Coral Calcium for Weight Loss

According to Dr. Stephen Barrett, contributing writer for QuackWatch.org, a watchdog site for dietary supplements on the market, coral calcium is a dietary supplement said to be derived from remnants of living coral that have fallen from coral reefs. They are limestone, which organisms in coral originally manufactured as a protective shell. He said providers of coral calcium present it as an all-around health boosting supplement but does it help consumers lose weight as companies allege?

How Calcium Supports Weight Loss

• According to a March 2009 study by the British Journal of Medicine, calcium has been shown to spurn on weight loss. A group of women were invited at random to participate in a 15-week experiment. All were given strict guidelines for how many calories they could ingest, but half the women were told to take one tablet a day containing 1,200 mg of calcium. At the end of the 15 weeks, the calcium group was shown to have lost 6 kg (11 pounds) whereas the other group was shown to only have lost 1kg (2 pounds). They came to the conclusion that those who had a deficiency in calcium were tempted to eat more to make up for it whereas an abundance of calcium curbed one's appetite.

  The study writers said that women started noticing a change in weight within two weeks' time.

  Mike Adams, a contributing writer for NaturalNews.com, says that coral calcium is a "convenient, safe way to add the calcium to your diet that you need to support your weight loss effort." He said that many Americans believe that eating a slice of cheese pizza or drinking a glass of milk are healthy ways to get more calcium, but pizza is loaded with sodium and saturated fat and milk is ingested with too many hormones to count. Coral calcium, he says, has one of the highest concentrations of calcium in any supplement on the market, and calcium has been proven to support weight loss.

Taking Coral Calcium

• Coral calcium can be purchased at most pharmacy stores where over-the-counter supplements are sold. Walgreens.com and iHerb.com both ship coral calcium. As of September 2009, a bottle of over 300 capsules sold for nearly $20, and the bottle said to take between one and three pills a day. The nutritional facts state that each 1,000 milligram capsule contains 350 milligrams of calcium.

  Because coral contains traces of manganese, strontium and even uranium, the supplement is not good for us or our stomach. Sharon Lawrence wrote an article about calcium supplements for USAToday.com in 2004 that said that the main side effects of all calcium pills, not just coral calcium, are gastrointestinal problems, gas, bloating and stomach pains. William Keane, director of Conservation Science and Reef Check, told Lawrence that there were much safer ways to obtain calcium. Reefs, he said, are under constant threat from ecological and man-made dangers.

Medical Dangers of Coral Calcium

• Coral calcium products are composed of calcium carbonate found in common rocks and limestone deposits. Scientifically, there isn't much difference between coral calcium and other calcium supplements such as Tums. But Dr. Barrett said he is not convinced that coral calcium is a better alternative than adjusting one's diet to include more calcium-rich foods (such as cheese, broccoli and skim milk).

  While Dr. Barrett writes that coral calcium can work as it is simply a concentrated form of calcium which has been proven to help people lose weight. It's just not in the way Barefoot suggests.

  First, Dr. Barrett writes, there is the psychological danger of telling people that calcium helps them lose weight without also telling them the dangers of ingesting too much of any one mineral. Dr. Barrett points to the claim that Robert Barefoot, developer of the coral calcium pill, makes when he says in his infomercial that in "all cultures in which people live very long, all the people consume 100,000 milligrams of calcium." Dr. Barrett points out that even close to that much calcium would cause kidney failure and certain death. He writes that the Institute of Medicine recommends no more than 2,500 milligrams a day.

  Second, Barefoot makes no mention of supplementing moderate amounts of coral calcium with a healthy diet. It is not, as Dr. Barrett said, the coral calcium that will make you lose weight. It is the moderation of one's appetite that comes with increasing calcium intake that helps one lose weight. Also, while an increase in calcium has been proven to help with hypertension and other circulatory problems, it is the addition of exercise in one's diet that keeps the heart pumping strong, not the popping of pills.