One of the many colorful discoveries–for me, anyway–that has accompanied life after thirty is that your parents keep being parents. If you’re lucky, their quips and quirks will evolve with the times, at least. My mother and father, for example, have become nutrition obsessives. Recently, it’s been all calcium all the time. Mom’s new telephone sign-off? “Did you take the calcium pills I sent?”
After a few weeks of this, I finally looked into all this geared and specific interest in calcium. With deepest apologies to my 16 year-old self, I’ve got to say, she’s onto something: A May study from the University of Texas at Austin found that a meal of cereal with milk was just as effective as a sports drink when it came to helping athletes refuel and build muscles. The researchers argue that the findings are important, given the comparative cost of sports drinks.
Even more promising, data published in the British Journal of Nutrition found that among people whose diets were calcium deficient—as countless Americans’ are—a calcium supplement actually aided in weight loss. In the study group, women who were given a 1200 mg calcium tablet lost an impressive 6 kg over the course of the experiment, compared to 1 kg for the group taking a placebo. “Our hypothesis is that the brain can detect the lack of calcium and seeks to compensate by spurring food intake, which obviously works against the goals of any weight loss program,” said author Angelo Tremblay, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Environment and Energy Balance.
In other words, “yes, mom, I’m working on the calcium thing.” There, that’s my 30-something year-old self talking.
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Camille
