5 Reasons Your Calcium Isn't Reaching Your Bones

Calcium is what bone is made of. But on its own, it's only raw material. Your body needs a whole chain of nutrients to take it in, put it to work and send it where it belongs.

Think of a delivery truck.

• Calcium is the package.
• Vitamin D3 is the loading dock. It helps you take calcium in.
• Magnesium is the key. It turns D3 into the form your body uses.
• Vitamin K2 is the address label. It directs calcium into bone.
• Boron is the strap. It helps your body hold on to calcium and magnesium.

Most calcium bottles, including the one many of our mothers took, give you the package and a little of the loading dock. That's two links of a five link chain.

More calcium doesn't fix a broken chain.

Your body has to turn vitamin D into its active form before it can use it, and that step needs magnesium. So your vitamin D can look perfect on a blood test and still sit idle.

The same goes for calcium. Your body keeps the calcium in your blood inside a tight range no matter what. If it runs short, it pulls calcium out of your bones to make up the difference.

And without vitamin K2, the calcium you do take in has no address label. Only a bone scan shows what's really happening.

Normal blood numbers can hide a chain that isn't working.

Boron is a trace mineral almost no calcium bottle has. It helps your body hold on to calcium and magnesium instead of losing them.

In a 1987 USDA study, the same 12 postmenopausal women ate a diet low in boron for 119 days, and then boron was added back. Within 8 days, they were losing less calcium and magnesium in their urine.

So you can take every mineral on the list, and your body can still be letting them go. Turn your bottles around tonight and look for the word boron.

Taking calcium in is half the job. Keeping it is the other half.

Most women take two big tablets with their morning coffee, before breakfast, to get it over with. But your gut takes calcium in a little at a time.

In absorption studies, about 36% of a 300 mg dose was taken in, compared with about 28% of a 1,000 mg dose. And the chalky kind, calcium carbonate, needs a meal or stomach acid to break down.

Many women make less stomach acid after menopause, and heartburn pills turn it down even more. In a 1985 study, people with low stomach acid barely absorbed it on an empty stomach, and absorbed it normally with food.

On a weekly bone medication? It has to be taken alone with plain water, and calcium taken with it gets in its way.

Two small doses with meals beat one big dose with coffee.

The tablets are the size of your thumbnail. They get stuck halfway down and sit in your gut like concrete.

So women skip them, then feel guilty, then skip again. Some hide them in a napkin. The chews get sickly sweet, and Tums are calcium and nothing else your bones need.

Buying the missing pieces separately makes it worse. Calcium, D3, K2, magnesium and boron is five bottles and six to eight pills a day, and almost nobody keeps that up.

Skipped pills don't count. The best formula is the one you'll actually take.