Also known as: trimagnesium dicitrate, Mg citrate, magnesium dicitrate
Magnesium Citrate
·By Croix
What is magnesium citrate?
Magnesium citrate (trimagnesium dicitrate, Mg₃(C₆H₅O₇)₂) is the magnesium salt of citric acid. As an anhydrous powder it's about 16% elemental magnesium by mass — so 1 g of citrate powder provides ~160 mg of elemental Mg. That's a touch lower than malate's ~20% but well within the same range.
The form used by DripDrop ORS, Ultima Replenisher, and (historically) several Skratch formulations alongside magnesium carbonate. It's the magnesium salt with the strongest direct head-to-head human bioavailability evidence: Walker et al. (2003) compared it against amino-acid chelate and oxide in a 60-day double-blind RCT and found citrate had the greatest urinary, serum, and salivary Mg increase.
How does it work in a sports drink?
Mg citrate dissociates into 3 magnesium ions and 2 citrate ions in solution. The citrate counter-ion gives the powder a mild alkalinizing effect on solution pH — though at the per-bottle doses used in a sports drink (0.15–0.3 g) this is well below the gram-scale buffering protocols studied for performance, so the alkalinizing claim is real chemistry but functionally marketing at our doses.
On absorption, the standard reference is Walker 2003 (Magnesium Research 16(3):183–191): citrate outperformed both oxide and amino-acid chelate over 60 days. The 2016 Kappeler BMC Nutrition single-dose crossover replicated the citrate-over-oxide finding. There is no published direct head-to-head RCT of citrate vs malate in humans, so the malate-vs-citrate comparison is fundamentally indirect — but the gap, if any, is small.
How do I use it at home?
Target 25–50 mg of magnesium per 500–750 ml bottle — that's roughly 0.15–0.3 g of citrate powder. Slightly more powder per dose than malate because of the lower elemental-Mg fraction, but the practical difference is negligible at these amounts.
Citrate is the magnesium form already in many people's pantries (it's also sold as a clinical laxative at much higher doses). At sports-drink doses (well under 100 mg Mg per bottle) the laxative effect is irrelevant — clinical bowel-prep doses are 1,750+ mg of elemental Mg.
If you're starting fresh and don't already have a magnesium powder on the shelf, we recommend magnesium malate for the LMNT-form reasons (higher elemental-Mg density, slightly cleaner taste, comparable bioavailability). If you already have citrate, keep using it — the science doesn't support switching for switching's sake.
Dose & usage at a glance
- Elemental magnesium
- ≈160 mg Mg per 1 g citrate powder
- Typical drink dose
- 0.15–0.3 g per bottle (25–50 mg Mg)
- Bioavailability
- Equivalent to amino-acid chelate, ~6× oxide (Walker 2003)
- Laxative threshold
- >400 mg elemental Mg single dose — well above any sports-drink use
Where to buy it in bulk
We primarily recommend Nutricost-brand products (made in GMP-compliant, FDA-registered facilities, third-party tested), with NOW Foods or BulkSupplements as fallbacks for ingredients Nutricost doesn't stock. The list below shows every channel that carries the product — Nutricost direct, iHerb, and Amazon — sorted by unit price. Pack sizes vary across retailers, so the lowest $/g usually means the largest pack — pick whichever store and size fits your usage. Links are affiliate — the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. For ingredients none of the three brands carries (HBCD, table salt, sucrose) we describe the typical specialty- or grocery-store option and skip the affiliate link.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
- Amazon (Nutricost) — Nutricost Magnesium Citrate Powder (500 g) — via Amazon500g pack · $3.00 per 100 g$14.99Buy
- iHerb (Nutricost) — Nutricost Magnesium Citrate, Unflavored, 17.9 oz (500 g) — via iHerb500g pack · $3.39 per 100 g$16.95Buy
- Nutricost — Nutricost Magnesium Citrate Powder (250 g)250g pack · $5.99 per 100 g$14.97Buy
DIY teardowns that use magnesium citrate
- DIY Tailwind Endurance: tune sodium to your own sweat rate
- DIY Skratch Sport Hydration: real-fruit flavor without the $1 scoop
2 teardowns— all walk through how magnesium citratefits into the specific commercial product's formulation.