BABY STEP 28 - Stolen calcium (Jan 28)

“Pepsi is like a party in my mouth.” (Diane Stoddard, author and friend)
But sometimes the party needs to come to an end.
I have a question for you. Do you have enough calcium in your bones? Do you have an excess that you can stand to dump?
Answer: No, you do not have enough if you drink soft drinks, which leach calcium from our bones. You know, leach: to dissolve out soluble constituents from [bone/teeth] by percolation. In this case, the percolation is caused by the bubbles that contain way too much phosphorus.
Leach, as opposed to leech, which is what the soft drink makers have become (I mean, come on--soft drink machines in schools? Give me a break). A leech is a person (or company) who clings to another for personal gain, especially without giving anything in return, and usually with the implication or effect of exhausting the other's resources; parasite. (Both definitions were found at dictionary.com) In this case, the companies don’t care what the soft drinks do to our bodies, as long as their bottom line looks good.
(I’d like my bottom line to look good, too, and that’s what this year is all about.)
Okay, I’m a writer, so I’m going to tell you a story. A horror story.
Once upon a time there was company that made soft drinks. And that company added many chemicals to the bottles and cans.
One thing they added was phosphoric acid, to help the many little bubbles effervescing. Because people won’t buy soft drinks with flat bubbles, and they want to sell as many bottles and cans of soft drink as they can.
And then along came a thirsty consumer who bought one of this company’s soft drinks, and drank it.
And the phosphoric acid went into the body and stole some of its valuable calcium and ran out, laughing. The end.
Okay, okay, once again I’ll force myself to get serious. (Although you’ll see that this is actually what excess phosphorus does to our bodies.)
For good health, our bodies need to maintain a one-to-one (1:1) balance between calcium and phosphorus. If that balance is kept, our bodies retain their calcium or, if it dips, our bodies are able to create more. Drinking soft drinks drives this balance up much higher, as high as 4:1 or 5:1. Unfortunately for us, when we drink a soft drink and the excess phosphoric acid hits our systems, our bodies attempt to re-balance the ratio by releasing calcium from the teeth and bones into our bloodstreams.
Whoa. Did I hear that correctly? Like I have extra calcium in my teeth I want to toss out, or extra calcium in my bones I can afford to lose?
And what happens after the body dumps its much-needed calcium in its attempt to balance the excess phosphorus that just hit it? Eventually our bodies excrete the phosphoric acid, but out with the bad goes the good: the calcium our body released.
Hmmmm. I wonder if there’s a correlation between the increase in soft drink consumption and the increase in osteoporosis?
Michael Murray ND and Joseph Pizzorno ND, in the Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, Revised Second Edition, stated that, "Soft drink consumption may be a major factor for osteoporosis as they are high in phosphates but contain virtually no calcium. This leads to lower calcium levels and higher phosphate levels in the blood."
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want soft teeth and weak bones.
Now there’s some food for thought to chew on. If we have strong calcium-rich teeth left to chew with, that is.

© Copyright 2010 Heather Horrocks