Calcium: are you getting enough?

Calcium is one of the most abundant minerals in your body. An average human body has about a kilogram of calcium, most of it stored in the bone.

So how can you get adequate calcium in your daily food?

The most popular food, perhaps, made famous by the character Popeye, is spinach. Eat your spinach, a glowering mother would say, because Popeye says so.

But is it true?

To understand this, we need to understand two concepts in food.

Availability and absorption efficiency.

How much of an ingredient is available in a food and how much of it would be absorbed? They are not the same thing.

A cup of spinach, about 100 gms, has about 115 mg of spinach. However, only about five percent of this is absorbed in your body. So you get roughly 5.9 mg of calcium per cup of spinach.

You would need to eat a lot of spinach to get your daily required intake of calcium. Even the famed cup of milk gives you about 100 mg of absorbable calcium per cup.

So why is the calcium not being aborbed?

To illustrate, a 100 gms fox nuts (daal makhana) has aproximately 60 mg of calcium. But fox nuts also contain about 200 mg of phytates which bind with the calcium, preventing absorption.

So you get only about 6 mg of calcium for a box of fox nuts.

You are more likely to get too little as opposed to too much.

Too often, we go by what is visible on the surface. In the past if we didnt look at nutrition labels, we now do. A quick search tells us what a food might contain.

But food is complex.

You can quickly do yourself a disservice by relying on what I call “headline news.”

You think you have done the right things without understanding what you are doing.

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