anyone taking raw calcium?

It's not just getting the D levels that will answer your questions. You need to test your calcium levels and most important, PTH. If your PTH is high, that means your body is stealing calcium from your bones and teeth. Exactly what you don't want to happen!!!!

Pete came along and posted Mandy's plan(thanks Pete). I think the group on FB is OH DS Family.

Thank you Patty and Pete too, you guys found me everything I need! BTW, I bought the Bone Up at Whole Foods, and surprisingly it was less expensive than Amazon ( $21 ) not on sale. I also saw the raw calcium there. I'm going to have to wait until Monday to start the Bone Up because I'm on warfarin, and the product mentions that it will affect that. I may just have to have the warfarin dose adjusted or maybe not even that. It also dawned on me that my vitamin AD is now in a gel cap. When did that happen? I used to use the Twinlabs dry A D. Evidently over the years with no WLS contacts other than my Dr and dietician, I just forgot why I was taking some things, and when life happened I forgot my WLS needs and some of them fell by the wayside. I'm so glad that I've reconnected. My last blood test for the PTH was normal but it was done almost a year ago, it may be included in the labs I'm supposed to have next week. My Dr doesn't do the DS so I sometimes have to remind him that my needs are different than his sleeve patients. At least it seems that way to me. Because I'm on Medicare I have a bone scan every other year, and the last 2 scans have been stable, no changes. So it's good I'm not losing more, I think I lost what I did because my vitamin D level was down to 7 before I got this Dr and had it corrected. By taking 50,000 i.u every day for the last year it's now low normal as of last Oct. But I really want to get that bone loss back, so we'll see. Hey, at 68 years of age i can walk 5 miles a day, not bad huh? Thank you again Patty and Pete !!!!

I saw you went through information on what might be better forms of calcium for you. Looking at this though a couple of things jumped out.

Dosing. Most of the standard calcium supplements long ago went to listing elemental calcium so you could do an apples to apples comparison ( keeping in mind bio availability too ). The algecal used as the basis here doesn't do that although they do state in several places that the product is 30% elemental calcium which would put the 4 pills for 750 at approx 250mg elemental. That would be a lot of pills to get to what most people consider a minimum of 1500mg. Again the label doesn't say and I'm assuming it would say elemental if that is what they meant.

On the plus side for a normie it has all the extras that most of us DS'rs add separately. Magnesium, vitamin D, K2, etc. However the doses are fairly small for a DS'r so while it is a plus for most people I think you would still need to add more of these separately.

Personally I wouldn't risk it but as an experiment you might do both this a citrate if you really want to try. There just don't seem to be any studies that directly compare one to the other as far as absorption goes and I wonder about the claims that because it is from a plant the calcium itself is somehow better. I'm more inclined to think all the other stuff helps it be more effective for some people but in the end calcium is calcium and it depends on what it is attached to as to how we absorb it.

Pete

Hi Pete, Thank you for responding to my question, you actually brought me back down to earth about the algae calcium. I saw what you pointed out about the lack of elemental calcium dose but didn't want to accept it because frankly, I love the idea of clean and organic. With me having osteoporosis it probably isn't a good time for me to experiment. Altho I liked the testimonials of people's osteoporosis being cured by the algae. I of course am skeptical of the marketing ploys too, making it difficult to know the best thing to do. With everyone's help here I've decided to abandon the algae calcium, add the Jarrow Bone Up to what I'm taking, change my vitamin D gel cap to the dry, and hopefully get in touch with Mandy Eller about reversing my osteoporosis. I wish doctors and/or nutritionists had a plan in place other than waiting until it got so bad that bone loss drugs have to be taken, maybe there are some like that, and I want to avoid the drugs. It's also time that I come back to this forum. Over time I've done well, but I've gotten slack thinking that all I need is the doctor to monitor my labs. It's time for me to take charge, with everyone's help here! I've been away too long.