Could Your Calcium Supplement be a killer?

            So, you think you’re doing a good thing for your body by faithfully taking your basic calcium supplement every day but as it turns out, you could be setting yourself up for a heart attack. Recent research published in Heart shared the findings of two controversial studies regarding calcium supplementation and heart attack risk originally made public in the British Medical Journal in 2012. Researchers found a 24 to 27 percent increase of heart attack for people taking 500 mg of standard elemental calcium daily. And that’s not all. A newer study involving 24,000 people between the ages of 35 and 64 revealed that those who took a regular calcium supplement were 86 percent more likely to have a heart attack than those who didn’t take any calcium supplements.

            These findings really shouldn’t come as such a big surprise since we have long administered coronary and cardiac calcium scans in order to determine a person’s risk of future cardiovascular events and/or cardiac mortality.  Bottom line, calcium of the wrong kind in the wrong place often results in negative health events. In fact, many experts in the field of nutrition have long been discouraging the use of elemental calcium supplementation, which is calcium from limestone, oyster shells,  and egg shells. And, listen you really don’t have to be “an expert” to figure out that consuming rocks and shells is probably not such a great idea. So, why do we do it?

            Part of the popularity of taking elemental calcium supplements stems from the excessive promotional efforts of conventional health organizations like the National Osteoporosis Foundation. But guess who sponsors that foundation? Oscal and Citrical, which are two major calcium manufacturers. Also fueling the fire of the elemental calcium supplements craze is the World Health Organization. Back in 1994, the World Health Organization drastically changed the new definition of “normal” bone density for women by using a 25-year-old woman’s bone density as the new standard for all women, no matter their age. This was a game changer since a 25-year-old woman is at peak bone mass in her life cycle at that particular age. Thus, the normal, gradual loss of bone mineral density that comes with aging was now seen as a disease that required treatment when in reality, it was just the normal aging process. Suddenly, millions of women felt forced into taking unnecessary and potentially dangerous “bone-building” drugs and elemental calcium supplements to increase their bone mineral density because they now had been “diagnosed” with osteopenia or osteoporosis even though their bone density was truly normal for their age, gender and ethnicity.

        Fast forward from that 1994 decision, figuring in the almost 20 years of force-feeding women bone-building drugs and elemental calcium supplements, and today we have women who are dying prematurely from calcium-induced heart attacks and/or high bone mineral density associated malignant breast cancer—the number one and number two killers of women today. So, let me ask you this. Would it be better to risk fracturing a bone due to low bone mineral density or risk dying from a calcium-induced heart attack? That’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

            Furthermore, even if you don’t suffer from a calcium-induced heart attack or succumb to bone mineral density associated malignant breast cancer, you are setting yourself up for many other health problems because when inorganic, elemental calcium travels to the wrong place or in excessive amounts, bad things happen.

            See, elemental calcium is not bound to amino acids, lipids or glyconutrients found in food because we aren’t getting it from food; we’re getting it from shells and rocks. Without the proper delivery system, the calcium can end up in excessive amounts in various parts of the body such as the bowel or the kidneys causing constipation and kidney stones. Or, even worse, high levels of calcium can settle in the blood and cause blood clots, hypertension, arrhythmias or a coronary artery spasm. Also, the breasts are especially sensitive to excessive amounts of calcium known as ectopic calcification.

This may explain why women with the highest bone density (often obtained through massive, lifelong calcium supplementation) have up to 300 percent higher incidence of malignant breast cancer. Too much elemental calcium might also be to blame for an increasingly strange phenomenon called “brain gravel,” in which autopsied patients have been found to have pebble-size calcium deposits throughout their brains.

            We have become a calcium-fixated culture, taking mega doses of elemental calcium, all the while thinking we’re doing a good thing for our bodies. Well, we now have proof that we’re not, so stop it! Stay away from inorganic calcium supplements!

The only calcium I ever recommend is one that we personally make and have throughly tested called (Healthmaters Ossomag). 

Ossomag is a well-researched, standardized extract from one of the world’s safest premium sources of bone. Ossomag contains microcrystalline hydroxyapatite concentrate (MCHC), a complex crystalline compound containing calcium, phosphorus, bioactive growth factors, type I collagen, amino acids, glycosaminoglycans, and a broad range of essential trace elements that naturally comprise healthy bone. Ossomag contains additional calcium and magnesium in the form of highly absorbable Albion^® minerals. Vitamin D, in the form of cholecalciferol, supports intestinal calcium absorption and homeostasis in the body and completes the comprehensiveness of this bone-support formula. It is specifically designed to go directly to the bones and nowhere else. Providing you with optimal bone density support.

If you are looking for the highest quality, best priced, most absorbale calcium supplement on the market, look no further, Ossomag is here.

Resources:

*BMJ 2010; 341 doi: 10.1136/bmj.c3691 (Published 29 July 2010)

*Calcium supplements with or without vitamin D and risk of cardiovascular events: reanalysis of the Women's Health Initiative limited access dataset and meta-analysis. BMJ. 2011;342:d2040. Epub 2011 Apr 19. PMID: 2150521