VOL. 14 — SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2026

Coffee first, and let's talk a little bit about magnesium.

The Research

Magnesium: should you be taking it?

Magnesium is absolutely having a moment in fitness and health circles. It's become a popular conversation among podcasts and influencers, and if you're a guy who's having trouble sleeping, big brother is definitely going to find a way to put magnesium in front of you. Instagram knows. YouTube knows. That ad found you for a reason.

So let's break this down.

What it actually does.

Magnesium is a cofactor in more than three hundred enzymatic reactions in your body. Energy production. Nerve signaling. Muscle contraction. Blood sugar regulation. Bone structure. It is not some fringe nutrient somebody invented to sell you a bottle — it's load-bearing.

The recommended dietary allowance for adult men is 400 to 420 mg a day. Women, 310 to 320.

Are you short on it? Probably, a little.

The NIH's analysis of national survey data found that roughly 48% of Americans take in less magnesium from food and drink than their estimated average requirement (EAR). Older men and teenagers come up shortest.

Now, before you panic: falling below the EAR is not the same as being deficient. Your body is good at holding onto magnesium, pulling from bone stores when intake dips. Frank deficiency is rare in otherwise healthy people. But sitting chronically below what you need is common, and that's a different kind of problem — a slower one.

The issue.

You cannot easily check. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) hasn't measured serum magnesium in participants since 1974, and magnesium isn't generally included in the routine electrolyte panel your doctor orders. Even when it is measured, blood levels are a poor window — the overwhelming majority of your magnesium sits in bone and soft tissue, not floating in serum, so your blood can look perfectly normal while your stores run low.

So when someone tells you they "tested low on magnesium," ask what test. Usually there wasn't one.

Now, the wall of bottles.

Walk down the supplement aisle and you'll find magnesium oxide, citrate, glycinate, malate, taurate, L-threonate, chloride, aspartate, and a few more nobody has heard of. The marketing implies these are specialized tools for specialized jobs.

Mostly they aren't. But one thing about them is real and worth understanding: the form determines how much you actually absorb.

Magnesium is too reactive to sit on a shelf by itself, so it's always bound to something else. That binding partner controls two things — how much elemental magnesium each gram carries, and how readily it dissolves and crosses your intestinal wall. Those are different numbers, and the second one matters more.

Magnesium oxide has the biggest number on the label, about 60% elemental magnesium by weight. It is also the worst absorbed by a wide margin. It barely dissolves. Most of it passes straight through you.

(Firoz M, Graber M. Magnes Res. 2001 Dec;14(4):257-62. PMID: 11794633; Lindberg JS, et al. J Am Coll Nutr. 1990 Feb;9(1):48-55. PMID: 2407766)

That poor absorption is exactly why magnesium oxide works as a laxative and an antacid. Same mechanism. If you've ever taken a cheap magnesium and spent the following morning looking like Harry in the scene from Dumb and Dumber — you know why.

Citrate and glycinate carry less magnesium per gram but actually get where they're going. Citrate is well studied and well absorbed, and it has a mild laxative effect of its own — useful for some men, inconvenient for others. Glycinate is bound to the amino acid glycine, tends to be the gentlest on the gut, and is the one I'd point most men toward if they're going to take something.

Malate, taurate, and L-threonate are the newer, pricier entries. Threonate in particular is marketed hard for brain and sleep benefits on the grounds that it crosses the blood-brain barrier better. That's a plausible mechanism, but with thin human evidence behind it, and you'll pay four times as much for it.

Be skeptical of the absorption charts you see online — the ones claiming 80% for glycinate and 4% for oxide. The direction is right. The precision is not.

So does supplementing actually do anything?

Well, sort of.

Sleep is the big claim, and the evidence is thinner than the marketing. A systematic review of oral magnesium for insomnia in older adults found only three randomized trials — 151 people total. Pooled, magnesium got them to sleep about 17 minutes faster than placebo. Total sleep time improved by roughly 16 minutes, which was not statistically significant. All three trials carried moderate-to-high risk of bias, and the authors concluded outright that the literature is substandard for physicians to make well-informed recommendations.

Seventeen minutes, from three small studies of questionable quality. That's not a great headline to sell folks on buying your product.

(Mah J, Pitre T. BMC Complement Med Ther. 2021 Apr 17;21(1):125. PMID: 33865376)

Blood pressure is where the evidence is strongest, and it's still modest. A meta-analysis of 34 double-blind placebo-controlled trials found that a median dose of 368 mg a day for about three months lowered systolic pressure by 2.0 mmHg and diastolic by 1.8 mmHg.

(Zhang X, et al. Hypertension. 2016 Aug;68(2):324-333)

Two points. That's real, and at a population level it isn't nothing — but no man is going to feel it.

And a newer and larger meta-analysis, 38 trials and 2,709 participants, sharpened the picture a bit more: the benefit was concentrated among people who actually had hypertension or low magnesium to begin with. The authors specifically cautioned that the studies varied enormously.

(Hypertension. 2025. PMID: 41000008)

Blood sugar shows a similar pattern. Pooled across 24 trials in people with type 2 diabetes, magnesium supplementation improved fasting glucose and A1c by small but measurable amounts — and the effects depended heavily on baseline magnesium status and glycemic control.

Notice the through-line. Magnesium tends to help the people who were short on it — for the most part. In everyone else, the effect is small enough to be hard to find.

Where I land.

Food first, and this isn't a hardship list: pumpkin seeds, almonds, cashews, spinach, black beans, edamame, dark chocolate. A handful of pumpkin seeds gets you a fifth of the day's target.

If you want to supplement, go ahead. It's cheap, it's safe at reasonable doses, and the downside is having the poops. Glycinate if sleep or general topping-up is the goal. Citrate if you also want the gut effect. Skip the oxide unless constipation is specifically the point.

But be honest with yourself about what you're buying. You are not buying a fix. You are buying a small, plausible nudge with real but modest evidence behind it.

Now, the part that might make you uncomfortable: you probably won't actually know if it's working or not. You really can't test it meaningfully beyond the placebo effect. The effects, where they exist, are too small to feel. You will be taking it on faith and calling it data.

I take magnesium. I also cannot honestly tell you it does anything for me. Both of those are true and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.

But to quote one of my favorite movies I referenced above, "So you're telling me there's a chance..."

And if you're sleeping four hours a night, drinking every evening, not working out, and scrolling until midnight — magnesium is not the variable. Fix the big rocks. Then, sure, add the pebble.

Worth Remembering

I can make the argument that Jordan Peterson is one of the most influential and important figures of the 21st century. His books and lectures have changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of men across the world, and I suspect that number is low.

This quote comes from 12 Rules for Life, which I'd recommend to anybody. I'll grant that Peterson can be hard to read and harder to listen to, mostly because he is so much more intelligent than everyone else in the room that he doesn't always slow down for the rest of us. But if you dig in, what's there is completely and utterly profound.

The whole argument of the chapter this comes from is that your body and your mind are not running on separate tracks. The way you carry yourself changes how you're treated. How you're treated changes how you feel. How you feel changes how you carry yourself. Around and around it goes.

Charles Haanel got at the same thing a century earlier in The Master Key System: we must "be" before we can "do," and we can "do" only to the extent which we "are," and what we "are" depends upon what we "think."

Moral of the story: if you want to be something, start acting like it. If you want to be respected, start carrying yourself like a man who ought to be.

And to stand up tall is also to accept that your life is your responsibility. To carry that fully, without setting it down and without complaining about the weight, is the mark of a real man.

Try This Week

Get dressed. On purpose. At least once.

During the craziest stretch of most of our lives — the year we all just file under 2020 — I got an email from a mentor that I've never forgotten.

He wrote something to the effect of: with so many people working from home, you should still take care of yourself. Even if you're working from your kitchen table, get dressed like you normally would. Put on some dress pants and your polo, sit down, and get to work. Don't let yourself slip into the laziness that shows up when nobody's around. Present yourself as someone who should be presentable.

That's stuck with me ever since.

Honestly, it goes back further. Even in undergrad I was always struck by how people reacted when I got dressed up — and I mean lightly. Jeans, semi-nice shoes, a casual button-down tucked in. That was it. And people would ask if I was about to give a speech at a wedding or preach from the pulpit.

That tells you something about where the bar has fallen.

There was a time when men dressed to leave the house and airports were full of suits and top hats. Somewhere along the way we collectively decided sweats, a stretched-out t-shirt, and a waistband three inches below where a waistband belongs was fine for every occasion. It happened so gradually nobody remembers agreeing to it.

I want to be careful here. A man's worth is not in his clothes. I've known men in work boots and Carhartts worth ten of any man in a blazer.

What I'm saying is that taking care of how you present yourself is a form of taking yourself seriously. And your kids are watching you do it. They're learning what a man looks like when he walks out the door, and they're learning it from you specifically, without either of you ever discussing it.

Some men will scoff. "I do just fine in my sweatpants." All the power to them, and I mean that. But I have watched a striking number of men change something real in their lives starting with something this small. Not because the shirt did anything. Because the decision did.

The floor, if you want one:

• Khaki pants or slacks that actually fit. Khaki shorts count — we live in Florida.
• Dress shoes, ideally, if you're wearing pants.
• Clean up your face. Trim the beard.
• Ditch the hat.
• Throw on a belt.
• Tuck in a polo or a button-down.

That's it. Nobody's asking you to learn what a pocket square or brogues are.

I keep a small pocket journal where I write down quotes and ideas at the end of the night — little isms I come back to. Here's one I put down recently:

Get dressed up every day. Even if everything goes to hell, at least you looked good.

Not a bad rule for life.

Do it once this week. See how people respond to you. More importantly, see how you respond to yourself.

From the Bookshelf

A little something different for the boys this week.

Galahad and the Grail (Merlin's Isle: An Arthuriad, Vol. 1) Malcolm Guite

Guite is a poet, a priest, and a Cambridge man, and this spring he published the first volume of what he's building as a four-part epic ballad cycle retelling the Arthurian legends. Not a novel about knights. An actual epic poem, in ballad form, with woodcut illustrations, meant to be read aloud.

I know a lot of men scoff at poetry, which strikes me as a kind of hubris. Some of the greatest men who ever lived were tremendous poets and wrote verse their entire lives. And there is something absolutely breathtaking — transcendent, honestly — about reading and writing it.

This one is the Grail quest. Galahad setting out from Camelot, through the Wasteland, toward something that will heal not only the wounded Fisher King but the land itself.

Guite is working in a very old tradition. Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene in the 1590s — knights, quests, allegory, hundreds of pages of verse. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Tennyson wrote the Idylls of the King, which is the Arthur story most of the last two centuries knew it through. These men wrote long stories in poetry, back when that's simply how a big story got told. Guite has picked that up again and it is refreshing.

My recommendation: read it out loud. To your kids, or just to yourself. It isn't difficult to read, but it is genuinely beautiful to hear. And as a general matter, all of us should be reading something out loud — even if it's only bedtime books to the little ones. We've lost that, and it was worth having.

I also cannot recommend the audiobook more highly. Guite has an incredible voice. There's something in hearing a poet read his own work that doesn't come off the page.

Closing Thought

Poetry is a gift, and somewhere along the way we let it become something men are embarrassed by.

That would have baffled every generation before us.

Churchill wrote a poem at fifteen about the influenza epidemic tearing through Europe. It won a prize at Harrow. He was never a prolific poet, but he memorized enormous quantities of verse and could still recite long passages of Macaulay in extreme old age.

Teddy Roosevelt's son Kermit handed him a book by a struggling poet named Edwin Arlington Robinson. Roosevelt read it, found out the man was broke, and got him a job at the New York Customs House so he could keep writing. That's a President of the United States personally intervening to keep a poet fed.

Tolkien filled Middle-earth with verse. Lewis published poetry before he ever wrote a word of Narnia. Among the founders, Franklin wrote verse and John Quincy Adams wrote it his whole life.

None of these were soft men.

That's the part we've gotten wrong. We've accepted a caricature of manhood where the man is a bumbling idiot who grunts at the television — and we've done it to ourselves. But a man can and should be educated. A man can and should be intellectual. A man can sit down and try to fit what he feels into a shape with a beat to it.

You can be warrior and poet. That was the standard for most of recorded history, and it's a better one than what we've settled for.

So write some. Badly. Nobody has to see it. Prose lets you hide; a line with a rhythm to it doesn't, and you'll find out what you actually think.

And read some. Out loud. To somebody you love.

That's all for this week, fellas.