You may have heard that calcium citrate is superior as a supplement to calcium carbonate, and you may also know that calcium carbonate is an effective heartburn remedy. As such, it's reasonable to wonder whether you could use calcium citrate to treat heartburn, and if so, whether it might work better than calcium carbonate. In fact, calcium citrate isn't an effective antacid, though it's an excellent calcium supplement -- especially for certain individuals.
Heartburn
If you suffer from heartburn, the reason is that you have stomach acid backing up into your esophagus. There's a muscular ring called the cardiac sphincter that normally allows food to pass from the esophagus into the stomach, but doesn't allow acid to back up out of the stomach and into the delicate esophagus. In some individuals -- particularly if they eat greasy or spicy food, are obese, or are pregnant -- the sphincter fails occasionally, leading to the sensation of heartburn.
Calcium Citrate
When you take a calcium supplement, you're never consuming pure, elemental calcium. Instead, you're taking calcium in the form of a salt. Calcium salts consist of particles of calcium paired with particles of variable identity. Two of the most common calcium salts in supplements are calcium citrate and calcium carbonate, which is much less expensive. While you may have heard that calcium citrate is a better calcium supplement than calcium carbonate, most people can use either supplement effectively.
Treating Heartburn
There are many different ways to treat heartburn, but one common over-the-counter remedy is calcium carbonate, contained in both Tums and Rolaids. Actually, the calcium in calcium carbonate has no effect whatsoever upon your heartburn -- the active portion of the calcium salt is the carbonate, which reacts with stomach acid to produce carbon dioxide and water, explain Drs. Reginald Garrett and Charles Grisham in their book "Biochemistry." As such, you can't replace calcium carbonate with calcium citrate for effective heartburn relief, because citrate doesn't neutralize stomach acid.
Other Considerations
If you have heartburn on a more than occasional basis, your doctor may have prescribed a proton pump inhibitor or H2 blocker medication to help control your acid reflux. While these medications are quite effective at reducing heartburn, they do have ramifications for your calcium absorption ability -- you can't effectively absorb calcium from calcium carbonate if you're on such a pharmaceutical, explains nutritionist Deborah Straub in a 2007 article published in "Nutrition in Clinical Practice." As such, calcium citrate is the superior source of calcium from individuals with frequent heartburn on certain medications -- but the calcium citrate itself isn't an antacid.
References
- "Biochemistry"; Reginald Garrett, Ph.D. and Charles Grisham, Ph.D.; 2007
- "Nutrition in Clinical Practice"; Calcium Supplementation in Clinical Practice: A Review of Forms, Doses, and Indications; D. Straub; 2007
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