By Ellen Landauer
www.healthfreedomcoach.com
Calcium: Supplement for Weight Loss?

Do you know that research suggests that calcium intake is an important factor in helping you lose weight and keep it off? The role calcium plays in bone health is well-known, but the idea that abundant calcium in the diet can help us maintain normal weight is likely a new concept for you.

In this article, I will tell you why calcium influences weight loss. You will also learn how to get more high-quality calcium into your diet. I will give you the inside story on the best calcium supplements and how to make sure you are absorbing the calcium you take in.

Calcium - Not Just for Bone Density
The idea that calcium intake may be related to body weight has been borne out by several studies in the past ten years. Studies in rats and mice suggest that higher calcium intake alters the metabolism of fat cells, causing less fat to be stored and more fat to be released.

Why would this be so? To find out, we need to go back to our hunter-gatherer origins. The Paleolithic diet contained an abundance of calcium - 2000 milligrams or more. Human calcium physiology is still tuned to that level of abundance. Therefore, if we donпїЅt get enough calcium, it is a signal to our bodies that we are starving. That tells the body to slow down the metabolism, and to burn less fat, even if adequate calories are being consumed. Abundant calcium is a signal to the fat tissue that your body is well-nourished, and no longer needs to store fat, but can burn it. Fat storage is reversed, fat burning increased.

Another way calcium helps in weight loss is to help reduce cravings. The combination of high calcium, magnesium, potassium and vitamin C has been proven to quickly reduce all kinds of cravings. People with the highest intake of calcium lost the most fat on weight control programs regardless of exercise level. Significant weight loss was even observed in overweight people who were not watching their diet, when they increased their calcium intake!

Here are some other reasons it is good to make sure you are getting plenty of calcium. Adequate calcium may play a role in increasing HDL (high-density lipoprotein) in the blood. It also has been given credit for; reducing occurrence of kidney stones, reducing risk of colorectal cancer, reducing fracture risk, and reducing age-related bone loss. Long-term calcium restriction and lack of vitamin D can promote high blood pressure, too.

By Harry Jackson Jr.
www.stltoday.com
Alli -- Safety of New Weight-Loss Drug is Questioned

A new over-the-counter weight-loss drug called Alli may give people with eating disorders another tool to harm themselves, local therapists fear.

Alli — pronounced "AL-eye" — is the only weight-loss medicine on the market approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. It's half the dose of the prescription drug orlistat, trade name Xenical, which is used to fight morbid obesity.

Dr. Randall Flanery, head of the Eating Disorders Program for the St. Louis Behavioral Medicine Institute, says the new drug is ripe for abuse because young people with eating disorders find the side effects of intense diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems that empty the digestive system inviting.

People who use diet products to bolster their eating disorders "… tend to take them at much higher dosages than recommended, as much as 10 times," Flanery says. "It's analogous to laxatives. People with eating disorders take 10 to 50 (laxative pills) at a time. They become dependent and take higher and and higher dosages."

Another danger is that the medicine is approved by the FDA "… and people will believe that because it's over-the-counter and FDA-approved, it must be safe," Flanery says. "It's not."

The drug should be kept behind counters and monitored for distribution to make sure that at least teens don't have access to it, Flanery says.

By HARRY JACKSON JR.
www.chron.com
Supplements Shouldn't Be Substitutes For A Healthy Diet
We hear about them all the time, but how many of us really know what we are putting in our bodies?

Vitamins are actually a group of chemicals that the body needs in very small quantities. Their job is not to actually do anything but rather to help other chemicals do their jobs.

The misconceptions of what vitamins should or shouldn't be expected to do are rampant, and professionals fear their misuse. Experts are especially nervous about the megadoses available on store shelves. Megadoses of some vitamins can actually be poisonous.

WHAT ARE VITAMINS?

Picture a machine that needs 1,000 chains to work. A vitamin would be one tiny link that helps the whole machine work better. Scientists lettered and then numbered vitamins for reference because their real names often were long and complicated. For example, vitamin B12 is cyanocobalamin.

When several vitamins are under one letter, that means they're closely related. Dr. James Shoemaker, a professor and nutritionist with St. Louis University School of Medicine, says vitamins are part of a group of nutrients that the body generally doesn't make. So you have to eat your vitamins every day.

The human body makes only one vitamin, vitamin D, and that's with the help of sunlight. But even most of that needs to come from your diet, he says.

Shoemaker says the need to eat vitamins appears to come from the primitive feast-orfamine days of human evolution. The body interprets a lack of vitamins as famine and slows down its metabolism, the chemical processes in your body.

That's why the American Medical Association recommends vitamin supplements when someone is on a low-calorie or restricted diet. The presence of vitamins helps to keep the metabolism moving.