James Dowd and Diane Stafford
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 In the end, you probably won't need calcium supplements at all if you normalize your vitamin D, balance the acid base in your diet, supplement magnesium, and regularly exercise.
In the meantime, until you know that you've gotten your D up to par, supplement your calcium at 500 to 600 milligrams per day. Once your vitamin D level is normal and your diet is on track, you can decrease your calcium supplementation further or eliminate it altogether. |
| But when the same folks took regimens of vitamin D and calcium supplements, they regained muscle strength and coordination in weeks and were able to sit, stand, and walk again.
Protein and Strength
It takes protein to make protein (muscle). If you don't eat enough protein to keep the brain, heart, and kidneys going, you end up robbing Peter to pay Paul. This sounds obvious, but it's often overlooked.
When an older person moves slowly using a cane, people presume that's from age-related weakness. But for elderly women in particular, malnutrition is a more likely explanation. |
| If you're supplementing vitamin D, be careful, because you probably don't need calcium supplements (see chapter 7).
If you think you've taken too much vitamin D or vitamin A, call your physician immediately. You need to have your blood levels checked. Then your doctor can use those results to decide on appropriate treatment.
It's also important to note that you'll probably see misleading articles that warn not to take more than 2,000 units of vitamin D per day. |
| But if you have trouble sticking to the ratio of three times as much produce as protein, continue to take both magnesium and calcium supplements.
Don't take more than 600 milligrams of calcium per day if you're following the vitamin D supplementation guidelines in this book. Too much calcium supplementation can cause constipation and back pain and may increase your risk of kidney stones.
Knowing What to Take
You can refer to the following chart for supplement recommendations. The middle column lists current DRI recommendations. |
| Some of these people then took vitamin D and calcium supplements regularly, and the result was a dramatic resolution of their pain, fatigue, and muscle cramps.
Similarly, Dr. Al Faraj at Riyadh Armed Forces Hospital in Saudi Arabia discovered vitamin D deficiency in 83 percent of several hundred patients who had chronic back pain for more than six months without a diagnosis. When Dr. Faraj normalized the vitamin D of those with low vitamin D levels, the back pain resolved in all of them. |
Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D.
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 We weren't as surprised as others may have been at the lackluster results seen with calcium supplements in the Women's Health Initiative. Walter Willett, MD, DrPH, MPH, the Frederick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, had told us years earlier that calcium is not the whole story. Women in Scandinavia have the highest calcium intake in the world, but they also have the highest rates of osteoporosis. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 So they start out with a vitamin D deficiency due to lack of sunlight, and they end up with a calcium deficiency even though they're taking lots of calcium supplements. The end result is, of course, osteoporosis or osteomalacia, the advanced stage of osteoporosis. Once that's diagnosed by conventional medicine, they're usually given hormone replacement therapy or a variety of prescription drugs rather than simply being told to get more sunlight and engage in some form of physical exercise to enhance bone mineral density. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 You can also go the more expensive route and buy chelated calcium supplements from a variety of vitamin manufacturers like Twin Lab. Chelated calcium is yet more bio-available. It is more effective per ounce than other forms of calcium. But, is it more effective per dollar than other forms of calcium? I haven't done that assessment myself, but my guess is that it's both pricey and effective, meaning that you may be just as well off to spend your money on cheaper sources of calcium that have lower bio-availability, because you can afford to put more of that powder into your body. |
Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D.
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| In one study, pregnant women with nighttime leg cramps were given calcium supplements or vitamin C as a "control." Since there is no evidence that vitamin C can reduce leg cramps, it seemed that the difference between the two groups would be readily apparent if calcium worked well. Both groups did equally well, however, suggesting that calcium really didn't make much difference.715 A systematic review of the research on calcium for nocturnal leg cramps concluded that the evidence for its effectiveness is weak, at least in pregnant women. |
| Make sure you get enough magnesium, especially if you are taking calcium supplements. Calcium carbonate can be constipating, but magnesium can help offset this tendency. We generally advise people that a dose above 300 milligrams of magnesium per day may cause diarrhea. The maximum short-term dose of magnesium advised on the label of Phillips' Milk of Magnesia is 2,000 milligrams for adults. Do not take magnesium or milk of magnesia if you have kidney disease.
Conclusions
Constipation accompanied by pain, nausea, vomiting, or fever should not be ignored. It deserves medical attention. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 There are a lot of senior citizens out there who are spending small fortunes on calcium supplements and antacid tablets, but they're not getting any sunshine. And that means they're not getting enough vitamin D. With a vitamin D deficiency, they can't even absorb the calcium. It's either going right through their bodies or actually contributing to the buildup of calcification in their kidneys. So guess what? They'll probably end up with kidney stones. |
Mike Adams
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 In this way, taking calcium supplements in order to "balance" the consumption of diet soft drinks may not be nearly as effective as you hoped:
If your diet contains an excess of phosphorus, from too much animal protein or too many carbonated soft drinks, you may fail to absorb calcium from your food as well as lose more calcium from your urine. Americans tend to eat more phosphorus than calcium, which looms large if you are at risk for bone thinning. ...Avoid carbonated soft drinks and yeast products.
- Mary Dan Eades, M.D. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 According to practically everybody in the mainstream press, the study shows little or no benefit of taking calcium supplements. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Without sufficient vitamin D, your body cannot absorb calcium, rendering calcium supplements useless.
Chronic vitamin D deficiency cannot be reversed overnight: it takes months of vitamin D supplementation and sunlight exposure to rebuild the body's bones and nervous system.
Even weak sunscreens (SPF=8) block your body's ability to generate vitamin D by 95%. This is how sunscreen products actually cause disease -- by creating a critical vitamin deficiency in the body. |
by Michael Murray, N.D. and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D.
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| Antacids and overuse of calcium supplements also decrease iron absorption. These items should be restricted for individuals with iron deficiency.
Other Recommendations
In the treatment of nutrition-related anemias, it is critical to supplement with the corresponding nutrient to address the deficiency, such as iron, vitamin B12, or folic acid. Iron-deficiency anemia can be treated with 50 milligrams of iron citrate in a liver-based supplement, three times per day. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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 If you have a family history of kidney stones, take calcium supplements with meals. When you consume calcium-rich foods with oxalates, they bind together and are expelled in the stool, lessening your risk of kidney stones. calcium supplements should be avoided only by those with a personal history of kidney stones.
CONSIDERATIONS
Ll Women who have both kidney stones and bone loss from osteoporosis can use calcium supplements, but have to be careful about what supplements they use and what they eat. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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 I doubt that a high-calcium diet, obtained through calcium supplements or through calcium-rich cow's milk, has a beneficial effect on colon cancer. In rural China where calcium consumption is modest and almost no dairy food is consumed,87 colon cancer rates are not higher; instead they are much lower than in the U.S. The parts of the world that consume the most calcium, Europe and North America, have the highest rates of colorectal cancer.
Another lifestyle choice that is clearly important for this disease is exercise. Increased exercise is convincingly associated with less colorectal cancer. |
| We disdain saturated fats, butter or carbohydrates, and then embrace vitamin E, calcium supplements, aspirin or zinc and focus our energy and effort on extremely specific food components, as if this will unlock the secrets of health. All too often, fancy outweighs fact. Perhaps you remember the protein diet fad that gripped the country in the late 1970s. The promise was that you could lose weight by replacing real food with a protein shake. In a very short while, almost sixty women died from the diet. More recently millions have adopted high-protein, high-fat diets based on books such as Dr. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The study did not compensate for poor hydrochloric acid production in the elderly
If you want to design a study that shows calcium supplements to be useless, strategy number one is to choose a segment of the population that has poor hydrochloric acid production. Namely, the elderly. Guess who was chosen for this study? The elderly, of course. And a good nutritionist would have told them to supplement with acidic substances or digestive enzymes in order to enhance the chemical breakdown of calcium in preparation for absorption in the small intestine. Yet this was never addressed in the study. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 A lot of senior citizens are taking calcium supplements but not getting sunlight, so the calcium is passing right through their bodies. As a result, they're losing bone mineral density. However, by adding vitamin D to the equation through sunlight (remember, your skin generates vitamin D in response to sunlight exposure), senior citizens can start assimilating calcium and rebuilding their bones.
This is information that doesn't get told to senior citizens, and modern doctors don't even understand it. They think that you treat osteoporosis with drugs, which is ridiculous. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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| Much of the calcium intake shown in this chart, especially in high consumption countries, is due to dairy foods, rather than calcium supplements or non-dairy food sources of calcium.
Mark Hegsted, who produced the results in Chart 10.3, was a longtime Harvard professor. He worked on the calcium issue beginning in the early 1950s, was a principal architect of the nation's first dietary guidelines in 1980 and in 1986 published this graph. |
The Editors of FC&A
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| If you are an older adult or if you take calcium supplements, it's a good idea to check with your doctor to determine whether you need more phosphorus.
Food
Phosphorus
Halibut, 5 1/2 ounces, grilled
453 mg
Salmon, 5 1/2 ounces, grilled
428 mg
Sunflower seeds, 1/4 cup, dry roasted with salt
370 mg
Lentils, 1 cup, boiled, no salt
356 mg
Cottage cheese, 1 cup, low-fat
341 mg
Ricotta cheese, 1/2 cup, part-skim
225 mg
Men need bone protection, too
In the United States alone, about 2 million men suffer from osteoporosis. |
Earl L. Mindell, RPh, PhD with Virginia Hopkins, MA
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| In fact, calcium supplements can help slow bone loss in some women. To be incorporated into bone, calcium requires the help of enzymes, which require magnesium and vitamin B6 to work properly. We tend to be more deficient in magnesium and B6 than we are in calcium.
All calcium supplements are not the same. The best absorbed form is called calcium citrate. Avoid the oyster shell calcium, as it can be contaminated with heavy metals. If you're female and over the age of 12, you should be taking 1,200 mg of calcium, combined with 600 to 800 mg of magnesium every day. |
Mike Adams
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 Without sufficient vitamin D, your body cannot absorb calcium, rendering calcium supplements useless.
*" Chronic vitamin D deficiency cannot be reversed overnight: it takes months of vitamin D supplementation and sunlight exposure to rebuild the body's bones and nervous system.
** Even weak sunscreens (SPF8) block your body's ability to generate vitamin D by 95 percent. This is how sunscreen products actually cause disease—by creating a critical vitamin deficiency in the body. |
Earl L. Mindell, RPh, PhD with Virginia Hopkins, MA
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| NATURAL REMEDIES FOR OSTEOPOROSIS
Now that we know the process of preventing osteoporosis begins early in life, we are hearing about sugary drinks fortified with calcium for teenagers, antacids with calcium, and calcium supplements. Osteoporosis is not a calcium deficiency disease; it is a disease of excessive calcium loss. In other words, you can take all the calcium supplements you want, but if your diet and lifestyle choices are unhealthy, or you're taking prescription drugs that cause you to lose calcium, you will still lose more calcium from your bones than you can take in through diet. |
Jack Challem
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 Over the next year, Claire took still more iron supplements and also calcium supplements, but follow-up tests indicated that she was still anemic and her bones even thinner.
A nutritionally oriented physician suspected that Claire had celiac disease, an intolerance of gluten protein in wheat, barley, and rye. He ordered two tests: a genetic test for the presence of the HLA-DQ2 gene, which is often seen in people with celiac disease, and antitissue transglutaminase, a frequent marker of gluten sensitivity. The doctor's hunch was correct. Both tests came back positive. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Furthermore, as almost no reporters have yet pointed out, the so-called control group (the people with whom the pro-calcium group's results were to be compared) was allowed to freely take their own calcium supplements, too. In other words, there was really no control group at all! This makes the entire study scientifically useless. It's sort of like testing aspirin against placebo by giving one group aspirin, giving the other group a placebo, and telling both groups they can take all the aspirin they want on their own. |
Mike Adams
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| Thus, they're taking all of these calcium supplements that are completely useless. If you want to enhance your bone density, you must not only take calcium, you must also make sure you have adequate levels of vitamin D circulating in your blood. To do that, you should either take vitamin D supplements or get reasonable amounts of sunlight on a regular basis without using sunscreen. You must get healthy levels of sunlight— or consume vitamin D from fish oils—to have healthy bones.
Physical exercise is another important factor. |
Mary-Ann Shearer
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 Supplementation is also not the route to go as we see from the following: a nineteen-mem-ber panel prepared the latest information on dietary recommendations and after looking at more than 5000 studies, "strongly condemned the use of dietary supplements, maintaining that there was no convincing evidence that calcium supplements were necessary to prevent osteoporosis" (South African Medical Journal 3). In plain English, taking calcium or other mineral supplements has been shown to be of little or no value, so stop wasting your money! |
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