Metabolic Typing: Calcium Is Not For Everyone

There is a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding the use of calcium supplementation. For example, it is generally accepted that women over the age of 40 should be taking calcium supplementation to prevent osteoporosis. Here is yet another nutritional myth that has been shattered by metabolic typing research. Through metabolic typing we have come to understand that there is no one diet right for everyone and that there are no “good foods” or “bad foods” except those relative to each person's biochemical individuality. Similarly, although everyone needs to obtain all available nutrients in his daily diet, taking therapeutic doses of a nutrient such as calcium, for example, is another matter altogether.

While supplementing the diet with calcium can help some problems in certain metabolic types, in other metabolic types it can actually worsen the same problems. The reason for this is that any problem related to calcium has to do with its utilization or metabolism in the body. When there is a disruption to calcium metabolism or a loss of calcium metabolism efficiency, it often involves a calcium deficiency. But, there are two kinds of calcium deficiency: an actual quantitative deficiency and a relative deficiency of utilization due to biounavailability.

In order for calcium to be utilized, two factors are necessary: 1) calcium, and 2) calcium's synergistic nutrients (calcium requires other specific nutrients in order to be utilized). Certain metabolic types naturally require higher amounts of calcium in their diet in order to function optimally, tending to have sufficient synergistic nutrients but lack sufficient calcium. But other metabolic types have the opposite biochemical balance: these metabolic types tend to already have high calcium but are low in the synergistic nutrients, thereby doing well on diets lower in calcium and higher in the synergistic nutrients.

Thus, only the metabolic types (parasympathetics, fast oxidizers or anabolic dominants) that are actually deficient in calcium benefit from calcium supplementation. But the other metabolic types (sympathetics, slow oxidizers or catabolic dominants) who already have enough or excess calcium in the body but lack the synergistic nutrients will worsen their condition by calcium supplementation by creating an even greater biounavailability through further depleting synergistic nutrient stores.

Furthermore, the form of calcium used, when it should be used, is equally important. Parasympathetics, alkaline metabolic types that require calcium, should only use acid forms of calcium like calcium chloride or calcium aspartate. If other alkaline forms are used, not only will the problem not resolve but it could also even get worse than before. On the other hand, Fast Oxidizers, acid metabolic types, require an alkaline form of calcium and would actually worsen using the acid forms mentioned above.

W.L. and Suzi Wolcott, © Healthexcel, Inc., 1987, 1997, 2003