Easy Way To Lose Weight

Have you ever wondered if you’re getting enough calcium in your diet?

If you’re like me, you just look at the label on your milk carton or your container of yogurt to find out.

But you may be misled by that information if you’re in one of these groups:

–At risk for osteoporosis

–Pregnant or lactating

–50 years or older

–9 to 18 years old

Here’s Why…

If you’re in one of these groups, your doctor may recommend that you get as much as 1,200 to 1,500 milligrams of calcium every day. (For kids under 9 years old, the recommended intake is less.)

But in the U.S., our food labels don’t list the milligrams of calcium in a serving of food.

Instead, they tell us what percentage of our Daily Value (%DV) of nutrients we’re getting from each serving of food.

The Daily Value for calcium is 1,000 milligrams.

But if you need more than 1,000 milligrams, getting 100% DV won’t be enough for you.

So you’ll need to convert the %DV to milligrams or the amount of milligrams you need into a %DV number.

Here’s How To Do It

If you want to convert the %DV into milligrams, just add “0″ to the percentage on the label.

So if your container of yogurt says it has 20% DV of calcium, then you’re getting 200 milligrams of calcium from that yogurt.

If you need 1,200 milligrams of calcium every day, just make sure the total from all the foods you eat adds up to 1,200 milligrams.

It’s even easier if you convert milligrams to %DV.

If your doctor tells you to get 1,200 milligrams per day, just take the ending “0″ off the number of milligrams and that’s the %DV you need to get from all of your foods combined.

In this example, 1,200 milligrams of calcium is the same as 120% DV.

If you need 1,500 milligrams, the %DV should add up to 150 for all the foods you eat in one day.

That’s an easy way to make sure you’re getting enough calcium.

According to one study, even most doctors (70%) don’t know how to figure that out.

Technorati Tags: calcium, osteoporosis, daily value, %DV

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.