Calcium: The Questions We Need To Ask

How did calcium work its way into our general consciousness as being one of our best friends, a vital mineral that we could never get enough of?

More importantly, how do we change the perception of that nutritional dogma that has led us so far astray into a new age of calcium caused disease? 

The mainstream media and the dairy lobby remind us daily that the more calcium we get the better. However, that’s simply not true. Calcium is both a powerful and potentially toxic mineral that, like most nutrients, is vital for life.

But we need to remember that there are many supporting players in the calcium game. Calcium is not a simple one mineral wonder, working alone to keep our bones and teeth strong. There are many other factors at play, including those that are important for proper muscle function.

As is true for all nutrients, calcium is best when absorbed in a balanced diet that closely resembles the diet that we evolved on – rich in plants, occasional meat and fruit when available and plenty of clean water, preferably laced with life-giving minerals.

Our modern lives often make it difficult for us to meet our bodies nutritional needs. When we make health decisions, we’re usually forced by time or available options to make ad lib substitutions for our ancestral ways. To live the healthiest lives that we can, ideally we would understand what our ancestors had (and didn’t have), what we’ve lost with the changes in our environment and how best to mitigate the harm so that we can maximize the benefits of living in the most prosperous time in human history.

The challenge is to really come to grips with health, and that means going beyond merely treating disease and into understanding and protecting our food and water sources to enable us to have the best chance at living healthy and happy lives.

Modern Medicine is Making Us Sick

Enter modern medicine and the untouchable ‘evidenced based science’.

Notice how it is used exhaustively to denigrate the effects of diet and supplementation, while promoting the supposed efficacy of strange compounds that humans and animals have never before encountered. 

These Frankenstein compounds are declared safe and given “standard of care” status (read as:mandatory to prescribe by licensed union member) after just a few years of use in a few thousand animals and people. And all they have to do is beat a placebo to one end-point over a few months/years in a few people in a few countries in a controlled trial or two. While almost all of them have warnings and potentially severe side effects, it is frightening how quickly these are forgotten.

Calcium Systems In Our Bodies

My thesis is that there are no bodily systems more misunderstood or purposefully neglected than those affected by calcium. Because we have got it so wrong, and because it affects so many aspects of our health, calcium balance is going to be one of, if not the most important factor in curing disease. 

I believe that it’s well past the time that we lay to rest the bogeymen we have been conditioned to fear, such as cholesterol, saturated fat, butter or sunshine. We need to confront health issues in a more complex and nuanced way, one that encompasses layers of knowledge that expands beyond the most recent clinical trial.

If you want to keep it simple then eat the way our ancestors did (make friends with a farmer), walk a lot, get some sunshine and stay away from any “food” that comes from a factory. If you’d like to really optimize your health, than take the trouble to dig a little deeper than the average medical dictum, another prescription drug and the endless screening for the next disease headed your way with increasing likelihood.

For most of us, already immersed in our culture of sickness and treatments, finding our way back to health can be a joyful journey of shedding pills, pain and pathology as we go.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to delve further into the calcium story. I promise that by the end you will understand how calcium and magnesium work, and how important their balance is for our health. We will look at the distortions in our intake of calcium and magnesium and how their controlling factors lead to imbalance. Lastly, we will look at the diseases that these imbalances cause and understand why they are often found together in the same person.

My goal is for you to be left with a workable understanding of calcium so that you will be able to use it when confronted with fragments of information and isolated medical evidence that purports to prove something that in fact, on closer examination, is usually wrong.    

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