You might think that there’s no harm in taking your daily vitamin or mineral supplement, but according to a new study, taking high daily doses of calcium supplements may do more harm than good to men’s wellbeing, as it raises their risk of dying from heart and circulation problems. However, the researchers also found that there was no effect on female wellness, or with calcium from foods.
Calcium is necessary for strong bones and teeth, as any yoghurt advert will tell you. Though you can get calcium from many foods, including dairy products, spinach, kale, and soybeans, your body becomes less able to absorb the mineral with age, which increases your risk of osteoporosis. As this condition means you have weak and easily breakable bones, many older people take calcium supplements as a preventative measure or treatment. It is currently recommended that most adults get 700 milligrams (mg) of calcium a day, preferably from foods.
As recent studies have begun to indicate that calcium supplements may increase your risk of heart attacks and other serious heart and circulation problems, the researchers looked further into this by gathering data on more than 388,000 men and women, aged 50 to 71, who took part in a large US health study, and reported on their usual diet and supplementation programme. The researchers recorded how many people died of heart and circulation problems over an average of 12 years, and looked for a link between this and calcium intake.
The results were that there was no connection between calcium intake and the risk of dying from heart and circulation problems among women, whether that was related to total calcium intake, the calcium they got just from supplements, or calcium just from foods. However, men who took more 1000 milligrams or more of calcium daily were 20% more likely to die from heart and circulation problems than men who didn’t take any calcium supplements. As with women, there was no link between food-derived calcium and poor male heart health.
However, bear in mind that though this 20% sounds like a huge increase in risk, the chance of dying was low overall, with less than 2 in 100 men who took the most calcium dying of these problems during the study. Also, this type of study can’t prove that calcium supplements increased men’s risk of dying from heart and circulation problems, as there is always room for error in self-reported data and there could have been something else about the diets or lifestyles of men who took calcium supplements that increased their risk instead.
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