Two bottles. One says 2,000 mg. Ours says 200 mg. Ours may still contain more magnesium. Here's the trick — and how to never fall for it again.
Walk down any supplement aisle and you'll see magnesium bottles shouting big numbers: 1,500 mg, 2,000 mg, sometimes more. Next to them, a bottle like ours says 200 mg. Ten times less, right?
Not quite. Those two numbers are measuring different things — and once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Compound weight vs. elemental magnesium
Magnesium doesn't come as a pure metal in a capsule. It's always bound to something — glycine, citrate, oxide — forming a compound. That compound has weight, but only a fraction of it is actual magnesium.
Magnesium bisglycinate, the form we use, is one magnesium atom bound to two glycine molecules. By weight, it's roughly 14% magnesium. The other 86% is glycine — a perfectly benign amino acid, but not magnesium.
So there are two honest ways to describe the same capsule:
- Compound weight: how much magnesium bisglycinate powder is inside. For Sleep & Calm, that's roughly 1.4 g per two-capsule serving.
- Elemental magnesium: how much actual magnesium your body gets. For us, that's 200 mg.
Same capsules. Same contents. One number is seven times bigger than the other.
The front-label trick
Guess which number ends up on the front of most labels.
A brand can print "Magnesium Glycinate 2,000 mg" in large type, and it's technically true — that's the compound weight. But 2,000 mg of magnesium glycinate delivers only about 280 mg of elemental magnesium. The big number isn't a bigger dose. It's a bigger font.
The FDA requires the elemental amount to appear in the Supplement Facts panel on the back. So the real number is always there — just not where the marketing lives.
How to read any magnesium label in 10 seconds
- Flip the bottle over.
- Find "Magnesium" in the Supplement Facts panel. That number is elemental — the one that counts.
- Ignore the front until you've done steps 1 and 2.
That's it. This works on every magnesium product, ours included.
Why we put the small number up front
We print 200 mg — the elemental amount — on the front of Sleep & Calm, because that's the number your body actually receives. It looks smaller next to the shouting bottles. We're fine with that.
One more layer worth knowing: not all "glycinate" powders are equal. Some are buffered — bisglycinate blended with cheaper magnesium oxide to bulk up the elemental number at lower cost. We use fully reacted magnesium bisglycinate: every milligram of magnesium in the capsule is actually bound to glycine, nothing blended in. It's the difference between what the label implies and what's in the powder — which is also why every lot we make is independently tested, with results published by lot number.
200 mg of elemental magnesium, from roughly 1.4 g of fully reacted magnesium bisglycinate. Plus 200 mg of L-theanine. Everything else — 0 mg.
That's the whole label. Now you know how to read everyone else's.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.