why is it good to take magnesium if you drink alcohol, and why does it work like a laxative?
In: Biology
Magnesium *is* a laxative. With or without alcohol. As a general rule, water follows ions in the body. So lots of magnesium in the gut, water follows and that makes everything a lot more watery
Alcohol is magnesuric which means it leads to magnesium wasting in the urine (it inhibits the reabsorption after filtration). I don’t know how much physiology you know, but the kidney usually filters by throwing out many things and getting back the things that matter. Alcohol inhibits the getting back of magnesium. There’s also other mechanisms but I’m not familiar with all of them. And magnesium is also a laxative because, like many minerals, it is poorly absorbed in the intestine which means if you take a lot of it, it’ll be highly concentrated in the lumen (inside of intestines) and via osmosis water diffuses to the lumen making your stool watery and manifesting as diarrhea. Magnesium has also been found to increase the level of Aquaporin3, a water channel, in the intestinal cells. This exacerbates water loss as it gives it less resistance when it is diffusing out of the cells.
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