Eating This Vegetable While Taking Magnesium Can Backfire

Taking daily magnesium supplements can lower your risk of muscle cramps, improve energy, treat insomnia and constipation, regulate your blood sugar and blood pressure, and strengthen your bones. Like many other nutritional supplements, it's best to take magnesium with food, as doing so can prevent nausea. However, there are also certain foods that you should avoid eating right before or after taking this supplement.

In particular, spinach can affect your ability to absorb magnesium properly. Because this leafy green contains high levels of oxalates, which bind to magnesium and other minerals during the digestion process, it can reduce the amount of magnesium your body is able to soak-up. The oxalic acid in spinach can also affect calcium absorption, while the phytates in spinach can reduce absorption of magnesium, iron, and zinc supplements.

Another potential risk is a magnesium overdose. Eating fresh, raw spinach is an underrated way to add more magnesium to your diet. However, because spinach is already rich in magnesium, you should talk to your doctor before taking supplements as well. Consuming too much magnesium can cause symptoms like nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, low blood pressure, and arrhythmia. In general, most people don't typically eat enough spinach for this to be a concern. The greater risk is taking too high a dose of a magnesium supplement each day.

If you are a huge fan of fresh spinach, there are a few simple ways to make sure you can keep eating it safely, even while taking magnesium supplements. Firstly, however, you should be aware of the maximum amount of spinach you can safely eat each week. Consuming large amounts of raw spinach each day could cause a buildup of oxalates in your body. You should also avoid eating spinach right before or after taking your supplement. This will lower the risk of any type of interaction between the two.

Rather than eating spinach raw, you should explore spinach recipes that use steamed, roasted, or boiled spinach. When you cook the spinach before eating, you can reduce the levels of oxalates and phytates present so that they are less likely to interfere with your ability to absorb magnesium. If you boil fresh spinach in water, don't include any other vegetables or foods in the same pot, or reuse the spinach water. The water could potentially retain high levels of oxalates and phytates from the spinach that could then seep into other foods.