Calcium is a very important mineral in human metabolism, making up about 1-2% of an adult human’s body weight. In addition to its widely known role in bone structure, calcium is used to help control muscle and nerve function, as well as to manage acid/base balance in our blood stream. From this very simple description, you can see how calcium-rich foods can play a role in many aspects of your health that extend far beyond the specific area of bone health.
- It may sound counter-intuitive, but bone is very metabolically active tissue, with bone being built and broken down constantly.
- When our dietary calcium levels are too low, we pull calcium from the bones to keep the blood levels close to constant.
- As long as we correct this imbalance more days than not, this borrowing and returning process works very well. But if we do more borrowing from than replenishing to our calcium stores, bone can become dangerously weak.
In some sense, this gives us flexibility with our diets. In other words, we do not have to get a full supply of calcium each day, as long as we reach our goals most days. As long as your diet contains a wide variety of the foods on our World’s Healthiest Foods list, we believe that your calcium intake should be sufficient to maintain strong bones.
