Breast Most cancers and Coronary heart Assaults: A Lethal Aspect Impact of Calcium Dietary supplements?

By Dr. Mercola

Calcium is without doubt one of the hottest dietary dietary supplements in the marketplace, largely due to the broadly circulated mantra that mega-doses of this mineral are important for constructing and sustaining wholesome bones.

Because of this, many individuals imagine that taking a calcium complement is a straightforward strategy to stop bone fractures related to osteoporosis.

What they haven’t been informed is that whilst you can drive elevated bone mineral density with calcium dietary supplements, you can’t make certain that it will end in better bone energy.

Be Cautious In Deciphering Bone Checks Outcomes

Bone density, whereas a superb 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 related trauma.

Furthermore, “osteoporosis,” as presently outlined by bone scans (DXA scan) utilizing the T-score, inappropriately defines “regular bone density” in response to the usual of a 25-year previous, younger grownup.

In different phrases, in case you are 40, 50, and even 100, the T-score-based system says your bones are usually not regular, and even diseased if they don’t seem to be as dense as they have been if you have been a younger grownup.

If in truth they used the age-appropriate Z-score, most circumstances of “osteopenia,” and lots of circumstances of “osteoporosis,” would all of the sudden disappear as a result of they have been inappropriately categorised from the beginning.

Do Calcium Dietary supplements Predispose You to Breast Most cancers?

Finally, the “calcium is sweet on your bones” mantra is one more instance of idea gone improper, and represents how broadly deluded the mainstream medical neighborhood is about bone well being and the character of osteoporosis, and its extremely fabricated twin situation “osteopenia.” 

There are literally quite a few research indicating that mass market calcium dietary supplements enhance your threat 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 substances just like the medication Fosamax and Evista, doesn’t imply it will translate into improved well being on your bones, or any of your different organ techniques.

Certainly, earlier than leaping off the lemming-like cliff of standard medical knowledge, take into account there’s a stable physique of analysis indicating that larger bone density may very well enhance the danger of malignant breast most cancers by 300% or extra! Contemplating that near 1 in 4 ladies will likely be identified with most cancers of their lives, with breast most cancers high on the listing, is not the neurotic fixation on rising bone density with calcium dietary supplements misplaced, particularly when it might enhance the general threat of dying from most cancers and, as we are going to see, heart problems (the #1 killer), as nicely?

Calcium Will be Helpful or Lethal Relying on The place it Ends Up in Your Physique

Calcium is essentially the most considerable mineral in your physique, vital for not solely bone well being but in addition regulating your heartbeat, conducting nerve impulses, clotting blood and stimulating hormone secretions. Your physique doesn’t make calcium, and actually loses calcium day by day by means of your pores and skin, nails, hair, sweat and elimination, which is why it’s essential to exchange it by way of your food plan.

It has been estimated, nevertheless, that your physique excretes as little as 100 mg a day, making the present suggestions by the Nationwide Osteoporosis Basis for girls over 50 to take 1200 mg a day, a bit troubling.  Once we examine our calcium-rich food plan to the standard calcium-poor Chinese language peasant food plan, 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 meet their bodily wants – and it is a tradition with no phrase for “osteoporosis” in its 3,000+ 12 months 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 hold your physique in steadiness, can have adversarial results, comparable to calcium build up in coronary arteries and inflicting coronary heart assaults. Even taking calcium with vitamin D doesn’t look like sufficient to forestall all these adversarial results.

So if you take a biologically international type of calcium (comparable to limestone, oyster shell and bone meal (hydroxylapatite), or when your physique’s means to direct calcium to the best locations turns into impaired (as when you’re 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 truth, main contributors and even causative components 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 Could Create Mineral Deficiencies that Promote Illness

Robert Thompson, M.D. wrote a guide on this topic referred to as The Calcium Lie, which explains that bone is comprised of not less than a dozen minerals, and the unique concentrate on calcium supplementation is prone to worsen bone density and truly enhance your threat for osteoporosis. Dr. Thompson believes overconsumption of calcium creates different mineral deficiencies and imbalances that may enhance your threat of coronary heart illness, kidney stones, gallstones, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, weight problems and kind 2 diabetes.

In case your calcium complement is being became “little rocks” which are being deposited in your comfortable tissues and arteries, you may start to grasp how this may very well be rising your threat 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 % of those fatty plaques are calcified. Ldl cholesterol is comfortable 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 develop. It’s calcium — not ldl cholesterol — that induces arterial stiffness and makes the plaque much less secure and extra susceptible to chipping off and subsequently inducing a life-threatening clot.

That is notably essential for postmenopausal ladies as a result of hormone steadiness is important for correct calcium signaling — directing your physique to deposit calcium into your bones. When hormones fall out of steadiness, this signaling causes calcium to slowly exit your bones and grow to be 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 not direct the calcium to the best spot, it should trigger much 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 take in calcium, there may be 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 (often known as 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 is likely to be working AGAINST you — by build up your coronary arteries reasonably than your bones. For this reason when you take calcium and vitamin D however are poor in vitamin Ok, you would 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 type and balanced out with nutritional vitamins D and Ok and different essential hint minerals, as a part of a complete dietary plan.

 Good sources embody uncooked milk and cheese from pasture-raised cows (who eat the crops), leafy inexperienced greens, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, sesame seeds and wheatgrass, to call just a few. It is price mentioning that the research carried out about calcium from dairy merchandise are all carried out with pasteurized dairy, reasonably than uncooked dairy merchandise which have extra of their vitamins intact, and this muddies the outcomes of those research.

Calcium from dietary sources is usually 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 % decrease threat of dying from all causes, and a 23 % decrease threat 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 sort of calcium your bones can use. This idea 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 by means of low-energy nuclear transformation solely discovered inside residing techniques.

His idea explains how cows and chickens produce much more calcium of their milk and eggs than is discovered of their food plan, or why, staff uncovered to extraordinarily excessive temperatures (130 levels F) within the Center East are identified 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 quite a few herbs together with horsetail, nettles, oat straw, alfalfa, and uncooked cacao, which can be extraordinarily wealthy in extremely bioavailable magnesium.

Dr. Thompson recommends the use of pure unprocessed salt as a much better different to calcium dietary supplements as a result of it gives the hint minerals you merely can not get from meals grown in right this moment’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 by means of solar publicity and devour a wide range of recent, native natural entire meals, together with greens, fruits, nuts, seeds, natural meats and eggs, unprocessed salt, and uncooked natural unpasteurized dairy, which gives you the bioavailable calcium your physique wants together with the hint minerals and different cofactors it must be absorbed and correctly utilized by your physique.

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