Heart Attacks Increase With Use of Calcium Supplements

This study documents that modern medicine has no authority in nutrition. Its methods of reductionism and partitioning the body into units that can be treated separately are deeply flawed.

by Heidi Stevenson

8 August 2010

In a finding that should come as no surprise, the British Medical Journal reports that taking calcium supplements results in heart attacks. A supplement that doctors routinely tell women to take to prevent osteoporosis is implicated in heart disease. What's a woman to do?

A good place to start is to realize that your doctor most likely does not have a good understanding of nutrition. A combination of reductionist thinking about how health is produced, with an attitude that parts of the body can be partitioned from the whole, is a recipe for disaster—as this study documents.

Mainstream medicine has simply assumed that, since calcium is a major part of bone composition, then a lack of calcium must be a cause of osteoporosis. That assumption does not consider that calcium is part of a synergystic balance in a host of body functions, including heart beat, nerve function, muscle contraction, and blood clotting—and that it interacts with other nutrients.

The Magnesium Connection

Nutrients are synergystic. They don't act by themselves, but as part of a process, or more accurately in the case of calcium, many processes. Calcium is not taken into a void. In fact, studies have documented that excess calcium can interfere with magnesium absorption, and that magnesium may be a more significant factor in osteoporosis than calcium.

Calcium and magnesium compete for the same absorption mechanisms. Excessive amounts of calcium can prevent adequate absorption of magnesium.

Magnesium is required by every organ in the body. It helps regulate blood sugar, energy production, protein synthesis, blood pressure, and heart rhythm. Anything that interferes with the body's ability to absorb adequate magnesium can obviously have a negative impact on heart health. Excess calcium does just that. Obviously, supplementing calcium on a just-because basis is, at best, a bad idea—and it's certainly not surprising that it can lead to heart attacks.

Why We're More Likely Require Magnesium Supplementation

Our ancestral pre-agricultural diets did not include significant grains or dairy. The hunter-gatherer diet provides approximately equal amounts of calcium and magnesium. We must have evolved to achieve optimal health with that balance. However, the modern diet usually provides a far higher amount of calcium, about twelve times as much as magnesium.

Therefore, since calcium and magnesium compete for absorption, we are far more likely to lack adequate magnesium than calcium.

Modern Medicine's Misunderstanding

About 98% of the body's calcium is found in bone. An adult weighing 70 kg. will normally have about 1,000 grams of calcium. That same person will have about 19 grams of magnesium, of which 65% is found in bones and teeth. Because there is significantly more calcium in bone than there is magnesium, it's easy to make the leap to assume that lack of calcium is the problem in osteoporosis. That, though, completely ignores how these minerals are used in the body. It doesn't consider how long calcium and magnesium are held by a bone, what actually induces the release of them from bone, or the body's other uses of these minerals.

It is well established that calcium is involved in producing the heart's contractions, while magnesium is inherent in the heart's relaxation between contractions. Both are critical for health. Magnesium is known to lower blood pressure. It protects against blood clotting by keeping platelets from sticking together. If magnesium metabolism is limited by excess calcium intake, then all these heart protection effects of magnesium are minimized.

Even the interrelation between calcium and magnesium seriously misrepresents the complexity of both of these minerals' interrelationships with other body processes and nutrients. Both are related to sodium, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements. Not one of them can be dealt with independently of the others. A change in one will usually have a cascade effect in the body.

That's why treating any single element of nutrition or part of the body as if it were an independent actor is doomed to failure. That's why modern medicine's reductionism and partitioning of the body are irrational approaches to issues of health. The body is an immensely complex arena of constantly changing states and interrelationships.

Should You Supplement With Calcium?

Certainly, there are people who benefit from calcium supplementation. Most, though, do not—and are likely doing themselves harm with it.

Should you, then, supplement with magnesium? Perhaps. Again, this must be taken on an individual basis. It's likely that a large proportion of the population does require magnesium supplementation.

What we need to understand is: Pills are not food. If we need to supplement, it's because there's an imbalance in our lives. In some instances, it's reasonable to assume that we do need to supplement, as in Vitamin D, in which nearly all of us are deficient.

Because of the inadequacy of most people's diets as the result of Agribusiness and the resultant modern diet that's high in grains and processed foods, the vast majority of people in industrial nations lack adequate nutrients. Nonetheless, taking supplements is not the best solution. To follow that path is to continue the fallacy that nutrition can be broken down into simple molecular units, while forgetting that nutrition is part of a synergystic process.

If you have good reason to know that you are deficient in a particular nutrient, your best solution is to evaluate your diet and switch to a more natural one that simulates what paleolithic humans ate, and assure that your food is grown organically. Second best is to follow a diet that has developed within a culture, such as the Mediterranean diet. If you still require supplementation—which means that your body has sustained damage, is in a temporary but serious imbalance, or you were born with a metabolic defect—then you should take targeted supplements.

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