How to Make Calcium using Egg Shells

By Bee Wilder

Eggshells present healthy, balanced calcium due to trace amounts of other minerals contained in it. Eggshell calcium is probably the best natural source of calcium, and it is easier for your body to digest and absorb. Dutch researchers have reported recently a highly positive effect of eggshell calcium (with added magnesium and vitamin D) on bone mineral density in a scientific study (double blind, placebo-controlled). Laboratory test and measures of bone density were carefully made in these studies. The eggshell supplemented group had measurable increases in bone density in their hip bones, after one year.

The ideal bone-building combination of eggshell calcium and vitamin D3 was also well documented in Japanese studies. Researchers at the Japan Women’s University, Tokyo studied a combination of vitamin D3 and eggshell powder in animals with osteoporosis. Not only was the eggshell powder with vitamin D3 able to improve bone mineral density, but it did it without significantly increasing blood calcium levels.

You can use any kind of egg (chicken, goose, duck), but it is best to use organic or certified organic eggs from free-range birds. If the bird does not get proper nutrients the eggshells won’t contain the nutrients we need.

How much to take?

One whole medium sized eggshell makes about one teaspoon of powder, which yields about 750 – 800 mgs of elemental* calcium plus other microelements, i.e. magnesium, boron, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, sulphur, silicon, zinc, etc. There are 27 elements in total. The composition of an eggshell is very similar to that of our bones and teeth.

*Elemental amounts are the amounts absorbable.

Most people require a minimum of 400 mgs per day of calcium, in addition to calcium from other food sources, so you would take 1/2 teaspoon of the powder per day. Also take 400 mgs of magnesium citrate at the same time. Calcium and magnesium need to be taken in at least equal amounts, and some people require more magnesium than calcium depending upon how much they obtain from their diet.

If you are getting muscle cramps take extra magnesium (about 150 mgs). If that doesn’t alleviate the cramps within an hour take another 150 mgs, and so on. If you get unusual joint pain and you do not have arthritis, take an additional 150 mgs of calcium. Do not take more than 500 mgs of calcium at one time because your body cannot handle it. If you need more than 400 mgs per day split up the doses during the day.

It is best to take calcium and magnesium with foods to help absorb them.

Don’t forget that vitamin D is very important for absorbing minerals, so take cod liver oil in the winter and get into the sun in the summer! In addition, all of the trace minerals, sodium and chloride are important for mineral absorption and to keep minerals balanced so do take a lemon juice and ocean sea salt drink every day (the juice of 1/2 lemon and 1/4 teaspoon of ocean sea salt mixed into 6 ounces of filtered water 6 times a day; 3 with meals to aid digestion).

How to Make Powdered Eggshells:

    Wash empty eggshells in warm water until all of the egg white is removed, but do not remove the membrane because it contains important nutrients for the joints which helps arthritis.

    Lay broken pieces out on paper towels and allow them to air dry thoroughly.

    Break the eggshells up into small pieces, and grind them to into a fine powder in a food processor, blender, coffee grinder, or a nut mill, or put them in a plastic bag and use a rolling pin to grind them. Please note that some blenders will not grind the eggshell into a fine enough powder. A coffee grinder works the best.

    Store powdered eggshells in a covered glass jar or container. Keep it in a dry place, like the kitchen cupboard.

How to take eggshell calcium (this forms calcium citrate) takes 3 hours:

    Put 1/2 teaspoon of powdered eggshell into a small dish (approximately 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 inches across) 1/2 teaspoon equals approximately 400 mgs of elemental calcium.

    Add the juice of 1/2 a lemon (freshly squeezed), and mix well it will start to bubble and foam, which is what is supposed to happen.

    Leave it at room temperature for 6 hours the longer you leave it the less gritty it will be, but do not leave it longer than 12 hours.

    It can be taken by the spoonfuls, followed by mouthfuls of water to wash it down. It is not sour tasting. In fact the taste is quite pleasant.

    Also take 400 mgs of magnesium citrate at the same time.

Other Eggshell Recipes here are some other ways to make eggshell calcium citrate:

Source: http://nourishedmagazine.com.au/blog/articles/how-to-make-calcium-using-egg-shells

I don’t know if it is my age or my diet but I find it difficult to build a little more muscle mass.  I figure if I have a little more muscle,  I can store a little more oxygen to run a little faster.  After a year of trying, nothing seems to have changed for the better.  I haven’t gained any weight and I think I’ve hit a wall as far as improving my time.  Maybe I’m over the hill and it is downhill from here.  I can’t reverse time.  Maybe it’s my diet.

My typical morning starts around 8am.  I sip 2 mugs of coffee along with a brownie or something.  Then I go through a 15 minute routine with some weights and stretching.  Then I take off for a 6 mile run.  I’m not sure what I’m running on when I do all this, but most of the time (4 out of 5 times) I can put in a hard work out.

I come back and cool down while I prepare my breakfast/lunch.  First, I down 2 cups of greens.  How do I explain what this is?  Um.  It’s like a liquid salad with a scoop of whey protein in it.  I eat it? with a straw.  About an hour later, I put 2-3 bananas, an apple, 6 strawberries, a cup of soaked sunflower seeds, the contents of my vitamin, a tablespoon or two of flax seed oil, and a bunch of water into a very high speed blender.  My latest concoction is to add an egg.  With the shell.  Raw.

I was surprised to find that the raw egg blended in just fine.  It was tasteless.  Even the egg shell was so pulverized that there was no grit.  Not bad.

Now I’m learning the value of eating egg shells.  I don’t like milk, but when my muscles cramp up I know I need more calcium.  After having kidney stones formed by calcium and being told not to intake calcium supplements, I’m looking for safer, more natural means of taking calcium.  This might be the trick.

And maybe the raw egg will serve a purpose too.  More protein maybe?  I’ll have to look into that too.

Running on egg shells,

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted on March 5, 2012, Printed on March 10, 2012

I’ve always been at odds with sleep. Starting around adolescence, morning became a special form of hell. Long school commutes meant rising in 6am darkness, then huddling miserably near the bathroom heating vent as I struggled to wrest myself from near-paralysis. The sight of eggs turned my not-yet-wakened stomach, so I scuttled off without breakfast. In fourth grade, my mother noticed that instead of playing outside after school with the other kids, I lay zonked in front of the TV, dozing until dinner. “Lethargy of unknown cause,” pronounced the doctor.

High school trigonometry commenced at 7:50am. I flunked, stupefied with sleepiness. Only when college allowed me to schedule courses in the afternoon did the joy of education return. My decision to opt for grad school was partly traceable to a horror of returning to the treadmill of too little sleep and exhaustion, which a 9-to-5 job would surely bring.

In my late 20s, I began to wake up often for a couple of hours in the middle of the night – a phenomenon linked to female hormonal shifts. I’ve met these vigils with dread, obsessed with lost sleep and the next day’s dysfunction. Beside my bed I stash an arsenal of weapons against insomnia: lavender sachets, sleep CDs, a stuffed sheep that makes muffled ocean noises, and drugstore remedies from valerian to melatonin which cause me “rebound insomnia” the moment I stop taking them.

The Sleep Fairy continued to elude me.

Recently I confessed my problem to the doctor, ashamed to fail at something so simple that babies and rodents can do it on a dime. When I asked for Ambien, she cut me a glance that made me feel like a heroin addict and lectured me on the dangers of “controlled substances.” Her offering of “sleep hygiene” bromides like reserving my bedroom solely for sleep was useless to a studio apartment-dweller.

Conventional medical wisdom dropped me at a dead end. Why did I need to use a bedroom for nothing but sleeping when no other mammal had such a requirement? When for most of history, humans didn’t either? Our ancestors crashed with beasties large and small roaming about, bodies tossing and snoring nearby, and temperatures fluctuating wildly. And yet they slept. How on earth did they do it?

A lot differently than we do, it turns out.

The 8-Hour Sleep Myth

Pursuing the truth about sleep means winding your way through a labyrinth of science, consumerism and myth. Researchers have had barely a clue about what constitutes “normal” sleep. Is it how many hours you sleep? A certain amount of time in a particular phase? The pharmaceutical industry recommends drug-induced oblivion, which, it turns out, doesn’t even work. The average time spent sleeping increases by only a few minutes with the use of prescription sleep aids. And — surprise! — doctors have just linked sleeping pills to cancer. We have memory foam mattresses, sleep clinics, hotel pillow concierges, and countless others strategies to put us to bed. And yet we complain about sleep more than ever.

The blame for modern sleep disorders is usually laid at the doorstep of Thomas Edison, whose electric light bulb turned the night from a time of rest to one of potentially endless activity and work. Proponents of the rising industrial culture further pushed the emphasis of work over rest, and the sense of sleep as lazy indulgence.

But there’s something else, which I learned recently while engaged in a bout of insomnia-driven Googling. A Feb. 12, 2012 article on the BBC Web site, “The Myth of the 8-Hour Sleep,” has permanently altered the way I think about sleep. It proclaimed something that the body had always intuited, even as the mind floundered helplessly.

Turns out that psychiatrist Thomas Wehr ran an experiment back in the ‘90s in which people were thrust into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. When their sleep regulated, a strange pattern emerged. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before drifting off again into a second four-hour sleep.

Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech would not have been surprised by this pattern. In 2001, he published a groundbreaking paper based on 16 years of research, which revealed something quite amazing: humans did not evolve to sleep through the night in one solid chunk. Until very recently, they slept in two stages. Shazam.

In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Ekrich presents over 500 references to these two distinct sleep periods, known as the “first sleep” and the “second sleep,” culled from diaries, court records, medical manuals, anthropological studies, and literature, including The Odyssey. Like an astrolabe pointing to some forgotten star, these accounts referenced a first sleep that began two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

This waking period, known in some cultures as the “watch,” was filled with everything from bringing in the animals to prayer. Some folks visited neighbors. Others smoked a pipe or analyzed their dreams. Often they lounged in bed to read, chat with bedfellows, or have much more refreshing sex than we modern humans have at bedtime. A 16th-century doctor’s manual prescribed sex after the first sleep as the most enjoyable variety.

But these two sleeps and their magical interim were swept away so completely that by the 20th century, they were all but forgotten.

Historian Craig Koslofsky delves into the causes of this massive shift in human behavior in his new book, Evening’s Empire. He points out that before the 17th century, you’d have to be a fool to go wandering around at night, where ne’er-do-wells and cutthroats lurked on pitch-black streets. Only the wealthy had candles, and even they had little need or desire to venture from home at night. Street lighting and other trends gradually changed this, and eventually nighttime became fashionable and hanging out in bed a mark of indolence. The industrial revolution put the exclamation point on this sentence of wakefulness. By the 19th century, health pundits argued in favor of a single, uninterrupted sleep.

We have been told over and over that the eight-hour sleep is ideal. But in many cases, our bodies have been telling us something else. Since our collective memory has been erased, anxiety about nighttime wakefulness has kept us up even longer, and our eight-hour sleep mandate may have made us more prone to stress. The long period of relaxation we used to get after a hard day’s work may have been better for our peace of mind than all the yoga in Manhattan.

After learning this, I went in search of lost sleep.

Past Life Regression

“Even a soul submerged in sleep

is hard at work and helps

make something of the world.”

― Heraclitus, Fragments

What intrigued me most about the sleep research was a feeling of connection to ancient humans and to a realm beyond clock-driven, electrified industrial life, whose endless demands are more punishing than ever. Much as Werner Hertzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams pulls the viewer into the lives of ancient cave dwellers in southern France who painted the walls with marvelous images, reading about how our ancestors filled their nights with dream reflection, lovemaking and 10-to-12 hour stretches of down-time produced a strange sense of intimacy and wonder.

I’m a writer and editor who works from home, without children, so I’ve had the luxury, for the last couple of weeks, of completely relinquishing myself to a new (or quite old) way of sleeping. I’ve been working at a cognitive shift – looking upon early evening sleepiness as a gift, and plopping into bed if I feel like it. I try to view the wakeful period, if it should come, as a magical, blessed time when my email box stops flooding and the screeching horns outside my New York window subside.

Instead of heading to bed with anxiety, I’ve tried to dive in like a voluptuary, pushing away my guilt about the list of things I could be doing and letting myself become beautifully suspended between worlds. I’ve started dimming the lights a couple of hours after dusk and looking at the nighttime not as a time to pursue endless work, but to daydream, drift, putter about, and enter an almost meditative state.

The books I’ve been reading in the evening hours have been specially chosen as a link to dreamy ruminations of our ancestor’s “watch” period. Volumes like Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body or Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors provide the kind of reflective, incantatory experience the nighttime seems made for. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams would be another excellent choice, and I know from experience that reading it before bedtime triggers the most vivid mental journeys.

In sleep, we slip back to a more primitive state. We go on a psychic archaeological dig. This is part of the reason that Freud proclaimed dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious and lifted his metaphors from the researchers who were sifting through the layers of ancient history on Egyptian digs, uncovering relics and forgotten memories. Ghosts flutter about us when we lie down to rest. Our waking identities dissolve, and we become creatures whose rhythms derive from the moon and the seas much more than the clock and the computer.

As we learn more, we may realize that giving sleep and rest the center stage in our lives may be as fundamental to our well-being as the way we eat and the medicines that cure us. And if we come to treasure this time of splendid relaxation, we may have much more to offer in the daytime hours.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet contributing editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of ‘Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.’ Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154424/

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Sometimes I wonder if we won’t look back on chemo treatment like we do on those that practice bloodletting.

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