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Health
Health
UPDATED: April 9, 2012 NO. 15 APRIL 12, 2012
The Calcium Quandary
Fears of calcium deficiency lead Chinese mothers to overuse supplements
By Wang Hairong
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(CFP)

Zhang Ting and Xue Ying, a young couple working as corporate executives in Beijing, discovered the problems associated with excessive calcium after the supplements they had been feeding their daughter caused her to develop kidney stones.

Fearing their child was not receiving enough calcium, they began to feed her calcium-fortified milk and calcium supplements when she was 6 months old.

A year later, however, Xue found that the child was urinating too frequently and took her to see a doctor. After a three-hour operation, doctors removed over 50 kidney stones from the baby. Xue was told that feeding children excessive calcium supplements may cause kidney stones.

Recently, at an interview with Web portal People.com.cn, Gan Weihua, President of the Second Hospital Affiliated with Nanjing Medical University in east China's Jiangsu Province, illustrated the danger of excessive calcium intake by comparing it with melamine.

Gan said that the kidney stones resulting from excessive calcium intake are harder than those caused by melamine and can lead to more serious problems and are more difficult to treat.

In 2008, six babies died and nearly 300,000 children sickened after drinking melamine-tainted milk in China. More than three years after the scandal, China's dairy industry is still struggling to recover.

Getting too much calcium from food is rare, and any excess is likely to be caused by the use of calcium supplements, doctors say.

A common misconception

Whether their babies are receiving enough calcium is a major concern for Chinese mothers. Nervous mothers often worry their babies may suffer from rickets, a softening of bones in children as a result of calcium deficiency.

On account of this fear, feeding infants calcium supplements has become a major fad. But most parents usually do so without consulting a doctor beforehand.

Recently, Li Keji, a professor at the School of Public Health at Peking University, surveyed 218 parents in Beijing about the calcium supplement intake of their children. He found that 70 percent of babies under 4 months old and 90 percent of those older than six months were being fed calcium supplements.

The results of the survey troubled Li. "If a baby does not have digestion problems, no matter whether she is breastfed or drinks formula milk, there is usually no need to take calcium supplements," he said.

A number of parents blindly follow others, and as a result they feed too many calcium supplements to their babies, said Li Pu, a pediatrician who has worked in Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing for more than four decades.

Li has been consulted by many mothers who are overly worried about the risk of rickets. Babies not sleeping well at night, or sweating too much, or having pillow baldness, or shaking their heads frequently all arouse Chinese mother's fears of rickets.

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