According to the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), 75 percent of Americans take dietary supplements, almost all of whom believe these pills are essential for their health. In theory, this makes sense. What harm can putting added nutrients into your body do? But most people are surprised to learn that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t regulate supplements like they do medications, but rather as a subcategory of food.
“What it means is that the [supplement] manufacturer can introduce anything into the market that they believe is safe,” Pieter Cohen, MD, an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explained to the American Medical Association (AMA).
“The FDA’s job is to identify the products that are causing harm after they’ve been on the market and remove them from store shelves,” he adds.
So, there’s very little oversight of what’s in your supplements and what safe dosages are. As for the latter, doctors caution that one extremely common supplement can have serious cardiovascular risks if taken in excess.
RELATED: Doctor Says These 10 Supplements Can Damage Your Digestive System.
Calcium supplements can raise your risk of heart damage.
Calcium is a mineral most commonly associated with healthy bones. In addition, “Your heart, muscles, and nerves also need calcium to function properly,” Mayo Clinic notes.
But according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), up to 40 percent of U.S. adults consume less than the recommended amount of calcium, which increases the risk of low bone mass, fractures, and osteoporosis.
Adult men should get 1,156 mg of calcium daily, while women should aim for 1,009 mg. But since so many people don’t meet these goals through their diets, they turn to calcium supplements.
However, if you overdo it on these supplements, your heart could be in trouble.
In a 2016 study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill analyzed 10 years of medical tests covering more than 2,700 patients to examine the causes of heart disease.
They concluded that taking calcium in the form of supplements “may raise the risk of plaque buildup in arteries and heart damage.”
“As a person ages, calcium-based plaque builds up in the body’s main blood vessel, the aorta and other arteries, impeding blood flow and increasing the risk of heart attack,” the researchers explain.
“When it comes to using vitamin and mineral supplements, particularly calcium supplements being taken for bone health, many Americans think that more is always better,” study co-author Erin Michos, MD, current director of Women’s Cardiovascular Health at Johns Hopkins, said in a statement. “But our study adds to the body of evidence that excess calcium in the form of supplements may harm the heart and vascular system.”
Other doctors agree that heightened levels of calcium in the blood—a condition known as hypercalcemia—can be problematic for your heart health.
“Hypercalcemia can seriously affect heart function and the cardiovascular system and can cause arrhythmias (an increase in irregular heartbeats) and EKG abnormalities due to the increased calcium levels disrupting the heart’s electrical activity,” Brynna Connor, MD, healthcare ambassador at NorthWestPharmacy.com, previously explained to Best Life.
“This is because calcium is a positively charged ion that, when in the blood in normal quantities, helps carry electrical activity to the heart (along with the muscles and brain),” she continued. “However, when too much calcium is in the blood, it can alter the electrical activity of the heart, causing a change in heart rate.”
RELATED: 8 Surprising Vitamin D Side Effects, According to Doctors.
But you shouldn’t limit your dietary calcium intake.
However, doctors agree that hypercalcemia is rarely caused by diet. In fact, the 2016 study found that “a diet high in calcium-rich foods appears to be protective.”
This is likely because the body metabolizes dietary calcium and calcium supplements differently.
“It could be that supplements contain calcium salts, or it could be from taking a large dose all at once that the body is unable to process,” study author John Anderson, PhD, professor emeritus of nutrition at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, explained in a statement.
Therefore, if you’d like to up your calcium intake through what you eat, the following foods are very high in calcium:
- Plain, low-fat yogurt
- Fortified orange juice
- Part-skim mozzarella
- Sardines
- Nonfat milk
- Fortified soy milk
- Tofu
- Canned salmon
- Cottage cheese
- Fortified breakfast cereals
- Spinach
It’s also important to understand that for your body to adequately absorb calcium, it also needs vitamin D.
If you’re concerned your calcium levels are low, or you’re considering taking a calcium supplement, first speak with your doctor.
Source link
