@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?
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.
Appreciate the help
@zygote and some of the thoughts helped a bit, especially when combined with what Raenia posted. As for the quoted part specifically? Making in bulk but portioning out the powder evenly with the right balance/blend for smaller batches doesn't work for a multitude of reasons. First is the distribution problems with all the salts and grain size sorting between the items and not having an industrial mixer to portion smaller batches off with. Second, I don't have the money for a decent milligram accurate scale, let alone one that could handle more than a 50g max limit. Third, is the fact that at the concentrations of the minerals as formulated - I'm going through about 1.5-2L a day, and realistically, that means the batches mixed up only need to be stable for 2-3 days at screaming most. Making in 4L powder batches seems to be the best balance between speed, hassle, and using the best affordable while still functionally useful weight tools available.
And yes, I realistically do need to find an expert... why I posted in hopes that someone of that variety was available in the brain-trust here. Unfortunately, it's harder to get solid information like that off of randos on the internet from what were all the bastions of the most useful information lately, and it's barely better when you are embedded in a known and established community. Unfortunately still, getting that sort of medically relevant expert assistance from the actual experts you're technically supposed to rely on, especially given the need for speed and nimbleness on keeping myself even remotely functional with this stuff while using privatized Medicaid and dealing with CFS/ME? Like it or not, the reality of this situation is when you're
actually poor and not just cosplaying poverty to qualify for government benefits one wouldn't actually need if they'd just worked a little longer before leaching off the labor of millions of underpaid people, you don't have the resources to get the help you actually need, let alone in a timely fashion. Nearly all of the progress that I've made the past six months since things finally ran so far off the rails that I hit a crisis point has been from spending money that I didn't have and spending the physical and mental energy I couldn't actually spare researching to get the answers that I've gotten thus far... and taking the risk of guinea pigging myself.
Amazingly enough, I've accidentally stumbled into the solution for the real underlying problems, but it's hard to dial in the electrolyte supplementation levels when all you got to refine it is the occasional complete electrolyte blood test that frequently still gets crucial minerals like phosphorous and magnesium forgotten and dropped from the order by any doctors in question because electrolyte panels don't include those and anion gap calculations now, and trying to piece together the same from self-order labs winds up costing well over $100 a pop... and good luck even getting an anion gap off those self-ordered labs unless you sit down and try to estimate the math yourself off the electrolyte panel. Well, there's also trying to infer what minerals may be too high or too low based on blood pressure readings, types of heart arrythmia caused and detected by an ECG, and listening to what pains the body's giving you and you've experienced from the various extremes encountered... and I'm not gonna sugar coat it. Most of the time? I'm pretty okay, but when things go out of balance, it can get scary fast. I used to brute-force these mineral supplements with pills, but that doesn't work anymore, and I need something a lot more... precise.
As for why a ready-made product isn't already available? Well, in a way, there is kinda already... but they're IV solutions. I can barely get bloodwork, as is... so that leaves mineral ORS drunk frequently and slowly throughout the day to keep levels balanced, absorbed through a gut that's got malabsorption issues with these very minerals due to scarring from years of undiagnosed celiac disease. Most of the electrolyte solutions on the market are targeted at healthy people tailored for the fitness market, or for people actively suffering from dehydration caused by illness, and both are meant for short term use as it's expected that the cause of the imbalance needing the replenishment is temporary. And the problem is, the cause of my imbalance is chronic and rooted in metabolism malfunction, which means ongoing, likely for the rest of my life. It's already inconvenient enough to take as it is... you can perhaps see why multiplying that out into two or three separate ORS mixes that I have to potentially space out to avoid interaction between not only hampers the need for the regular dosing, but complicates and increases further variation and potentially getting ratios between the target minerals further out of balance. It's why taking supplement pills is the easier path, but that's not an option for me these days given the nature of the hypokalemia and lack of potassium reserves in the body currently. But the thing is, all these minerals should be happy enough to coexist when appropriately buffered, and there are even IV mixes that do just that... after all, if our body can do it...?
