[joe_guy]

Not OP but I've had luck with zinc and magnesium aspartate supplements commonly available on Amazon. I take two caps that each are a net about 500mg an hour before bed, along with 1mg of melatonin.

Been doing this for a lot of years now.

[hgomersall]

You need to be a bit careful with zinc. A doctor friend of mine compiled a load of data showing most zinc supplements are contaminated with cadmium, which is cumulative. I'm not sure if he's published yet.

Edit, here's a paper by some other researchers: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0963748012005760...

[krackers]

Fyi in the consumerlabs review for zinc, all products passed testing for cadmium levels with the highest (Nature's Bounty) having 0.5mcg/g.

You basically need to be careful with any supplement since it's unregulated, and need to do a lot of careful diligence. It's a good sign if they are honest about their supplier and you trace back their supply chain. E.g. for many chelated supplements (zinc included), if you see a TRAACS trademark then the source is Balchem (Albion) which to my understanding is fairly well regarded.

ConsumerLabs tested one such TRAACS product and found it to be 0.1 mcg/g cadmium, so likely most products using TRAACS zinc bisglycinate formulation should be similar. I also found some EU food safety application [1] which confirms that across 3 different manufacturers of zinc bisglycinate (one of which is Albion), all samples were < 0.1mcg/g

[1] https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.2903/j.efsa....

[_yb2s]

Thanks! It is also critical to balance zinc with copper, and supplementing a lot of zinc without copper can effectively cause copper deficiency, which is very serious.

[joe_guy]

Thank you for this information. I'll either switch to a better brand or go straight magnesium.