Healthy Food Choices for Calcium

Need more calcium in your diet? Learn how to adjust your diet to fit your specific health and nutrition needs in this video on grocery shopping.

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Drink fortified or soy milk
Eat 1-2 ounces of cheese per day
Take vitamin supplements
Get calcium from vegetables

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Mary Hondros graduated from University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Science in Dietetics. She currently works as a nutritionist for New Hanover County Schools in North Carolina. Her main focus is to teach children to improve nutritional habits.

MARY HONDROS: So the topic now is calcium. Calcium is a pretty important nutrient in your body as 99% of it is found in your bones and about 1% of it is found floating around in your blood and helps with the other functions. Obviously we get most of our calcium from things like milk and cheese--dairy products. But it is possible to get calcium from lots of sources of food like leafy greens, broccoli, almonds, figs and parsley and those types of things also have calcium in them. The typical recommendations are that you get three servings of calcium in your diet per day. One serving would be like one cup of milk which would be eight ounces or one to two ounces of cheese depending on your age. So, four tips if you are trying to get the recommended 1000 to 1200 mg of calcium per day in your diet are, make sure that you are drinking at least one to two cups, eight ounces each of either fortified milk, soy milk, rice milk or almond milk. Secondly, try to fit about one to two ounces of cheese per day in your diet in a sandwich or something. Thirdly, if you are not getting the amount of calcium from the foods you eat, you can try taking a supplement that has about a thousand milligrams in it. And lastly, remember that you can get calcium from a variety of foods like leafy green vegetables, broccoli, figs, parsley and those types of things and that you do not need to get it all from dairy foods. And those are four tips on your calcium intake.

Healthy Food Choices for Calcium Video

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