What is calcium carbonate? And why is it in your conventional calcium supplement?
People often ask us why calcium carbonate is so common if it causes side effects such as gas and constipation. The short answer is that calcium carbonate is cheap. Very cheap.
Price of calcium carbonate per metric ton
In fact, calcium carbonate is so cheap that the crude prices of the mineral are measured in the metric ton (yes, 2205 lbs). Recent forecasts price US calcium carbonate at $655 per metric ton and Chinese calcium carbonate $135 per metric ton. Those numbers are hard to believe: each capsule or chew that you take costs the manufacturer just a fraction of a fraction of a cent. Trust us, if we were a big corporation like Viactiv or Nature’s Made, we’d want to use this cheap, abundant ingredient, too!
But calcium carbonate comes with other costs. It might be cheap to mine from quarries, but consumers pay a price in terms of common side effects. The NIH lists common adverse effects for calcium carbonate to be vomiting, gas, constipation, irratabiliy, and nausea. In our market research, those side effects were confirmed in interview after interview. Many women told us that their calcium pills gave them gas, constipation, or just a general bloated feeling. Less common but more serious side effects include headache and muscle twitching. That’s a big price to pay for such a cheap ingredient.
Do you want to eat calcium mined in a quarry that looks like this? I’ll pass on the rock-mined calcium, no thank you.
Rather eat my calcium from foods, not a quarry.
We created Seen from dietary calcium because we know that our bones need dietary calcium - calcium sourced from real foods, not rocks - to grow and strengthen. That’s why we chose food-based calcium in the form of milk minerals. This calcium isn’t isolated, but calcium in the context of the other helper minerals such as magnesium and phosphorous that help your bones absorb the dietary calcium. We also include Vitamin D from mushrooms and a nice gram of milk protein: both to help your bodies absorb the 500 mg dietary calcium from our chew.
