Calcium & Magnesium Citrate - Vitamins and Supplements

For what, and how is Calcium used in the Body?

Most of the calcium in the body is bone. But providing skeletal material is far from calcium's only role in the body. Calcium serves in nerve transmission, muscular contraction, and blood clotting. Your bones actually serve as a reservoir of calcium - calcium is added or subtracted as needed by the body, as determined by the concentration of calcium in the blood. Below 10mg/100ml, calcium is mobilized into the blood. Above approximately 11mg/100ml, the bones absorb the excess calcium. Given this, it is easy to see why dietary calcium is important in maintaining proper bone density.
 
Women especially cannot afford to be without adequate amounts of calcium in their diets. The common female complaints of PMS and symptoms of menopause may be relieved by simple supplementation with the mineral, calcium. The evidence is circumstantial, but mounting fast, that PMS and menopausal complaints may be early signs of osteoporosis!


Osteoporosis is a term familiar to most people. It is the progressive decalcification (degeneration) of the bones throughout a persons body. Known as the 'silent thief' of diseases, osteoporosis most often strikes older women. But the time to combat it is now. As much as 95% of your bone mass is accumulated during adolescence, then it must be maintained throughout life. We have all seen the little old ladies whose vertebrae have collapsed from lack of calcium, making them shorter and hunched over. In severe cases of osteoporosis the vertebrae are so weak that the spine doesn't stop dropping forward until the rib cage comes to rest on the hip bones. That's uncomfortable and damaging to the self image, but not deadly. What usually kills victims of osteoporosis is a hip fracture. Because of the mechanics of your muscles and bones, the act of standing up from a chair places great stress on the hip bones. In people with osteoporosis the hip bone becomes porous and weak to the extent that one day simply standing up from a sitting position breaks their hip. Immotility in the hospital bed often leads to pneumonia or other complication and the victim often dies. Mortality due to hip fracture is about 30%. While men are less likely to suffer from hip fracture, owing to their greater bone mass, they are almost twice as likely to die once it happens. What two things can you do to maintain bone mass? Exercise and supplement with calcium.


Like the misconception about peptic ulcer and stress (it turns out that most peptic ulcers are caused by the bacteria, Helicobacter pylori, not psychological stresses), there is a similar misconception about kidney stones and calcium. The misconception is that kidney stones are caused by an excess of calcium in the diet. The result is that kidney stone victims are often advised to limit dairy (calcium) intake. Unfortunately for those people, just the opposite is true and their limited consumption of dairy products will probably lead them to another kidney stone.

Men: there is no need to avoid calcium for fear of kidney stones. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health, conducted by researchers at Harvard University, and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 looked at 45,000 men aged 40 or older and found an inverse relationship between calcium and kidney stones.¹

Eighty percent of kidney stones are composed of calcium oxalate, a highly insoluble substance that is sometimes precipitated in the kidney from a combination of oxalate and calcium. (Oxalate is found in vegetables such as spinach, brussels sprouts, carrots, tea, garlic and others.) The hypothesis explaining the inverse relationship between calcium intake and kidney stones is that high levels of dietary (consumed) calcium and oxalate combine to form calcium oxalate "stones"in the gastro-intestinal tract, instead of in the kidney. This allows the calcium oxalate "stone" to pass through unnoticed, instead of later precipitating in the kidney where it would be called a "kidney stone".


Our Cal-Mag™ formula has been developed for the optimal ratio of Calcium Citrate to Magnesium Citrate, of 5:1. Take 2-4 Cal-Mag™ tablets per day.