It is commonly believed that calcium supplementation can improve your bone health, which is especially important in the elderly. However, according to a longitudinal study of more than 60,000 elderly Swedish women, if you take calcium supplements in high doses, you may have a higher risk of heart disease and death. The researchers discovered that the risk of death from heart disease is doubled in women who consume 1,400 milligrams or more of calcium a day in tablet form.
According to lead author, Dr. Karl Michaëlsson, a professor and orthopaedic surgeon at Uppsala University in Sweden, ‘If you have a normal diet, you don’t need to take calcium supplements. Calcium supplements are useful if you have a very low intake of calcium, but few women have such a low intake.’ This message could extend to many other vitamin and mineral supplements, as more and more medical health experts are asking how healthful and necessary these pills are.
In an ideal world, you would only need to take a supplement if you were specifically unable to absorb certain nutrients, or if, as when pregnant, you were deficient in certain nutrients (folic acid). This can be ascertained through simple blood tests, so why are people popping pills as a preventative measure? Certain nutrients and minerals can have a positive impact on our health, but then taking them in supplement form isn’t as ‘natural’ as you might like to think. Though the difficulty of naturally extracting certain nutrients makes it sometimes necessary to take synthetically-created vitamins, in some cases they are extracted from petrochemicals.
Therefore, though popping pills seems like the more attractive option, before you rush to the supplement aisle of the supermarket, consult your doctor or dietician, and maybe head to your local greengrocers instead. As Cloud put it, ‘You can take vitamins on the faith that they will make you better – and if you have a real vitamin deficiency, they will. But there’s more science behind another way of getting your vitamins: eating right.’