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Nutrition Diva

Is the recommended intake of calcium higher than it needs to be?

Nutrition Diva

Macmillan Holdings, LLC

Health & Fitness, Education, Arts, Nutrition, Food

4.31.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dairy is a relatively recent addition to the human diet. How did early humans get enough calcium to develop and maintain healthy bones?

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast, a show where we take a closer look at nutrition research, headlines and Unfortunately, like many women her age, Anne has been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and her

0:26.1

doctor has told her that she needs to get 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day, and that's fairly

0:31.6

standard advice. But Anne raises an interesting question.

0:36.2

She writes, I've been researching which foods contain calcium and it sure seems that the only

0:41.8

cultures where people consume anywhere near this amount

0:45.4

are those that consume significant amounts of dairy.

0:48.2

But historically, many cultures evolved without consuming a lot of dairy.

0:52.3

So how do these cultures get anywhere near

0:55.0

the 1200 milligrams of calcium necessary to develop and maintain healthy bones?

1:00.0

It's true that dairy products are very concentrated sources of calcium and the

1:06.9

calcium that they contain is very well absorbed in the body. Cultures whose

1:12.1

dietary patterns include a lot of dairy products are likely to get

1:16.5

a large proportion of their calcium from dairy. Now humans didn't really start consuming dairy products until they started keeping

1:24.7

ruminant animals such as sheep and goats for the purpose of consuming their milk and

1:30.8

usually that would have been fermented or cultured into yogurt, caffir, or cheese

1:36.8

which would extend its shelf life.

1:39.9

After Europeans colonized North America,

1:42.8

we were mostly an agricultural society.

1:46.7

But as industrialization drew people

1:48.6

from the farms into the cities,

1:50.4

agriculture gradually became an industry of its own with a lot fewer farmers

1:56.0

providing food for a lot more people and that's a process that continues to this day.

...

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