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Calcium Rich Foods

What are side effects of calcium supplements?

Have you considered taking calcium pills to prevent osteoporosis, the thinning of the bones responsible for lost height and fragility fractures? If so, you may have encountered the research showing how calcium pills can put you at increased risk for serious harms.

The pros and cons of calcium pills

The recommendation to take calcium pills originated in the assumption that even if they did little to help, aside from mild constipation they would be unlikely to harm.

This assumption, however, has now been called to question by recent evidence suggesting that people taking calcium supplementation are more likely to develop heart attacks, strokes, kidney stones, and painful bone spurs affecting their soft tissues and joints. I have personally treated a number of patients with pain in their joints who experienced relief after a trial off the calcium pills.

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Interestingly, women are at lower risk of these complications from calcium supplements than men. I believe this is probably because more women than men eat vegetables and take supplemental vitamin D.

How would vegetables and vitamin D intake help?

Your Bones Need Deep Nutrition

While calcium is the most talked about mineral for supporting bone health, few people realize that our bones need many nutrients besides calcium—magnesium, selenium, vitamins A, D, and K, and protein, for starters. The fact is, supplementing with calcium alone without addressing other dietary deficiencies offers marginal benefits. In order to actually build healthy bone, multiple members from a much longer list of nutrients have to work together in concert to stimulate the cells living in your bones, to activate  the bone-building apparatus that orchestrates the building the of a collagen matrix and then mineralizing that matrix to form new bone.

If your diet and lifestyle are inadequate to support this complex biological activity, adding calcium to an unhealthy situation is unlikely to help.

So what’s the best way to get your calcium? From food!

Visit Dr. Cate’s office in Newtown, CT for a Complete Bone-Health Plan

Instead of taking pills, I recommend taking some time to consider whether you follow a balanced diet that includes calcium rich foods. Dairy products, nuts and seeds, and dark green, bitter vegetables like chard and kale top the list. Unlike pills, not only do they offer the calcium, they offer your body many other building blocks together with the biochemical instructions your body listens to when it needs to build, or rebuild, healthy bone.

Remember: Food has a three critical functions. Food provides energy (primary with healthy fats). Food provides building-block material with which the body creates new tissue. And food is information, a kind of biochemical message from the Earth’s living environment to the cells of your body, all Interpreted by DNA and Transformed by enzymes and exercise.

That’s why, whenever you rely on pills instead of foods, you risk providing nutrients in an unnatural balance, in a form that the body is ill equipped to recognize and exploit.

The lack of biological ‘information’ not only limits your body’s ability to transport the supplemented nutrients from your digestive tract into your bloodstream (a process called absorption), it interferes with the ability to properly metabolize the nutrients. Without this essential guidance from biology, chaos takes over and the supplemented nutrients end up in random places where they don’t belong.

Exercise plays a key role as well. Without activity, your muscle and bones atrophy no matter how excellent your diet is. All physical activity, in proper proportion, helps keep bones healthy. And while weight bearing is the most talked about, aerobic and balance exercises are essential. Walking, jogging and swimming help optimize circulation for nutrient delivery while activities like dancing, yoga and tai chi improve coordination and balance for reducing the accidents and falls that break bone.

The type of supplement is irrelevant

While much ado is made about what form of supplemental calcium is the best—liquid versus solid, for example—or the ecologically destructive coral calcium versus calcium carbonate (which is basically chalk), the reality is that when you talk about supplementation, the various forms matter little because they are all, at least as far as the body is concerned, unnatural. There’s a reason we never developed cravings for chalk or coral, because these foreign replacements for the bone fide article confuses the body, leading to intestinal upset and constipation, as well as other problems.

in most cases, the powerfully beneficial alternative to supplements is REAL FOOD!

It’s good to remember that real food isn’t just a supplement to supplements. It’s the staff of life. It protects us, helps us grow, fights off age and disease and connects us to the earth. The truth is, the vast majority of your supplement dollar will wind up swirling down the toilet: what the body can’t use, it discards. Either it will pass right through your digestive system and exit the rear due to limited absorption, or the portion that does get into your blood will quickly be excreted by your kidneys.

That’s if you’re lucky.

If you are unlucky, the supplement will react with other elements in your body in unpredictable ways. Well, not entirely unpredictable. In the case of calcium, chemistry favors reactions with certain glycoproteins in collagen, and that’s why we get the buildup of plaque, kidney stones, and bone spurs, glycoproteins that arteries, kidneys, tendons, and ligaments contain in abundance.

I know, it sounds almost as if I have a bone to pick. But it’s not that, really. I want you to be the healthiest you can be. And for that to happen, I want you to give real food a try.

Calcium Rich Foods (with loads of other nutrients)

Sardines (canned, bone in) 380mg per 3 ounce serving  (also high in protein, magnesium, vitamin D)

Sesame  seeds, dry roasted 280 per 1 ounce serving (handful) (also high in magnesium, potassium, zinc)

Mackerel (canned, bone in) 240 mg per 3 ounce serving (also high in protein, magnesium, vitamin D)

Salmon (canned, bone in) 240 mg per 3 ounce serving (also high in protein, magnesium, vitamin D)

Collards, steamed 250 mg per 4 ounce serving

Whole milk yogurt 230 mg per 6 ounce serving

Cheddar cheese 220 mg per 1 ounce serving

Feta cheese 140 mg per 1 ounce serving

Broccoli, steamed 140 mg per 4 ounce serving

Cottage cheese 110 mg per 6 ounce serving

Almonds 75 mg per 1 ounce (handful) serving

Pistachio nuts, salted and roasted, 30 mg per 1 ounce (handful) serving

Thyme, dried 26 mg per tsp

Sunflower seeds, salted and dry roasted 20 mg per 1 ounce (handful) serving

REFERENCES

Women have higher D levels than men http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20595642

Calcium winds up where it does, in connective tissues, because of http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2015/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteopontin

With over two decades of clinical experience and expertise in genetic and biochemical research, Dr. Cate can help you to reverse metabolic disease and reshape your body.

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This Post Has 13 Comments

  1. For a period of time I suffered random and debilitating stomach pain. Doubled-over, head-to-the-ER pain that came and went. It would hit me hard and then disappear. Doctors and specialists do lots of tests abs had no answers. One day it occurred to me it might be from my calcium supplements. When I quit them, the pain went away. A few years later I started them up again—and back came the pain.

  2. Dr. Cate…. thank you so much for taking the time to answer… I’m 74 & sure wish I had known all this earlier… but my daughter knows!! u Betcha!!

  3. In your book, you mentioned Bubbie’s sauerkraut & making your own with the leftover juice…. been trying that , but it tastes off…. perhaps I am not letting it ferment enough? I am battling Cdiff after pacemaker replacement procedure & eating minimal food to not stress the gut further so sipping the juice from Bubbies a few times a day…. teaspoon of the sauerkraut chewed 50 times, etc. Kefir , homemade chicken broth & minute portions of the chicken.
    Ideas on using Bubbies juice appreciated….

    1. Fermentation is quite an art. If it tastes off, and your health is fragile, you are better off getting Bubbies (or other naturally fermented) sauerkraut as well.

      I drink the leftover juice after workouts and splash some in my salad.

      Zukay probiotic drinks are also top quality and you may enjoy them straight out of the bottle. There are fewer carbs and no alcohol, unlike Kombucha which is sold in the same section as Zukay.

  4. My husband and I are both physicians (family medicine and orthopedics). We have had to eliminate dairy due to chronic cough and GI symptoms in our family. Basically we eat “Paleo” or “GAPS” if you must give it a name. The question I have pertains to my daughters. We tallied one daughter’s calcium intake to be 200 mg to at most 600 mg a day. She is 9. We live in South Dakota where we don’t get much vitamin D, and they aren’t very active physically in the winter. After calcium tracking, we opted for a calcium plus D supplement for the girls. They just don’t eat enough salmon/sardines, collards, or broccoli to add up. I hate to use a supplemented “fake milk.” We just don’t feel it’s fair to take chances with the kids’ bone health and this low of a calcium intake. Any thoughts?

    1. Supplements are perfect for situations like you describe. And as they grow maybe appetites will change. Don’t forget about bone broths!

  5. Dr. Cate, thank you for this article. How many mg of Calcium do you recommend getting from food each day?

  6. Hi Dr Cate,

    I don’t understand this statement:

    “If you are unlucky, the supplement will react with other elements in your body in unpredictable ways. Well, not entirely unpredictable. In the case of calcium, chemistry favors reactions with certain glycoproteins in collagen, and that’s why we get the buildup of plaque, kidney stones, and bone spurs, glycoproteins that arteries, kidneys, tendons, and ligaments contain in abundance.”

    Could you explain so I can hear it?

    Kind Regards\nCassie

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