Sorting Out Supplements Study

Last week, a major government study raised some important questions about calcium and vitamin D, but the information was a bit confusing.

The biggest study ever to examine the value of the supplements suggested they convey only limited protection against broken bones. They failed to protect against most fractures in the mostly low-risk women, but seemed to offer some benefit against hip breaks among women over 60 and those who took the pills most faithfully.

The Early Show decided to go straight to the source to get some answers from Joan McGowan, Ph.D., the director of the Musculoskeletal Diseases Branch of the National Institutes of Health. McGowan was one of the researchers involved in the study.

One recommendation from the study was that people get their calcium and vitamin D from the foods in their diet, not supplements.

"That's always been the government's recommendation," McGowan told The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm. "We still think that calcium and vitamin D are critically important in your diet. And we think there are lots of ways for you to find out where the calcium and vitamin D can be found and to do it with food and consider supplements as really an alternative to food sources."

McGowan took a more positive outlook when it came to the studies take on calcium supplements.

"I think the glass is half full, not half empty. In the Women's Health Initiative Calcium and Vitamin D study, we had a very positive effect of the calcium supplements in older women, in women over 60, and particularly in the group of women who took the supplement," McGowan said. "And so we're encouraged to think that calcium, not necessarily supplements, but calcium, is really critical for bone health. It's not like a drug. It didn't give you the kind of treatment that you would receive from a drug. But it's a nutrient and it's an important one. So we'd like to see you continue to include it in your diet."

Calcium can be derived from many calcium-rich foods beyond dairy products such as cheddar cheese, nonfat milk and yogurt. Soybeans, fortified orange juice, salmon canned with edible bones, baked beans, spaghetti, lasagna, cheese pizza and raw broccoli are examples of the numerous options out there.

McGowan suggest eating three or four servings of calcium-rich foods a day.

The NIH recommends people over 50 get 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day. while for adults under 50, it's about 1,000 milligrams of calcium a day.

"Food labels can help you to reach that without knowing how many milligrams are in a food," McGowan told Storm. "A food label will tell you in terms of the percentage of your daily needs how much calcium is in a serving of a particular food."

Vitamin D is frequently coupled with calcium when discussing nutrition, but the best source for it is not in foods.

"You know, the natural source of vitamin D is the sun," McGowan said. "But we all recognize that there are limitations, especially if you live in New York City or north of that. You may not get very much sun in the winter time and you may not get it because you are working in an office all day. So there are limitations in the sun exposure that would be your natural source."

When healthful sun exposure is limited, vitamin D is best obtained through diet and dietary supplements.

These are two other important ways to keep your bones strong that McGowan likes to refer to as "loading" your bones: exercise and weight lifting.

"We know that people who walk more are more active and loading their skeleton and preserving their bones, than those who are inactive," she said. "This ties in with what we are hearing about preventing cardiovascular disease. The only extra message for bones is that the loading only applies to bones that are loaded. So, if you are only walking around, then you are only loading the bones in that direction. You aren't doing anything with your arms or back."

McGowan said that lifting weights is needed to give an all over body load, but she noted that sit-ups and push-ups are good ways to load bones, too.

The study's findings were published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. They were a long-awaited offshoot of the big national study of diet and hormone therapy known as the Women's Health Initiative.

The seven-year study of 36,282 women ages 50 to 79 gave half the participants 1,000 milligrams of calcium and 400 units of vitamin D, while the other half took dummy pills.