Fluke or Trend? Calcium vs Heart Disease Part 5

Snap!  Ouch!  That's from my head doing a double take.  All these years, I thought the calcium vs heart disease thing was a conspiracy arranged by one researcher & publication.  However, 3 months ago, I stumbled upon some corroborating studies by other researchers in other journals.  Even the US Preventive Services Task Force recently came out against low dose calcium (less than 1,000mg/d) in post-menopausal women because they could not find conclusive evidence of benefit in the face of a small risk of harm from kidney stones.

So you can only imagine my surprise when a population-based longitudinal cohort study was published early online yesterday in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolisim in which the authors concluded that both dietary calcium & calcium supplementation up to 1,000mg/d may actually be associated w/lower mortality in women.  To arrive at their conclusion, the authors followed 9,033 community-dwelling participants in the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study for 10 years.

What does this mean for you & me?  Is calcium good or not?  Is there a specific population or demographic that could benefit more or sustain greater risk?  As much as we'd like to be able to simplify complicated studies in to 15 second sound bites, it's not going to happen any time soon.  As we gain more & more knowledge, we'll get into a better situation to put the blocks in place.  Until then, dietary calcium seems like a safe bet.  But as for calcium supplementation, the jury's still out. It could go either way.  Stay tuned!

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