CALCIUM SUPPLEMENTS MAY DAMAGE THE HEART

If you have osteoporosis you should take calcium right?  Research would seem to indicate this might not necessarily be true.  In fact there would appear to be two polar opposite views when it comes to supplements.  The traditional medical approach is they are not needed and don’t work, while the alternative approach is that everyone should be taking them and lots of them.  Who’s right?  Will calcium supplements help osteoporosis but damage the heart? As with most things the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Let’s look at the October 2016 study mentioned in the title that came out of John Hopkins for another example.  The study says that “taking calcium in the form of supplements may raise the risk of plaque build-up in arteries and heart damage.”  To their credit, they also caution “that their work only documents an association between calcium supplements and atherosclerosis, and does not prove cause and effect.”  So are calcium supplements good or bad?

The first thing that needs to be clearly understood is that when it comes to supplements if we want to make an argument that they can be helpful then we MUST accept that when taken inappropriately they can also do harm.  We can’t have our cake and eat it too.  We can’t have it both ways.

So let’s look at calcium metabolism.  Calcium is influenced and controlled by many aspects in the body.  One of these is by the thyroid and parathyroid.  Calcitonin is a hormone produced in the thyroid and it helps to control the levels of calcium and phosphorus in the blood.  Parathyroid hormone also helps to control the levels of calcium in the blood.  They have opposite effects where calcitonin removes calcium from the blood and parathyroid adds calcium to the blood.  

What do you think happens when a person has hypothyroid issues (decreased thyroid function)?  In our experience a few things.  One is that if the thyroid function goes low this means that the parathyroid function will therefore be high proportionately.  As a result we end up with a scenario where calcium function (levels) are impaired in the blood and ultimately the tissues.  Should you supplement with calcium?  Not unless you know what is happening for sure with the calcium levels.

Let’s look as calcium’s solubility.  Sodium is one of the body’s solvent minerals.  It helps keep calcium in solution in the blood.  If the level of sodium becomes too low in the tissues (not the blood, in most cases), then calcium will begin to precipitate out of the blood and form hard deposits all over the body as the study is explaining. 

Sodium decreases in the tissues when the adrenal glands are nutritionally depleted.  This is very common today, and aldosterone, an adrenal hormone, maintains the sodium level in the body.  In this situation would you take calcium?  No, or at least not a lot.

How about Vitamin D’s influence on calcium?  It’s quite well established that Vitamin D helps the body to raise and use calcium.  If someone is low in Vit D you could argue that the person will need a lot of calcium but what about if the levels of D are adequate or high?  They might not need as much calcium.

Hopefully after these examples you can see the problem with the study.

You can’t assess if a single supplement is good or bad for people as we are all individuals with varying body chemistry.  OF COURSE some of us will not do well when supplementing calcium and OF COURSE others will do well.

So once again if we maintain that supplements can do good we need to recognise they can create problems.

Measurement is key.

While there are several ways to measure calcium, a tissue test is usually best as blood calcium is maintained in a very narrow range at the expense of the tissues.  The tissue tests are able to alert us to problems far easier than the blood tests are.

The simplest and easiest is a hair mineral tissue analysis.  From this we can assess calcium levels and make recommendations that are correct for you.

Lifestyle Integration is a leader in hair mineral analysis and works with people worldwide.

For more information visit us at www.lifestyleintegration.com.au