I recommend 500 to 1,000 milligrams per day. Unfortunately, even here there is controversy in the medical profession. Osteoporosis is a disease of calcium loss, so it would seem intuitive that replenishing calcium would prevent it. It turns out, however, that, within limits, the amount of calcium in the diet has little connection to the rate of progression of osteoporosis. It is important to understand that the three main risk factors in osteoporosis are a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, and lack of estrogen replacement postmenopausally.
Calcium does play a role, but it is far less important than the other risk factors.
I have talked with many women who believe that taking estrogen or, for that matter, many other drugs is not natural. Yet we re in an era in which hardly anything is natural, simply because we re living much longer now. More than 99 percent of human evolution took place under circumstances very different from today s. Let s not forget that, as recently as a century ago, even in the United States, the average life span was less than fifty years, so few women lived much beyond the menopause anyway. Now that the average woman reaching menopause can expect to live at least another thirty years, there are excellent reasons for taking hormones that are found naturally in the body, in order that women may stay youthful and avoid the curses of heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer s.