The Calcium Lie has led us to a host of health problems of untold proportions. We’ll go into them in greater detail in the coming chapters, but here is the foundation of The Calcium Lie:
Most people, even many medical professionals, began to believe that bones are made of calcium. As we’ve said before, our bones are actually composed of at least 12 minerals. One of them is calcium, but a proper balance of all these minerals is essential for bone health, strong bones and the prevention of osteoporosis. By the way, osteoporosis is defined as a loss of minerals from the bones, not a loss of just calcium. Remember, calcium hardens concrete, not bones!
Our doctors told us we needed more calcium to keep our bones strong, so we started popping calcium supplements, adding calcium to many of our foods and we were told to drink at least two glasses of calcium-rich milk every day. This false belief also commonly leads non-dairy consuming individuals to “fortify” with extra calcium in their diet.
This gross oversimplification for the apparent benefit of the dairy industry’s (Another lie: The Dairy “Get Your Calcium” Lie) is similar to The Mineral Lie, The Vitamin Lie and the Iodine Story. What we’ve sacrificed in the name of simplification and convenience has led us to serious errors and the propagation of outright lies in an approach to health that has taken a devastating toll.
Ask yourself, what are your bones made of? What builds strong bones? What is osteoporosis, a loss of what from the bones? Almost everyone, including educated medical personnel, dieticians and even physicians, will all answer, “Calcium.” That’s The Calcium Lie.
This is a big mistake! We are so programmed to believe that our bones are made of calcium, that it has almost become dogmatic.
Here’s the truth: If you take calcium supplements and eat calcium-rich foods (probably on the recommendation of your doctor), you’ll build up excess calcium in your system coupled with increasing mineral deficiencies and imbalances that will help cause plaque in arteries, kidney stones, gallstones, bone spurs, osteoarthritis, hypertension (high blood pressure), thyroid hormone resistance or what I have described as type 2 hypothyroidism, obesity, type 2 diabetes, brain shrinkage and dementia and many other diseases we’ll address in this book.
When we took the unrefined salts like sea salt and rock salt out of our diets, we lost about 15 percent of the nutritional value of our foods.
Incorrect suggestions to limit sodium intake, even as sea salt, increased our mineral deficiencies. Adding calcium to our diets to try to correct multiple mineral deficiencies and prevent or treat osteoporosis won’t help. This is a failed and incorrect hypothesis. Taking calcium alone will actually make our mineral imbalances worse. Excess calcium causes more mineral deficiencies and creates mineral imbalances leading to a downward spiral of numerous medical problems.
In addition, calcium doesn’t significantly improve fracture risks from osteoporosis and calcium excess leads to a myriad of other nutritional problems, including nutrient digestion and absorption issues and multiple diseases.
Our belief that calcium is the essential element for strong bones is an erroneous idea that has turned into an outright lie. Today nearly all of us believe we need extra calcium to have healthy bones and to prevent osteoporosis. More is better, so we add calcium. It is added to everything from orange juice to sports drinks, cereal, baby food, soy-based drinks and pasta. The list is endless.
We need minerals. We need all of them, not just one mineral.
Worst of all, we feed our children calcium-rich milk in the mistaken belief it will give them strong bones. By doing this we are subjecting them to hardening of the arteries later in life, hypothyroidism, hypoadrenalism, autoimmune disease, allergies and even obesity. We can all give thanks to the dairy industry’s advertising for that lie.
