By Dr. Mercola
Calcium is among the hottest dietary dietary supplements in the marketplace, largely due to the extensively circulated mantra that mega-doses of this mineral are important for constructing and sustaining wholesome bones.
In consequence, many individuals imagine that taking a calcium complement is an easy strategy to stop bone fractures related to osteoporosis.
What they haven’t been advised is that whilst you can power elevated bone mineral density with calcium dietary supplements, you can’t make certain that this can end in better bone energy.
Be Cautious In Decoding Bone Assessments Outcomes
Bone density, whereas a wonderful 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 previous, younger grownup.
In different phrases, if you’re 40, 50, and even 100, the T-score-based system says your bones usually are not regular, and even diseased if they aren’t as dense as they had been once you had been a younger grownup.
If in reality they used the age-appropriate Z-score, most instances of “osteopenia,” and lots of instances of “osteoporosis,” would instantly disappear as a result of they had been inappropriately categorised from the beginning.
Do Calcium Dietary supplements Predispose You to Breast Most cancers?
Finally, the “calcium is nice in your bones” mantra is yet one more instance of principle gone improper, and represents how broadly deluded the mainstream medical group is about bone well being and the character of osteoporosis, and its extremely fabricated twin situation “osteopenia.”
There are literally a variety 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 compounds just like the medication Fosamax and Evista, doesn’t imply this can translate into improved well being in your bones, or any of your different organ methods.
Certainly, earlier than leaping off the lemming-like cliff of typical medical knowledge, take into account there’s a stable 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 girls can be identified with most cancers of their lives, with breast most cancers high on the record, is not the neurotic fixation on rising 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 Will be Helpful or Lethal Relying on The place it Ends Up in Your Physique
Calcium is probably the most plentiful mineral in your physique, mandatory 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 each day via your pores and skin, nails, hair, sweat and elimination, which is why you could substitute it through 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 ladies over 50 to take 1200 mg a day, a bit troubling. Once we evaluate our calcium-rich food regimen to the normal 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 satisfy their bodily wants – and it is a tradition with no phrase for “osteoporosis” in its 3,000+ yr previous 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 maintain your physique in stability, can have hostile results, resembling calcium increase in coronary arteries and inflicting coronary heart assaults. Even taking calcium with vitamin D doesn’t seem like sufficient to stop these kind of hostile results.
So once you take a biologically overseas type of calcium (resembling 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 end up poor in vitamin K2), calcium could also be deposited the place it should not be, which may 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 operate, particularly hemodialysis sufferers. Calcium deposits are, in reality, main contributors and even causative elements 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 Might Create Mineral Deficiencies that Promote Illness
Robert Thompson, M.D. wrote a e book on this topic referred to as The Calcium Lie, which explains that bone is comprised of at the least a dozen minerals, and the unique give attention to calcium supplementation is prone to worsen bone density and truly 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 kind 2 diabetes.
In case your calcium complement is being changed into “little rocks” which can be being deposited in your gentle tissues and arteries, you possibly can start to know how this may very well be rising your danger for a coronary heart assault, stroke or different well being situation.
Many imagine that arterial plaque is just a buildup of ldl cholesterol. However in actuality, greater than 90 p.c of those fatty plaques are calcified. Ldl cholesterol is gentle 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 steady and extra liable to chipping off and subsequently inducing a life-threatening clot.
That is significantly essential for postmenopausal girls as a result of hormone stability is important for correct calcium signaling — directing your physique to deposit calcium into your bones. When hormones fall out of stability, this signaling causes calcium to slowly exit your bones and develop into deposited in your arteries as an alternative. Merely taking a calcium complement is not going to clear up the issue as a result of in case your physique can’t direct the calcium to the proper spot, it can 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 gives improved bone improvement by serving to you soak up calcium, there’s new proof that vitamin K2 directs the calcium to your skeleton, whereas stopping it from being deposited the place you don’t 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 referred to as osteocalcin, produced by osteoblasts, which is required to bind calcium into the matrix of your bone. Osteocalcin additionally seems to assist stop 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 could be working AGAINST you — by increase your coronary arteries moderately than your bones. For this reason if you happen to take calcium and vitamin D however are poor in vitamin Okay, you may be worse off than if you weren’t taking these dietary supplements in any respect.
Meals is the Finest Supply of Calcium
To ensure that calcium to do your physique good, it should be in a bioavailable kind and balanced out with nutritional vitamins D and Okay 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 vegetation), 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, moderately 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 p.c decrease danger of dying from all causes, and a 23 p.c 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 form 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 methods.
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 variety of herbs together with horsetail, nettles, oat straw, alfalfa, and uncooked cacao, which can also be extraordinarily wealthy in extremely bioavailable magnesium.
Dr. Thompson recommends the use of pure unprocessed salt as a much better various to calcium dietary supplements as a result of it gives the hint minerals you merely can’t get from meals grown in at this time’s mineral-depleted soils. My favourite supply of hint minerals is pure, unprocessed Himalayan salt, which comprises 84 parts wanted by your physique.
The underside line is, optimize your vitamin D ranges via solar publicity and devour quite a lot of recent, native natural entire meals, together with greens, fruits, nuts, seeds, natural meats and eggs, unprocessed salt, and uncooked natural unpasteurized dairy, which provides 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.