The Calcium Effect

Here we go, everybody. The big one. The delicious one. I LOVE calcium. And it is SO important. If my word isn’t enough, you can tell calcium is such a big deal because the FDA started the “Three-A-Day” campaign, which motivates people to eat three servings of dairy every day.

Honestly, I typically struggle with my dairy intake, but then I realized that it isn’t as hard as it seems: a glass of milk with breakfast, a little bit of yogurt for a snack, and cheese with whatever I have for dinner. Or sometimes cottage cheese gets thrown in there somewhere. Just three servings! That’s all it takes, and you are close to the amount of calcium you need in a day (the rest of your food makes up for the extra 300 or so mg that are left over).

So obviously, calcium is a big deal. The FDA doesn’t start such a huge campaign for just any nutrient. But why is calcium important? Similar to Vitamin D (if you need to, you should go back and review that post), calcium has a HUGE role in bone health. If you have more calcium in your bones, then your bones become stronger. Without calcium, bones become brittle and can break easily—this is another way to get osteoporosis. And to reiterate what I mentioned when we talked about Vitamin D, once you pass age 25ish your bones are at their peak strength and durability. So if you don’t eat enough calcium before age 25 then your bones are automatically going to be easier to break later in life; bone loss is inevitable. On the bright side, if you continue to eat enough calcium after age 25, bone loss can be slowed and you can continue to enjoy your normal activities once you reach menopause (if you are female), and mid to late fifties if you are male. I would go into more detail, but most of this information can be found in the Vitamin D post. No need to bore you if I have already said it.

Unlike Vitamin D, calcium also assists with muscle contraction, nerve impulses, and the secretion of hormones. A lot of this is very complicated and hard to explain without diagrams, pictures…and someone with a PhD in biology. So I will save you the terror of trying to comprehend the details of calcium’s roles through a simple blog post. But basically, we need to constantly have calcium in our body, or it doesn’t work correctly. It’s not one of those nutrients that we can slack off on and not notice a huge difference in our daily functioning or overall health. And if we don’t consume enough calcium for a long period of time, our bones begin to weaken. Simply because we didn’t eat enough dairy in our diet.

If you don't like dairy, or can't eat dairy, there are other options for calcium intake. The bodily can more easily absorb calcium from dairy, but here are some other options: dark, leafy greens (spinach, kale, bok choy, etc), fortified tofu, and fortified juices. It is harder to get enough calcium this way, but it needs to be done. 

Once again, I cannot stress enough how important our food intake is to our lives. And if it doesn’t have an impact on our daily life, it definitely will have an impact on our future lives if we don’t take care of ourselves. I don’t want to scare any of you, but that is the reality of the situation. Studies have shown that our health is 70-80% dependent on how we take care of ourselves, with the other 20ish% being genetics. If that much of your future health is dependent on food intake and exercise, I hope we all try to be a little better. We don’t need to be perfect eaters, we just need to be independent eaters—able to make our own food decisions and not let food make the decision for us.