Osteoporosis has come to become a common parlance among most women, especially in the menopausal phase of their life. Either they have been affected by it, or they live with the fear of being affected by it.

You very rarely hear (or probably never hear) men complaining about osteoporosis. It’s usually the women! Statistics show that women are affected four times more than men…what do you concur? – Obviously it has something to do with hormones!

A study looked through 36,282 normally healthy women between 50 – 80 years of age. These women were randomly assigned 1000mg of calcium and 400 IU of Vitamin D per day and the rest were given a placebo. Their progress was monitored over a 7 year period. This extremely well monitored statistically significant study revealed that during and at the end of the 7 years period, there was absolutely no benefit from Calcium and Vitamin D supplementation to prevent broken bones. A deeper study revealed that a very insignificant amount of calcium was actually going to the bones and an even more insignificant amount of less than 1% improvement in bone density only in the hip leaving the spine untouched.

It is true Osteoporosis is a disease in which the bones become porous and fragile – due to excessive loss of calcium…NOT due to insufficient intake of calcium. Rather – Osteoporosis is a disease that arises due to excessive loss of calcium…not due to deficient intake. Hence supplementing yourself with calcium is neither preventing you from developing the disease nor is it going to stop the progress of the damage caused. Calcium deficiency is in fact not even a concern among those whose dietary intake is deficient in calcium.

What then is happening to all the calcium you are taking as supplements?
Calcium is the most abundant mineral in your body – in your bones, teeth and plays a very important role in clotting and triggering nerve impulses. The reason calcium is so abundant is because calcium has its own regulation system. If the receptors sense a deficiency in calcium levels the regulatory system triggers Vitamin D to increase calcium absorption from the intestines and reduce calcium loss from the kidneys. This system is so robust that a required calcium level is maintained even with low calcium intake.

While women are made to believe supplementing with calcium will prevent them from developing osteoporosis…truth be told…there is not a single well controlled prospective study that has been published until now to prove the benefits of calcium supplementation to prevent osteoporosis.

Supplementing with just calcium is like taking your car that is out of fuel to the fuel station and instead of shoving the nozzle into the fuel tank, you spray your car all over with fuel. Calcium supplements don’t really end up in your bones.

In fact…taking this understanding to a more dramatic level – indiscriminate supplementation of calcium to strengthen the bones is not only useless but also dangerous. Calcium supplementation can actually become problematic when excess calcium gets deposited at wrong parts of your body…which quite often goes undiagnosed.

Do you know what your body does with all the excess calcium? Since it certainly does not seem to end up in your bones, it dumps it into the most abundantly available channel – your arteries. When CT Scan reveals – arteriosclerosis…the culprit who laid the foundation causing blocks in your artery causing heart disease – Calcium!

In 2011, researchers shocked the medical community when they published in the prestigious British Medical Journal the results of the Calcium and Heart Health Study- Women who supplement with calcium to prevent osteoporosis are at higher risk of developing atherosclerosis, heart attack and stroke than those who don’t!

Excess calcium in your system does more damage than that…Remember the role Vitamin D plays in Calcium regulation…if there is a deficiency…the contrary applies when there is excess Calcium – it suppresses the Vitamin D production. Apart from Calcium regulation, Vitamin D plays an important role in building your immune system. A compromised immune system opens doors to a wide range of autoimmune disorders. A paper published in Cancer Research by the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School found that immune deficiency caused by elevated calcium intake resulted in an increased incidence of advanced prostate cancer. There are similar studies showing a relationship with breast cancer and colon cancer.

Excess calcium also inhibits the absorption of magnesium and zinc. Considering that magnesium is essential in maintaining bone health, the theory that calcium supplementation prevents bone degeneration doesn’t quite add up!

Excess calcium that ends up in your kidneys causes kidney stones. Excess calcium in joints and tendons causes joint pains and arthritis.

Dr. Weston Price, a dentist also called the Charles Darwin of Nutrition, did some ground breaking discovery with regard to the cause of dental cavities and bone related chronic disease. What drew his attention to the problem at hand was the fact that he found his practice too busy…it really bothered him that too many people seemed to have bad teeth. To him, this wasn’t natural. Dr. Price made his way to remote corners of the world – Alaska to Australia to Africa…what they found was – previously healthy people, when they adopted a modern diet including refined oil and processed food they experienced a predictable and specific pattern of decline in their health, beginning with dental decay. Tooth and gum disease became common among this group even though there had been no change in their dental hygiene. What was discovered by Dr. Price is now being recognised even by modern medicine practitioners – tooth decay and gum disease are harbingers of heart disease. What was worse was, these issues began to crop up even in the kids of those who began developing these issues. Parents with broad beautiful faces, with lovely aligned sets of teeth, began having kids with narrow dental arches with crowded crooked teeth. Women started struggling to conceive and the process of birthing became more difficult as well. These kids along with dental issues also began to show symptoms of behavioral issues.

Dr. Price also noted that diets of healthy people contained more minerals, water soluble vitamins and at least 10 times more fat soluble vitamins as compared to modern industrialised diets!

What about Osteoporosis then?
Find yourself a functional medicine practitioner who can help you prevent or treat Osteoporosis with gut detox – to enhance your body’s ability to increase absorption of valuable vitamins and minerals, right diet, exercise, nutritional therapies (orally and intravenously), to top up on any deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, enzymes and coenzymes and finally hormonal treatment.

While under treatment a more reliable test to see if your treatment is working is a urine routine to check the levels of calcium markers in urine. A much more reliable tracker than bone density test. It takes 18-24 months to notice any improvement due to therapy using a bone density test…while the urine test will reveal any improvement through therapy by indicating lower levels of the same calcium markers within 6-8 weeks.

• The author of this article Dr. Ashmita Boopathy Moturi, is a Doctor of Naturopathy, a PhD. in Psychology and has completed her Masters in Medical Engineering. She is the founder of NineO2 Detox Center and the Director of Wishing Well Center for Integrative Medicine.