Adolescent girls who consume more calcium weigh less.

2003 MAY 8 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- The first large study to look at total calcium consumption in adolescents found that girls who consumed more calcium weighed less and had lower body fat. The findings were presented at the Experimental Biology 2003 meeting in San Diego, as part of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences program.

Dr. Rachel Novotny, and colleagues at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Kaiser Permanente Clinical Research Center in Honolulu, studied 321 white, Asian, and mixed-ethnicity girls aged 9-14 years (average age 11.5 years). The girls were enrolled in the health plans of Kaiser Permanente Honolulu Clinic during 2000 and 2001.

For 3 days, each girl recorded everything she ate and drank and any calcium or multivitamin supplements she took. A researcher recorded the girl's weight and the amount of fat at the iliac, just above the hipbone near the belly button. This skin fold thickness is a measure of abdominal fat.

As expected, girls who consumed more total calories and exercised less were heavier and had more body fat. However, when the researchers compared groups of girls at comparable age, height, level of maturation, calorie intake and exercise level, they found that girls who consumed more calcium on average weighed less than similar girls who consumed less calcium. It made very little difference if the calcium ...