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Transcript
- 01:49 About Dr. Kim Millman
- 04:19 Osteoporosis
- 06:46 The Calcium Checkup Tool
- 16:06 Calcium
- 21:51 Diagnosing Mineral Imbalances
- 23:56 Hair Mineral Analysis
- 25:37 Symptoms of Mineral Deficiencies
- 28:18 Prescription Bisphosphonates
- 34:55 Tips for preventing mineral deficiencies
- 38:18 Calcium Checkup Tool
- 43:54 About Dr. Kim Millman
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me on myersdetox.com.
Today, we are interviewing Dr. Kim Millman, an MD and PhD that has focused her practice on bone health and osteoporosis. She has just come out with an interesting tool called Calcium Checkup. You can find that at calciumcheckup.com. She’s going to be talking us today on the show about how one can determine their calcium needs.
We’re also going to be talking about whether or not you can be at risk for osteoporosis and what you can do to prevent it. This is a really important show because so many men or women eventually develop this painful and sometimes fatal condition.
But first, we have to do our disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this show is not intended to diagnosis or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice (even though we are interviewing a doctor). The Live to 110 podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest on this show.
And everyone, if you haven’t done so already, go check out my Modern Paleo Cooking Show on YouTube. You can find that at wendyliveto110. You can just search for that on YouTube. We’ve got about six episodes up so far. We just started a little while ago. I’ll be shooting about three a month or more. Just keep cranking out those cooking shows to show you how to eat the diet that I recommend, which is called the Modern Paleo Diet that I talk all about and outline in my book, The Modern Paleo Survival Guide, which will be out on Amazon October 1st. I’m praying I will finish it in time. I’m going to be working night and day to finish it.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Dr. Kim Millman. She is a Stanford-trained MD, board certified in internal medicine with a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology. She is internationally acclaimed for her medical research in the fields of population genetics and infectious disease. She has over 20 years of functional medicine training and has a thriving holistic medical practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She believes in using whole foods and lifestyle changes to reverse chronic conditions. She’s an expert in natural medicine, mineral metabolism and osteoporosis.
Kim, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Kim Millman: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be talking about this.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes! Really, one of my passions is bone health because it’s so important. When we lose our bone health, that really is an indication there’s lots of other problems going on in the body.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners about yourself and why you decided to specialize in osteoporosis.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah. Well, I’ve been specializing in my private practice in mineral metabolism and osteoporosis for about five years now. There’s really two reasons why I love this subject. I’m really passionate about it. The first is that I don’t think that there’s anything besides working on minerals that I found in my private practice that gets people better fast, faster. I can do simple things like use a little bit of calcium, magnesium, potassium, selenium and people really see a difference right away.
I think that people are extremely mineral deficient in this country. We don’t talk about it enough. I don’t think that there are people that are really knowledgeable and understand the complexities of mineral metabolism like you and I do, Wendy.
And so I think it’s really important for people to have access to experts like us and I also think that it’s important for me to keep working and being as current as possible on this subject. The second thing is that this is a huge epidemic and it’s growing. Those are the two reasons why I really, really want to focus on osteoporosis and bone health.
Wendy Myers: Well, what are the rates of osteoporosis and osteopenia? I’m really shocked at how high the rates are. They’re actually higher than what I thought? Osteopenia, just for those that don’t know is the diagnosis one gets when they have the beginnings of bone loss.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah, I was quite shocked when I first started to specialize in osteoporosis and since I started, the numbers are just getting worse and worse.
In 2005 and 2006, the CDC produced the data that out of men and women in the U.S. who are over 50, 9% of people have osteoporosis and 49% of people have osteopenia. That’s a total of 58% of people over 50 in the United States have bone disease.
Wendy Myers: Wow! That’s incredible.
Dr. Kim Millman: I think that the odds are just staggeringly against you. That means that if you’re over 50 and you’re sitting in a coffee shop with your girlfriend, it’s very likely that one of the two of you have bone disease. And then the other thing that I’ve been seeing in my practice – and of course, I specialize in osteoporosis, so I may in fact see people who are a little bit more advanced, but in the last year, I have seen five people, five young adults who were in their early 30’s and late 20’s with bone disease. I’ve never seen that before.
Wendy Myers: And it’s sad because our young people, we know in the United States that they’re eating tons of flour and tons of sugar and this is definitely going to be contributing to a bigger epidemic in the future because they’re losing so much bone density at younger and younger ages.
Dr. Kim Millman: I think you hit the nail in the head. I think that that’s why the epidemic is as bad as it is. People don’t understand the relationship between sugar and minerals. Sugar call out all of your minerals out of your tissues and increases urinary loss of all of your minerals. That’s absolutely true.
Wendy Myers: So you mentioned to me that this increasing epidemic of bone diseases is what prompted you to come up with a tool that helps to predict if someone is on the path of osteoporosis decades before it happens. Can you tell us a little bit about your tool, Calcium Checkup that people can find at calciumcheckup.com?
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, because of this huge epidemic and because I was seeing these patients come into my office earlier and earlier with bone disease, this year, when I did my research to become current and make sure that I was doing everything that I could to have a really powerful program to help people, it was different for me because of this huge epidemic.
Every year, I research osteoporosis. I go to a conference every year at UCSF and learn about all the differences in traditional treatment and traditional diagnosis, but then I do my own research because I want to be current on both ends. I’m current traditionally, but I’m also current in the natural solutions area.
This year, I studied for six weeks and I read over a hundred papers. I really set out to find something that quantitatively would help me to predict whether a person was on a path to bone disease. And so what I did was that I’ve always been interested in knowing what is the root cause of chronic conditions. So for me, bone disease has five and they’re very similar to other diseases and chronic conditions that we think about. And so it’s inflammation, acidity, hormone imbalances, nutritional deficiencies and toxicity.
So what I did was I was looking at calcium metabolism and all things about calcium. What I found was that all the root cause factors were there in calcium’s journey. So you need exercise and estrogen to increase reabsorption of calcium. And then, calcium getting from the blood into the bone, you need vitamin K, you need estrogen, you need exercise. Inflammation bring calcium out of the bone and too much salt will increase losses of calcium. And so all of these root cause factors were there. Acidity will increase urinary losses. So it was really important to me to find a way of being able to predict where a person stood. I realized that understanding calcium metabolism in really fine detail would actually get me there.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you told me that when you use your tool to read your own numbers that you were terrified. Can you explain that to the listeners a little bit?
Dr. Kim Millman: I was. Well, let me explain a little bit more to you about the process too because you’re going to need a little bit of background before my own numbers.
Wendy Myers: Okay.
Dr. Kim Millman: So as I was doing this, I was finding that there were experts who were looking at something called calcium balance. Calcium balance, really, I like to look at it as being like your check book. You have withdrawals and you have deposits. And so your deposits are the food you take and the supplements you take. And then, your withdrawals are your losses through sweat and through urine and through your stool.
Well, all the experts were doing calcium balance studies, but they were all disagreeing about whether their model is best and who had the best model. So the RDA was set based on calcium balance set. It was found that your calcium balance was related to your age, your gender and whether you had high-demand states like pregnancy or lactation. And so a woman over 50 needs 1200 mg. of calcium based on the RDA. Well, to me, that seemed too high and also, it was a one-size-fits-all equation. I thought, “Shouldn’t people who don’t have bone disease need less and those people with bone disease need more? And shouldn’t it depend on your diet and on your inflammation and your acidity and all these other things that we know relate to our mineral metabolism and how well we’re able to keep minerals in our body?”
And so I found this work of Hunt & Johnson. They found that neutral calcium occurs at 741 mg. of Calcium. So what a neutral calcium balance is is that your deposits equal your daily loses.
So I thought, “Well, this is simplistic as well, but maybe what I can do is I can layer onto that. They had calcium balance equations.” So here are your deposits. We know what your losses will be. When you fill out the tool and you know your deposits, I can come up with what your calcium balance will be based on the work of Hunt & Johnson and then layer on top of that what your goal should be based on do you have bone disease or do you have tissue deficiency symptoms now.
So I developed this tool and then I ran my own numbers. And when I ran my own numbers, first of all, food is my Achilles’ heel. I don’t do dairy, I don’t do well with eggs and I don’t do well with gluten. So I have a very food-restricted diet and I’ve had one for over 23 years.
So what I found was that I was very surprised to understand that I don’t get a lot of calcium in my diet. Even though I have a really phytonutrient-rich diet. I eat a lot of broccoli, a lot of good protein and kale. But I don’t eat dairy, so I only get 150 mg. of calcium in my diet per day.
Wendy Myers: Oops…
Dr. Kim Millman: Then I take a multivitamin, which has about 300 mg. of calcium in it, so I’m up to 450 mg. But remember, I said that neutral calcium balance occurs at 741 mg. So I’m running 300 mg. behind in just keeping things at bay and not stealing calcium from my skeleton. But if I need to replenish years and years and years of mineral starvation, I’m nowhere even close.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love that you used your tool to figure out that your calcium deficient and on the road to osteoporosis if you didn’t stop it.
Dr. Kim Millman: That’s exactly what I found. And in fact, when I used the calcium balance numbers, remember, I need 300 mg. more than I’m getting just for neutral. When I ran my calcium balance numbers, I was stealing 58 mg. of calcium from my skeleton per day. When you then translate that into grams per year that I’m losing, I’m losing 3% of my skeleton per year.
Wendy Myers: Wow! That’s very compelling.
Dr. Kim Millman: And that is three times higher than that of post-menopausal women. Post-menopausal women loses about 1% per year.
I’m thinking this is happening over decades and I can’t let this continue. I need to figure out how to stop this and I need to get this tool out there so other people can find out for themselves as well.
The other thing that I’ve realized was that there was a common denominator between myself and my 20-year olds who had bone disease and they all had food sensitivities and they all were not eating dairy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I have that same thing too. Sometimes, I can do the raw dairy. Other times, it doesn’t agree with me. I haven’t had testing yet. I just know that I had issues with dairy (especially with pasteurized dairy, I can’t do it).
But sometimes, I get these really overwhelming cravings for bree. It’s not just because I like cheese, but we know that bree is very rich in vitamin K and vitamin K is very important for calcium metabolism to depositing it into the bone matrix.
Wendy Myers: So everyone focuses so much on calcium, but what other minerals and vitamins are needed for bone health as well.
Dr. Kim Millman: I mean, you’re absolutely right. One of the things that people don’t really understand is that if they have bone disease, this means that your entire mineral stores are deficient. Minerals are needed for every process in the body. We’re talking about magnesium being really important and potassium and selenium and all the trace minerals. And of course, vitamin K and vitamin D are super important as well. It’s not just calcium, it’s all of those minerals.
What is really, really interesting, Wendy is that when you look at calcium metabolism, all of those minerals are there. All of the things, all of those things that I talk about all the time are in calcium’s journey. So I used to say, “Oh, we can’t just focus on calcium.” Actually, you can. You can just focus on calcium. You just have to do it in the right way and really understand calcium’s complete journey.
Wendy Myers: Now, what do you think about these recent studies that had come out from – I don’t remember exactly who did these studies. There was this big hoopla about that people should not be supplementing calcium. When I first heard that, I thought, “That is ridiculous. These studies were just not designed correctly. They were not using the right form of calcium. Something is off here.”
Dr. Kim Millman: I think that area is really multi-factorial. Now, I haven’t looked at these studies for a long, long time, so I’m not even able to quote you the odds they show. I used to know them by heart, but I don’t anymore. But one of the things that I thought was the most interesting thing was that there was an increased odd ratio or increased risk of stroke or heart attack when a person took a calcium supplement by itself – calcium supplement by itself. There is an increased odds ratio. I think it was something like 70% increased odds ratio.
Then what was really interesting to me was that if your dietary calcium was in the highest tertile or the highest one fit strata of people that were being analyzed in the population, your odds ratio was like a tenth of normal. So it didn’t make sense to me. It’s like on the one hand, dietary calcium is really protective, but on the other hand, supplementary calcium is really risky.
The other thing is that if you took calcium with other supplements and didn’t just take calcium, then it wasn’t as bad as just taking calcium by itself. So that just like feeds into everything that we’re talking about today, right? Minerals are complicated. You need magnesium, you need all of these things to increase calcium’s journey so that calcium doesn’t just come up into the blood and then get deposited there because it can’t stay ionized.
And that’s really the problem I think with heart attacks and stroke. The calcium can’t stay ionized because you need all these other things like magnesium, vitamin D, sodium, copper. Things like that all keep calcium ionized. And so they’re plaquing out into the arteries and causing increased risk for stroke. So I think that you’re right, I don’t think they were designed correctly because you need to look at all of these other things that are related to calcium metabolism and see how they play out.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it just made me so angry when I saw all these headlines flash saying, “Calcium supplementation is dangerous. It increases risk of stroke and all the other diseases you were talking about.” It’s just incredible to me because we need calcium. Just on a common sense face value, we need calcium for so many functions in our body and I think it’s just very irresponsible for people, news sources to report that people should not be supplementing calcium.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah. And I also agree with you that I think that the form of the calcium that you take is really important. I think that probably a large percentage of the calcium that was being taken on those studies was calcium carbonate. We know that it’s not absorbed as well as something like [inaudible 00:21:10].
And again, you have to get all these other factors that just were not, were not accounted for in those studies. And then what’s the discrepancy, right? The discrepancy between the fact that dietary calcium is protective and supplemental calcium is not. What it says to me is calcium inherently good for your heart. So if you take it in food where you have all of these other factors that help calcium go from the blood to the bone and stay ionized, calcium is really good for your heart.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Also, why don’t you tell everyone why it’s difficult to diagnose mineral imbalances and the reason why you can’t simply do blood test. I have lots of clients coming to me saying, “Oh, I had my blood test done. My calcium and my other minerals were fine.” It’s not that simple.
Dr. Kim Millman: It’s definitely not that simple, yeah. I think that this myths get really propagated by regular doctors in this country because they really don’t understand metabolism.
I was very fortunate that when I went to medical school, my endocrinology professor really showed us you cannot look at blood levels of minerals, that they’re not an accurate representation because minerals live inside of cells. And so there are three compartments when you look at where the minerals are held. They’re held in the blood, they’re held in the cells and then the tissues (including the bones) are the storage places. So let’s say that you’re mineral deficient and your blood levels drop, then minerals will get shuttled from the inside of the cell out into the blood. And then if the cells get depleted, then the minerals will get shuttled from inside the bones out into the blood. So you’re always going to be stealing from the tissues so that the blood levels stay high. So you can be terribly deficient in minerals inside your cells and inside your bones and be completely normal inside the blood. The prime example of this is osteoporosis where you can have completely normal levels of calcium, but yet your bones are depleted of calcium. And in fact, that is the definition of osteoporosis, your bone mineral content is diminished. And 99% of your calcium is in your bones.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: We talked a little bit before the show. I had no idea when I asked you to be on this podcast to talk about bone health that you were very much interested in the work of Dr. Wilson and that you actually do hair mineral analysis on your patients. I was just so pleasantly surprised that you used this tool, which is a tool that I use, that hair mineral analysis from Analytical Research Laboratories.
You had also said that you have read Dr. Wilson’s text, Mineral Power (formerly called Nutritional Balancing) with Hair Mineral Analysis about 14 times and uses it with your patients. So why do you use hair mineral analysis?
Dr. Kim Millman: Well, the wealth of information that I can get from a hair test is better than anything that I can do in my practice. You can get toxicity levels. You can find out whether a person has any heavy metal challenges and what exact heavy metals they’re challenged with.
You can have a good indication of their thyroid function and their adrenal functions that are completely separate from doing a blood or a salivary cortisol level or blood levels of thyroid hormone and TSH’s. You can get an indication of their sugar metabolism that’s completely independent of blood levels. Just for the reasons that we talked about, a hair mineral analysis is an intracellular mineral quantification and that’s the most accurate way to look at minerals.
Wendy Myers: And so can you share with us some of the key symptoms that indicate mineral deficiencies?
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah. I would think, really, the bottomline is that it could be anything. But things that people don’t really understand I think are how related blood sugar instability is to mineral metabolism. So things like hypoglycemia, getting irritable between meals, getting headachy between meals, feeling light-headed, having sugar cravings. All these symptoms can be helped with sodium and chromium and selenium.
Things like muscle cramps, we kind of understand that muscle cramps can be related to mineral metabolism, but bad uterine cramps, I have patients who used to have bad menstrual cramps, they don’t anymore because I just give them calcium. Calcium is wondrous for bad uterine cramps.
Charley horses, restless legs, all of these things can be helped with calcium, magnesium, potassium. Adrenal function is really related to mineral metabolism (so being exhausted). Thyroid metabolism, you’re looking at potassium and selenium.
Let’s see, toxicity, we kind of already talked about. And then mood, anxiety and performance anxiety, these things are related to calcium, magnesium. Just by doing a little bit of calcium and magnesium, I can really get people to calm down to have a more stable mood.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, one of the interesting symptoms that I had before I started my Mineral Power program and really started focusing on supplementing minerals was my joints were achy and my muscles were achy. I mean, I was pulling a muscle every two weeks.
I had asked my doctor about it, a naturopath. She had no answer for me. I thought, “How is this happening? Every two weeks, I’m pulling muscles.” It’s really when you have adrenal fatigue and your calcium is really dumping into your hair and into your tissues, it starts calcifying your body. It starts calcifying your joints and muscles and everything gets stiff and hard and achy.
Dr. Kim Millman: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I thought it was really, really interesting. And you have to supplement calcium to reduce it. It gets very interesting.
Wendy Myers: So when someone goes to their doctor and they have a diagnosis with osteoporosis, they are usually given a prescription for biphosphonates like Boniva or Fosamax. So this is one question I really wanted to ask you because I just feel really bad for women that are taking these medications. Why are bophosphonates a bad idea? Can you explain why they actually do not build strong bones and reverse osteoporosis?
Dr. Kim Millman: Well, first of all, I’m going to make the disclaimer that depending upon what your situation is, you may want to take a biphosphonate. I wouldn’t medically say that there are no situations in which you wouldn’t want to do that. That would be a decision that you and your doctor would need to make.
But I’ll just talk a little bit about the mechanism and why I have a lot of concerns, let’s just say, about the class of drugs and think that if you can do something different, that it’d be much better for you.
First of all, there’s a natural remodeling process in the bone. First of all, we have these little cells that build them. They’re called the osteoblasts. And then we have these other cells and they take away bone and they’re called the osteoclasts.
Well, we have this remodeling cycle that bad bone gets taken out and then good bone gets laid on top of that. And so you’re constantly taking out and putting in, taking out and putting in. It’s the job of the osteoblasts and the osteoclasts to keep this balanced out so that you’re taking out and putting in at about the same rate. What happens in osteoporosis is there’s more taken out than what’s being put in. And so you have the loss of bone over time, right?
So the drugs, the biphosphonates are built on a premise that we need to balance the situation out. So let’s stop the osteoclasts from working so that we’re not going to be taking out as much bone and we will be building more bone. The problem is is that the bad bone isn’t getting taken out.
What happens is that we have these little micro-fractures that happen just from walking and exercising and just daily living. That bone needs to be taken out so that good bone gets put in its place. So now if you keep that bone in and you’re laying bone on top of it, it’s almost like a scaffolding system where instead of having these really strong supports, you have these weak supports that actually have fractures and breaks in them.
And so you’re going to be laying down bones – yes, it’s true that if your bones are really thin for a while, it’s going to increase the strength. But after a certain point, those fractures are going to not be able to stand the weight of the extra bone and they’re going to give in.
So now what we’re seeing with the biphosphonates is that there’s something called an atypical fracture. These atypical fractures happen in the long bones, the femur bones. This is not a place where we usually fracture in osteoporosis. It’s usually at the joints – the wrists, the hip and the spine. We don’t usually fracture in the middle of our leg bones and it’s happening with just a little bit of trauma. It’s rare. It’s rare, but there is some evidence (and a growing amount of evidence) that it is related to biphosphonate use especially after the 5-year point.
Wendy Myers: I’ve heard that sometimes doctors give women biphosphonates vacation for a little while.
Dr. Kim Millman: That’s exactly what this is all about. The FDA is looking at this data and they’re saying, “Let’s just stop at the 5-year point and hopefully, the good that the biphosphonates have done will extend past the 5-year mark and basically, we won’t have to use it again.” But my biggest concern about this is that the symptom that they’re having, the side effect of the drug is the thing they’re trying to prevent.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that just doesn’t make sense to me.
Dr. Kim Millman: So I think that there are other – I can’t pronounce this drug, teriparatide and actually, it is a parathyroid hormone. It’s a relatively good drug if you have to take a drug. There are so many natural things that you can do that are very effective for osteoporosis.
Wendy Myers: The thing that you pointed out that is not just a blanket statement is that no one should take biphosphonates. That is just an individual basis. I think women would be better off definitely trying – some of the woman that are very far gone that they have to. It’s an emergency situation where they need to take something very quick to reverse the situation. But I think women would be very much better off mineralizing their body and mineralizing their bones.
Dr. Kim Millman: And there are experts in natural solutions to osteoporosis like me. I’ve had a few women who have had extremely bad osteoporosis with t-squares of -3 ½ and have had been on biphosphonates for a few years and really didn’t tolerate them very well. The side effect profile for biphosphonates is awful. And then they come to me and their bone disease is now stable and starting to reverse on just simple, natural things.
Wendy Myers: Wow! I love that. I love to hear that.
Wendy Myers: So do you have some simple tips for people so that they can protect themselves from becoming mineral deficient.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, we’ve already touched on this, but the number one thing I would say is to keep sugar and refined foods out of your diet. Sugar just calls minerals out of the cells very quickly. It’s inflammatory and it’s acidic. You get a triple whammy with sugar. Reduce sugar as much as you can. And eat really phytonutrient-dense foods so that you get things like vitamin K in your diet at a high level – and potassium. Really, we’ve under-recognized potassium as being a really important player in bone health, but it is a big player. And so is selenium. It’s really important as well. So just eat really phytonutrient-dense foods. And then, nuts and seeds are a really good source of minerals. Seaweed is great for iodine.
Try to get your minerals in your food first. And then you can take a multi-mineral to cover most of your trace mineral needs and really work with an expert like yourself or myself to really dive deep into mineral balancing because the amount that you can increase your health, it’s just amazing what I see with my patients and my own personal journey with working with minerals. It’s completely under-recognized. I think all of natural health even not just within the traditional spheres, but I don’t hear a lot of people in the natural realm talking about minerals either.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I don’t either. I’ve read about nutrition for years before I discovered Mineral Power and I just thought, “Why aren’t people talking more about minerals.” You hear an article about calcium or something, but not the ‘knock your head over with a hammer’ kind of message that we need to be supplementing with minerals – and lots and lots of them. It’s a very different message than take your thousand milligrams of calcium every day.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah, I think so too. And I think it’s really sad because I think that minerals are really at our very core for our health. Since almost all of our enzymes require minerals as co-factors and they’re really the limiting nutrient, you really can’t get that core strength back unless you really think about minerals. And you need to do it in a very artful way. When I first started doing mineral work, I got sick from it then because I didn’t know how to do it in the right way. Now, I’ve developed a lot of skill around it. I know there’s an art to it. I do it in the right way now.
Wendy Myers: So is your Calcium Checkup Tool available yet?
Dr. Kim Millman: It is available. I’m really proud of my Calcium Checkup Tool. It took me months to develop this tool, but I made it super easy for people. You don’t need any lab tests and it’d normally take you about five minutes to take the test.
And so what I did was in order to describe, I came up with this little acronym for people to kind of understand what they’re going to get and how it’s going to take you through the process and walk you through your calcium check-up. I call it the ABCD’s of your calcium check-up. A is for tissue adequace. You really want to know do you have calcium deficiency symptoms now, things like anxiety and having muscle cramps or do you have bone disease now. So whether you have any of these calcium symptoms or you have bone disease, that’s going to tell you what your tissue adequacy is.
And then B is for calcium bookkeeping. So you want to know what your deposits and your withdrawals are. I take you and walk you through. You answer all these questions about your diet to see what are your deposits from food and what are your deposits from supplements. And then my tool goes in and it calculates what your calcium balance is based on your deposits and what your withdrawals will be.
And so then you’ll get – okay, like for myself, my calcium balance was -58 mg. per day. And then I then translate that into, “Okay, if your calcium balance is overdrawn like that, how much are you potentially going to lose from your [inaudible 00:40:04] in a year from having that kind of loss.”
And then C is customized goal. That’s really based on tissue adequacy. No one should ever have a calcium balance that’s overdrawn. That’s bad for everyone. You at least need a neutral calcium balance. But you need more than that. That’s your calcium goal.
And then there’s the danger assessment. That’s just simply, “Are you meeting your calcium goal?” If you’re not, you’re on the danger zone. The important thing is to realize that there’s an opportunity now to reverse this. The most important thing is that you have the information that you need to do something and to reverse this trend or you’re potentially going to show signs of decay and your minerals are going to suffer.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. This is really exciting to me. I definitely want to go check it out myself because before I found Mineral Power, I wasn’t feeling well and something was just wrong. I went to my naturopathic doctor, I said, “Find out what’s wrong me.” She ran all these tests and she wanted to do a bone density test. I decided to decline because I felt like it would expose me to radiation and that’s something that even if I did have low bone density, I knew I wasn’t going to go on biphosphonates that I just decided I needed to live a bone healthy lifestyle during weight bearing exercises and taking minerals and things like that.
And so for me, this is exactly the kind of tool that I would want to use to find out what I needed to be doing to improve my calcium status.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah, I mean, it’s super simple, right? You’ll find out I think that if you’re not eating dairy, you’re going to be at risk for breaking down your bones if you’re not taking enough calcium. Even if you have sugar and refined processed things out of your diet and you’re eating a phytonutrient-dense diet, you can eat tons and tons of broccoli, but I just doesn’t have the calcium.
So many people don’t understand some simple symptoms that are related to calcium deficiency. If they see a deficiency symptom, they go, “Oh yeah, I have that. Oh yeah, I’m eating a bunch of really good food, but I’m not getting very much calcium. Wow! I really do need to supplement with calcium.” I mean, it’s really that simple.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love it.
Dr. Kim Millman: It’s like we think that we’re doing everything right by taking sugar out of our diet, by eating really healthy and then we find out, “Oh, my God! In ten years, I could potentially have osteoporosis because I’m not thinking about my calcium.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah! I just loved that you developed this tool. I think it’s so important for people to begin thinking about it now and not until they have a fracture or start having back pain, et cetera and that drives them to their doctor because then, it’s far more advanced. It’s such an easy tool that I’m definitely going to be recommending to all my clients and listeners and readers go to because people need to start thinking about this right now, today.
Dr. Kim Millman: Yeah, exactly. It’s really easy. You just go to www.calciumcheckup.com. That’s a special page for the Live to 110 listeners.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So guys, go out there and check that out. It only takes five minutes.
Wendy Myers: And so Kim, can you tell us a little bit about what you do, where are you and where the listeners can find you.
Dr. Kim Millman: Well, my private practice is in San Jose, California. They can go to the millmanclinic.com to find out about my private practice. I really don’t have very much of a social media presence. I’ve got a Facebook page and a fan page and I really don’t keep up with it, so you’re not going to find – I’m very interested in doing podcasts and sharing information with people like you. So that’s about it.
By the time that this is aired, I’ll probably have the beginnings of my new website, which will be kimmillmanmd.com. So you can look for that maybe around October or November. But calciumcheckup.com is really where I’d like for people to go because that’s my passion. I’ve just spent months and months and months of my life trying to develop this and get it out there for people. I really want people to use it.
Wendy Myers: That’s great. I love it. I’m going to go to check it out right now because I’m really just – even though I supplement a lot of my minerals, I’m still interested in maybe I could be doing something more for my bone health. I’m definitely going to go and give that a look. So Kim, thank you so much for being on the show.
Dr. Kim Millman: Thank you for having me.
Wendy Myers: And guys, if you want to learn all about detoxification, the modern paleo diet or healing your health conditions naturally, go check out myersdetox.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter @iwillliveto110. I’m also on YouTube. You can watch my Modern Paleo Cooking Show on wendyliveto110.
And if you liked what you heard on the show, please go give me a review on iTunes. A nice review will help me increase my visibility on the search engines and that will help me to spread my word on health. So everyone, thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
