After writing my blog yesterday, I tackled the question of an
on-line calcium calculator. What a waste of time that was!
I tried half a dozen sites. None of them counted the sorts of foods
we ate. They all assumed you had the same meals every week. We don’t. They gave
figures on weekly amounts. I’ve no idea how many cups of tea I drink a week. I
do know how much milk we get through in a day & it is only the milk that
provides the calcium but that wasn’t asked. I’m also aware that when I last did
this the amount of calcium varied accorded to whether you drank skimmed,
semi-skimmed or full fat milk but those variations weren’t shown in the figures
on the websites. Sometimes they didn’t give the quantities just “nuts”. Well,
today we’re having a stir fry including some cashew nuts (are they even
considered as nuts for this purpose?). However the amount of calcium I take in
will clearly vary according to whether I have one ounce or four ounces.
When I last had a Dexascan (bone density scan) some 6 years ago, I
was given a paper list of a wide range of ingredients which covered most of the
food I eat. Unfortunately I threw that list out some years ago when I’d
established my average over a few weeks. I could find no list on-line with so
comprehensive a list of food ingredients. I will just have to give up the idea
of checking my calcium intake & talk to the GP when he phones next month. Hopefully
he will have more sense than the practice pharmacist (I wouldn’t guarantee
that) or at least suggest a website I haven’t been able to find so far.
1 comment:
I think that these calculators etc all reside somewhere in an autocratically owned, but otherwise utopian, non-parallel universe!
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