassium chloride, sodium chloride, and magnesium chloride with maple syrup? WOW, 2.25g of elemental chlorine in a 24oz serving (the one electrolyte number she didn't calculate out)! That is literally a heart attack in a bottle for some people, and if she's actually drinking that on the regular? I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she winds up developing heart and kidney problems longer term. I don't even have that much chloride in a full four liter recipe, and that quantity is only half of what eight servings of Liquid IV would give you, which would also make a full four liters! Taking in less than half that amount daily (around 1g) in 2L of ORS was literally still driving my blood chloride levels through the roof.
A quick look suggests that your precipitate might be Magnesium Carbonate and/or Magnesium Phosphate, both of which are insoluble in water. Zinc is also insoluble with carbonate and phosphate.
Non-food chemist here.A quick look suggests that your precipitate might be Magnesium Carbonate and/or Magnesium Phosphate, both of which are insoluble in water. Zinc is also insoluble with carbonate and phosphate.
I'm also a chemist. This is correct. The higher charges on these cations and anions make them more attractive to each other (opposites attract, the force of attraction can be calculated with Coulomb's Law) which overcome the entropy associated with them being separated in solution.
Non-food chemist here.A quick look suggests that your precipitate might be Magnesium Carbonate and/or Magnesium Phosphate, both of which are insoluble in water. Zinc is also insoluble with carbonate and phosphate.
I'm also a chemist. This is correct. The higher charges on these cations and anions make them more attractive to each other (opposites attract, the force of attraction can be calculated with Coulomb's Law) which overcome the entropy associated with them being separated in solution.
I concur on the likely precipitates. I would note that a normal human stomach has a very low pH[1], with acidity that varies between “battery acid” and lemon juice. So these precipitates should re-dissolve easily.
The stomach acid also has a lot of chloride.
I’m not sure about the source of the abominable taste, but my bet is the general high pH of the preparation, and the magnesium.
I wouldn’t suggest trying this at home. Daley is correct in searching for some additional info.
| Batch 1: Precipitate | Batch 2: Weird Taste | Batch 3: Better? |
| Sodium Citrate | Sodium Citrate | Sodium Citrate |
| Potassium Citrate | Potassium Citrate | Potassium Citrate |
| Dipotassium Phosphate | Dipotassium Phosphate | Dipotassium Phosphate |
| Glucose | Glucose | Glucose |
| Citric Acid | Citric Acid | Citric Acid |
| Sodium Chloride | Sodium Chloride | N/A |
| Mg Malate | Mg Cl | Mg Cl |
| Ca Carbonate | Ca Citrate | Ca Citrate |
| N/A | Zn Gluconate | Zn Gluconate |
Hm. If you share the ingredients and concentrations (mg/mL or mM) I can poke at it a bit. Possibly it's just that the new concoction is at a lower pH than the previous one, which would help solubility of the Mg.
Hm. If you share the ingredients and concentrations (mg/mL or mM) I can poke at it a bit. Possibly it's just that the new concoction is at a lower pH than the previous one, which would help solubility of the Mg.
I'll shoot you (and the others - if they want) a PM with the ingredient list. I don't want to publish it publicly to avoid having others blindly recreating what I'm doing to use themselves, given the slightly risky nature of it all, and the fact that the numbers in the recipe are somewhat tailored specifically to my own metabolism defects.
I am not a food chemist. But my grandfather was, he designed food products and baby formula from 1950 -1980 and continued to do research even after he retired well into his 90s. He and lived to be 102 and passed away last year. He shared with me some good advice that seems like I could share it here. Hydrogen Peroxide, in small amounts is very good for you and will kill all sorts of pathogens in the body. He used it as mouthwash every night and put an eyedropper full in his OJ at breakfast every morning. He said it works as well as any prescription ointment for cold sores, and I have found that to be true.
I'm not sure if that helps with your dilemma but I thought you would find it interesting.