If true, it's great news. Could you share a few sources for this or point to where you've discussed this elsewhere? And what about the calcium to phosphorus ratio? I've recently had to lower my calcium intake due to a health challenge and am only consuming enough calcium so that Ca/P >1. Any further information you can provide would be most appreciated.
Expert says guidelines recommend too much calcium - Harvard Women's Health Watch - Harvard Health
500 to 700 milligrams of calcium through diet and 800 to 1,000 of vitamin D as a supplement should be adequate to preserve bone density....
www.health.harvard.edu
"Essentially, I think that adults do not need 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day. The World Health Organization's recommendation of 500 milligrams is probably about right. The United Kingdom sets the goal at 700 milligrams, which is fine, too. It allows for a little leeway," says Dr. Willett.
The studies about the "requirement" were a joke. Giving older women a 1200mg calcium supplement for a couple weeks. How can that count as a requirement.
The question should be how low can you go until issues appear.
The apparent calcium paradox, mostly derived from ecological studies, whereby countries or populations with lower calcium intakes also have a lower prevalence of osteoporosis, suggests that environmental factors other than calcium intake play a key role in preventing osteopenia, osteoporosis and bone fracture.
Evidence from human studies on the relationship between calcium intake and various health outcomes was reviewed and found to be inconsistent. It was not possible to use measures of bone health for deriving calcium requirements.
Scientists have reasoned that maintaining an adequate level of calcium in the blood could keep the body from drawing it out of the bones, thereby keeping bones strong. In the late 1970s, a couple of brief studies indicated that consuming 1,200 mg of calcium a day could preserve a postmenopausal woman's calcium balance. The current recommendation is based on those studies.
So basically they used the fraudulent calcium balance studies that only measured it for a couple weeks, but Dr. Willet says you can only judge calcium balance when doing studies that last years.
But that may not have been a sound decision. "The recommendation was based on calcium balance studies that lasted just a few weeks. In fact, calcium balance is determined over the course of years," says Dr. Willett.
Plus some balance studies showed that for women the EAR (Estimated Average Requirement) is only 400mg and for men around 500mg, and that is just taking into account the short-term balance studies, so the actual requirement has to be way lower, like 200mg or so.
The problem is when defining an RDA, they attempt to measure the average requirement and then add some large safety margin - they did the same with retinol. Because this is all based on the ideology that more must be better.
Across the 74 countries with data, average national dietary calcium intake ranges from 175 to 1233 mg/day. Many countries in Asia have average dietary calcium intake less than 500 mg/day.
200-500mg per day seem to be perfectly fine.
The actual physiological requirement of calcium has never been determined. It could be as low as 100 or 200mg in healthy people, for all we know. Nepalese people have an average intake of 175mg a day. Balance studies, even done for years, can't count as requirement, they just show how much the body excretes.
If bone health is no marker of calcium requirement, then we are left with a mineral that does not create obvious deficiency states in low amounts.
The calcium RDA is merely political to keep the dairy industry alive (or poison the population). How funny that these smart scientists always arrive at an RDA that perfectly matches the average intake in Europe and the USA, but completely ignore the epidemiological data from South America, Africa, Asia. Looks like western people have figured out everything intuitively by just eating the perfect amounts of nutrients. Oh, but we are also the sickest populations. Something isn't right here.
Given that calcium is in every food, and you will get at least 200mg on a whole foods diet, calcium requirement doesn't seem to matter in practice, but getting too much is very easy on a dairy heavy diet. Of course, during vA detox, calcium loss from bones could be an issue.
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