Lara Pizzorno is the author of “Your Bones: How You Can Prevent Osteoporosis and Have Strong Bones for Life – Naturally” and a member of the American Medical Writers Association with 29 years of experience specializing in bone health.
Recently we asked Lara if she would help us provide a series of short, ongoing videos to help you (our customers and readers) stay up to date on the latest facts and science related to bone health and overcoming osteoporosis naturally.
In this latest video, Lara talks about a study conducted by researchers from the Harvard Medical School and University of Connecticut where the scientists compared the effects of AlgaeCal with the top-sellers, calcium carbonate and calcium citrate. Watch the video below (or read the transcript provided) and let us know what you think in the comments.
Hello, my name is Lara Pizzorno the author of “Your Bones” and I’m here today to share some information with you that I hope will help you have healthier bones. In the last video we discussed the fact that calcium alone or calcium plus vitamin D has only been shown to slow the rate of bone loss not to enable us to build more bone than we lose after menopause.
So the question arises is there any calcium containing supplement that’s ever been shown to help us actually build more bone than we lose?And the answer to that is yes, there is one.
The only one, and it is called AlgaeCal. There are 3 research papers published in the peer-reviewed medical literature on PubMed that confirm this. You know I continually read the breaking research published on PubMed related to bone health and in my normal review related to the literature I came across these studies. And they’re the reason why I personally began taking AlgaeCal several years ago. It’s made a significant contribution to my completely regaining health of my bones. And these studies make it easy to understand both how and why. So let’s talk about the first of these studies now.
The first study conducted to look at AlgaeCal’s effect on bone was an in-vitro which means a laboratory study in which human osteoblast cells – these are the cells that build new bone, were treated with either AlgaeCal, calcium citrate or calcium carbonate and then each of these three pairings was also either given vitamin D3 or not. It’s important that they studied osteoblast cells because these cells play a pivotal role in bone metabolism. Osteoblasts are responsible for the syntheses of the bone matrix, for bone mineralization, and for the synthesis of bone growth factors and they also help to regulate when osteoclasts are formed and spring into action. So, osteoblasts actually help to control bone resorption. In this study, in the lab study, after just 4 days the osteoblasts that had been treated with AlgaeCal had been found to have produced much greater amounts of an enzyme called alkaline phosphatase, compared to the cells that had been treated with either calcium carbonate or calcium citrate, whether or not they got vitamin D. And this is really significant because alkaline phosphatase is a classical biomarker of osteoblast cell differentiation. In other words, the production of new osteoblasts. Alkaline phosphatase plays a key role in how osteoblasts mineralize bone so high alkaline phosphatase activity is actually required in the early stages of the extracellular matrix mineralization process. And in this study, alkaline phosphatase activity was greatly increased when osteoblasts were treated with AlgaeCal compared to either calcium carbonate or calcium citrate.
In fact, AlgaeCal increased alkaline phosphatase activity by 400%, calcium carbonate also increased it by about half as much at 200% and calcium citrate also by about as half as much 250%. What else happened? Well in the AlgaeCal treated cells, levels of proliferating cell nuclear antigen, it’s called PCNA for short, which is a protein involved in DNA synthesis and repair, were much greater in the cells treated with AlgaeCal. They were three-fold greater than calcium carbonate and four-fold greater than those treated with calcium citrate. And the end result of this is that more calcium was deposited in the AlgaeCal treated cells. Two-fold more than controls, 100% more than calcium carbonate and 400% more than calcium citrate treated cells. When vitamin D3 was also added to the treated osteoblasts, the results that were received with treatment AlgaeCal were even better. In addition, AlgaeCal was found to significantly reduce oxidative stress, which is what happens when cells are exposed to free radicals in the osteoblasts after just 24 hours. Remember that oxidative stress promotes inflammation which then triggers osteoclasts, the specialized cells that break down bone to bring into action. AlgaeCal reduced oxidative stress in human osteoblasts by 400% compared to controls. 200% compared to calcium carbonate and 250% compared to calcium citrate – did a much better job. These were very promising results and led to two human studies using AlgaeCal which we will cover in our next video. Thanks for tuning in!
Leilani Fox
February 8, 2020 , 8:26 pmIs it possible to have allergic reactions to AlgaeCal?