Your body contains a lot of calcium – more than any other mineral. Ninety-nine percent of your calcium is found in your bones and teeth, but the other 1 percent, called serum calcium, circulates in your blood, your muscles or the fluids that surround cells. It’s important that the 1 percent serum calcium levels stay constant. If your serum levels of calcium fall too low, your body will steal calcium from your bones to correct the deficiency.
Calcium Function
Calcium is an essential mineral. You need to consume it on a daily basis in order to avoid negative health repercussions. Calcium provides most of the bony matrix that makes up your skeletal system. Serum calcium enables muscles to contract, nerve cells to transmit information, cells to send signals to each other and glands to secrete hormones. If you don’t obtain adequate amounts of dietary calcium any of these functions can be hindered.
Bone-Thinning
Bone thinning diseases occur when your body doesn’t obtain enough dietary calcium to maintain the normal concentration of calcium that circulates outside the skeletal system. Though bones seem solid, they are actually constantly changing. Calcium is reabsorbed from bone and redeposited to bone throughout your lifetime. As you age, your reabsorption of calcium can become faster than your ability to deposit it. This can result in bone thinning, or osteoporosis.
Calcium Deficiency
Most of the time, calcium deficiencies are caused by factors other than diet. According to the Linus Pauling Institute, abnormal parathyroid function, chronic kidney disease, vitamin D deficiency and magnesium deficiency can all be causes of calcium deficiency. When your serum calcium concentrations fall too low, you may experience symptoms such as muscle cramps, lethargy, poor appetite, convulsions and heart arrhythmias. The effects of chronic calcium deficiency are related to the theft of calcium from your skeletal system, and include accelerated bone loss that can lead to osteoporosis.
Calcium Sources
Dairy products are the major source of calcium in the American diet, according to the Office of Dietary Supplements. Plant based sources include kale, broccoli and Chinese cabbage. Calcium supplements are also available. For adult males and females between the age of 19 and 50, the recommended dietary allowance to calcium is 1,000 milligrams per day. For adult females, that dosage increases to 1,200 milligrams after the age of 50.
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