By Dr. Mercola
Calcium is likely one of the hottest dietary dietary supplements available on the market, largely due to the broadly circulated mantra that mega-doses of this mineral are important for constructing and sustaining wholesome bones.
Consequently, many individuals consider that taking a calcium complement is a straightforward approach to forestall bone fractures related to osteoporosis.
What they haven’t been informed is that whilst you can power elevated bone mineral density with calcium dietary supplements, you can not make sure that this can lead to higher bone energy.
Be Cautious In Deciphering Bone Assessments Outcomes
Bone density, whereas a superb measurement of compressive energy, doesn’t reveal tensile energy, i.e. whether or not or not your bone will resist breaking from being pulled or stretched, as generally happens in a fall or comparable trauma.
Furthermore, “osteoporosis,” as presently outlined by bone scans (DXA scan) utilizing the T-score, inappropriately defines “regular bone density” based on the usual of a 25-year outdated, younger grownup.
In different phrases, in case you are 40, 50, and even 100, the T-score-based system says your bones are usually not regular, and even diseased if they don’t seem to be as dense as they have been once you have been a younger grownup.
If in reality they used the age-appropriate Z-score, most instances of “osteopenia,” and plenty of instances of “osteoporosis,” would abruptly disappear as a result of they have been inappropriately labeled from the beginning.
Do Calcium Dietary supplements Predispose You to Breast Most cancers?
In the end, the “calcium is sweet on your bones” mantra is one more instance of a very good principle gone mistaken, and represents how broadly deluded the mainstream medical neighborhood is about bone well being and the character of osteoporosis, and its extremely fabricated twin situation “osteopenia.”
There are literally a lot of research indicating that mass market calcium dietary supplements enhance your danger for cardiovascular incidents and different issues, whereas providing little profit to your bones. Solely as a result of one thing can enhance your bone density: consuming what quantities to chalk or pulverized bone meal, or worse, chemical substances just like the medication Fosamax and Evista, doesn’t imply this can translate into improved well being on your bones, or any of your different organ programs.
Certainly, earlier than leaping off the lemming-like cliff of typical medical knowledge, take into account there’s a strong physique of analysis indicating that greater bone density may very well enhance the danger of malignant breast most cancers by 300% or extra! Contemplating that near 1 in 4 ladies will probably be identified with most cancers of their lives, with breast most cancers prime on the listing, is not the neurotic fixation on growing bone density with calcium dietary supplements misplaced, particularly when it might enhance the general danger of dying from most cancers and, as we’ll see, heart problems (the #1 killer), as properly?
Calcium May be Helpful or Lethal Relying on The place it Ends Up in Your Physique
Calcium is essentially the most ample mineral in your physique, obligatory for not solely bone well being but additionally regulating your heartbeat, conducting nerve impulses, clotting blood and stimulating hormone secretions. Your physique doesn’t make calcium, and actually loses calcium day by day via your pores and skin, nails, hair, sweat and elimination, which is why you have to substitute it by way of your food regimen.
It has been estimated, nonetheless, that your physique excretes as little as 100 mg a day, making the present suggestions by the Nationwide Osteoporosis Basis for girls over 50 to take 1200 mg a day, a bit troubling. Once we examine our calcium-rich food regimen to the standard calcium-poor Chinese language peasant food regimen, which was freed from cow’s milk and calcium dietary supplements, roughly 250 mg a day of plant-based calcium was all that was wanted to meet their bodily wants – and this can be a tradition with no phrase for “osteoporosis” in its 3,000+ yr outdated language!
The reality is that taking any calcium in extra or isolation, with out complementary vitamins like magnesium, vitamin D and vitamin K2, which assist hold your physique in steadiness, can have opposed results, comparable to calcium build up in coronary arteries and inflicting coronary heart assaults. Even taking calcium with vitamin D doesn’t seem like sufficient to stop all these opposed results.
So once you take a biologically international type of calcium (comparable to limestone, oyster shell and bone meal (hydroxylapatite), or when your physique’s means to direct calcium to the proper locations turns into impaired (as if you find yourself poor in vitamin K2), calcium could also be deposited the place it should not be, which might result in a number of well being issues.
Usually, a lot of the burden of eradicating the surplus calcium falls on the kidneys, which is why it has been confirmed on quite a few events that calcium carbonate quickly calcifies arteries in these with compromised kidney perform, particularly hemodialysis sufferers. Calcium deposits are, in reality, main contributors and even causative components in lots of situations, together with the next:
Cellulite and scar tissue Coronary artery illness and atherosclerosis Dental plaque and gum illness Hypothyroidism Weight problems and diabetes Alzheimer’s illness Breast most cancers and cysts (fibrocystic breasts) Gallstones, colon most cancers and Crohn’s illness Kidney stones Ovarian cysts Cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration Bone spurs, stiff joints, osteoarthritis, tendonitis and bone most cancers
Too A lot Calcium Could Create Mineral Deficiencies that Promote Illness
Robert Thompson, M.D. wrote a e book on this topic known as The Calcium Lie, which explains that bone is comprised of at the least a dozen minerals, and the unique concentrate on calcium supplementation is more likely to worsen bone density and really enhance your danger for osteoporosis. Dr. Thompson believes overconsumption of calcium creates different mineral deficiencies and imbalances that can enhance your danger of coronary heart illness, kidney stones, gallstones, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, weight problems and sort 2 diabetes.
In case your calcium complement is being became “little rocks” which are being deposited in your smooth tissues and arteries, you’ll be able to start to know how this may very well be growing your danger for a coronary heart assault, stroke or different well being situation.
Many consider that arterial plaque is solely a buildup of ldl cholesterol. However in actuality, greater than 90 % of those fatty plaques are calcified. Ldl cholesterol is smooth and waxy and doesn’t impair the elasticity of your arteries. However calcium deposits are like concrete, “hardening” your arteries and impairing their means to broaden. It’s calcium — not ldl cholesterol — that induces arterial stiffness and makes the plaque much less secure and extra liable to chipping off and subsequently inducing a life-threatening clot.
That is notably essential for postmenopausal ladies as a result of hormone steadiness is critical for correct calcium signaling — directing your physique to deposit calcium into your bones. When hormones fall out of steadiness, this signaling causes calcium to slowly exit your bones and change into deposited in your arteries as a substitute. Merely taking a calcium complement is not going to remedy the issue as a result of in case your physique can’t direct the calcium to the proper spot, it would trigger way more hurt than good.
Why Vitamin K2 is Essential if You Take Vitamin D and Calcium …
Vitamin K2 engages in a delicate dance with vitamin D; whereas vitamin D supplies improved bone improvement by serving to you take up calcium, there’s new proof that vitamin K2 directs the calcium to your skeleton, whereas stopping it from being deposited the place you do not need it — i.e., your organs, joint areas, and arteries. As talked about, a big a part of arterial plaque consists of calcium deposits (atherosclerosis), therefore the time period “hardening of the arteries.”
Vitamin K2 has additionally really been discovered to decalcify sure tissues present process pathological (also called ectopic) calcification.
Vitamin K2 prompts a protein hormone known as osteocalcin, produced by osteoblasts, which is required to bind calcium into the matrix of your bone. Osteocalcin additionally seems to assist forestall calcium from depositing into your arteries. In different phrases, with out the assistance of vitamin K2, the calcium that your vitamin D so successfully allows is likely to be working AGAINST you — by build up your coronary arteries somewhat than your bones. That is why when you take calcium and vitamin D however are poor in vitamin Ok, you may be worse off than if you weren’t taking these dietary supplements in any respect.
Meals is the Greatest Supply of Calcium
To ensure that calcium to do your physique good, it have to be in a bioavailable type and balanced out with nutritional vitamins D and Ok and different essential hint minerals, as a part of a complete dietary plan.
Good sources embrace uncooked milk and cheese from pasture-raised cows (who eat the crops), leafy inexperienced greens, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, sesame seeds and wheatgrass, to call just a few. It is value mentioning that the research accomplished about calcium from dairy merchandise are all accomplished with pasteurized dairy, somewhat than uncooked dairy merchandise which have extra of their vitamins intact, and this muddies the outcomes of those research.
Calcium from dietary sources is often higher absorbed and utilized than calcium from dietary supplements, which is why research involving calcium from pure meals sources have proven favorable outcomes, together with a 25 % decrease danger of dying from all causes, and a 23 % decrease danger of dying from coronary heart illness.
You additionally want sources of silica and magnesium, which some researchers say is definitely enzymatically “transmuted” by your physique into the type of calcium your bones can use. This principle was first put forth by French scientist Louis Kevran, a Nobel Prize nominee who spent years finding out how silica, calcium, magnesium, and different minerals are associated and transmutable into each other via low-energy nuclear transformation solely discovered inside dwelling programs.
His principle explains how cows and chickens produce way more calcium of their milk and eggs than is discovered of their food regimen, or why, employees uncovered to extraordinarily excessive temperatures (130 levels F) within the Center East are recognized to devour salt tablets, which their our bodies convert to potassium (as measured by their excreta), leading to a discount of their bodily temperature.
Good sources of bone-strengthening silica are cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, and a lot of herbs together with horsetail, nettles, oat straw, alfalfa, and uncooked cacao, which can be extraordinarily wealthy in extremely bioavailable magnesium.
Dr. Thompson recommends the use of pure unprocessed salt as a much better different to calcium dietary supplements as a result of it supplies the hint minerals you merely can’t get from meals grown in in the present day’s mineral-depleted soils. My favourite supply of hint minerals is pure, unprocessed Himalayan salt, which incorporates 84 parts wanted by your physique.
The underside line is, optimize your vitamin D ranges via solar publicity and devour a wide range of contemporary, native natural entire meals, together with greens, fruits, nuts, seeds, natural meats and eggs, unprocessed salt, and uncooked natural unpasteurized dairy, which will provide you with the bioavailable calcium your physique wants together with the hint minerals and different cofactors it must be absorbed and correctly utilized by your physique.
