Dr. George L. Dixon - "Talking Fitness"

An Elemental Element

What weighs more than your head, but isn’t as smart? You have half as much by weight as you do water in your body. The answer is Calcium. You need it for growing and maintaining strong bones and teeth. It is also required for contraction and relaxation of normal muscle. It is essential for proper heart action, nerve function and blood clotting. Hey, maybe it is pretty smart!

When you eat calcium in any of its forms, it joins with Vitamin D, gets into your blood and does all those great things I mentioned and of course, goes to make the protein bone scaffolding hard. Bone gets thicker with use and thinner with disuse. Estrogen slows the normal constant bone loss and speeds the normal constant buildup.

How much calcium? 1500 milligrams. You eat normally, in America, about 400-500 milligrams daily. You must make up the rest in extra ways. More of the known calcium foods or by pills, powders, liquids, or additives. Skim and whole milk have the same amount of calcium, 300 mgm per eight-ounce glass. Yogurt has lots more than cottage cheese. Eat sardines and salmon with the bones. Oysters, green leafy vegetables, clams, tofu, even citrus fruit have calcium. Tums, extra calcium type, about 200 mgm per tablet. Titralac, an antacid, 200+ mgm per tablespoon. Don’t eat bone meal from the health food store unless you know it is not contaminated with lead. Cheap calcium carbonate is as good or better than expensive forms of calcium. Orange juice recently appeared laced with calcium, it is good, but expensive.

Don’t take calcium at the same time as you do the important fiber that you also need. They love each other and stay together right on through you. I suggest half a dose of calcium in AM and PM. If you find it too constipating you need to try the liquid forms and to take more fluids and fiber.

Hibernating bears do not get up, or urinate or defecate for several months. They do not lose calcium from their bones! If you lay down for two months you would lose huge quantities of calcium. Astronauts have kidney and bladder stones formed from their immense calcium losses. These stones are major problems of weightlessness in space. The answer is with the bear. We just haven’t found it yet. Stand by for "Bears In Space".

More about calcium and bones and muscles in "Exercise a la Carte", here, at your bookstore or call 800-624-4952.