Re: Follow-up on earlier question about vit D, spironolactone, and calcium

[Guest guest]

In background, Farah Rahbar responded to Valarie a while back, saying:

Considering most of us in this group are low in vit D, I am curious if this is the result of taking spironolactone, or does having too much Aldosterone in the body depletes us of our Vit D, or just because most people are now low in vitamin D even though I live in sunny California

I then asked:

Is it not the case that if your body believes it has sufficient or excessive calcium, it will dump all the vitamin D you can throw at it?

Then I pondered the calcium balance of people with aldosteronism.

So the other day I was reading an article that said something that is implied by my comment, but the implication hadn't really hit home for me.

The statement I read was that many cases of low vitamin D (if it truly deserves such a pathological " diagnosis " ) are the direct effect of excessive calcium intake. According to this source, getting too much calcium will suppress your vitamin D. That's what I said, just stated from a different set of assumptions. (Sorry, I've lost the article, but since the point of view is out there, it shouldn't be hard to find comparable articles through relevant searches.)

My earlier comment asked if low D was really a problem, since your body will shed the vitamin D it doesn't need for bone-building. This other source looks at it a different way, assuming that low vitamin D truly is always a problem, and claims the problem can be caused by excessive calcium intake.

And most Americans' intake of calcium is described as excessive by a number of authorities who come at it from other angles, not just the vitamin D angle. We get calcium added to lots of foods, plus the calcium citrate pills many take, and many of us get it from local water, but we aren't getting sufficient magnesium to metabolize our calcium overload properly. It is difficult to avoid getting enough calcium, or too much, on the typical American diet. Our weak bones have other causes such as that dietary magnesium deficit. At least that's what some of the experts say, even if unanimous consensus would be too much to ask. One of the more articulate spokespeople for this point of view was Mildred Selig, MD, in The Magnesium Factor. It's a compendium of much of the available research on magnesium, written for the lay person.

So if Farah is correct that most of us are low in vitamin D, maybe that points toward an answer to my earlier question: do we tend to be calcium hoarders or calcium wasters? Widespread low vitamin D could suggest that our bodies hoard calcium. But for now I have no actual evidence to support or rebut that possibility.

AG