Hi Izabela

Last Friday of this run, and it's the question that always follows the dairy conversation:

"If I stop dairy, where do I get my calcium? I'm worried about my bones."

Good question, and the honest answer is: from food that absorbs better than milk does, and it's easier than you think.

Let me give you the list first and the reasoning after, because I know some of you will want to go shopping.

• Sesame seeds and tahini. The best of the lot. A spoon of tahini in a dressing, sesame sprinkled over almost anything, and if you crush the seeds first, better again.

• The cruciferous vegetables. Kale, bok choy, broccoli, cabbage.

And we have the numbers on this, it isn't my opinion. Heaney and Weaver, Journal of Food Science, 1993. Milk came in at around 30 to 36%. Bok choy, 52%. Kale, 53%.

Look at that. The greens beat the milk.

Sardines too, with the soft bones still in them. Don't pick them out, that's the calcium.

Do those across a day and you're likely taking in more usable calcium than the woman drinking her milk next to you.

Now the catch, and this is the one that catches everybody.

Spinach.

Spinach looks fantastic on paper. High calcium, right there in the numbers.

But it's loaded with something called oxalates, which lock the calcium up.

Heaney again, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1988. Milk, 28%. Spinach, 5%.

Five percent. Insane, right?

And it doesn't stop at spinach. Put a good calcium source together with spinach, or with coffee, or with cocoa, and that calcium goes poorly absorbed too. So it isn't only what you eat, it's what you eat it next to.

So "just eat your greens" is only true for some greens. Sesame and crucifers, yes. Spinach, not for this. Eat it for other reasons, it's a good food. Just don't count on it for your bones.

And here's the bigger thing I want you to take away.

The answer to your bones was never a calcium pill.

Calcium on its own, in one big dose out of a bottle, doesn't reliably build bone.

Food does something a pill can't, because it arrives packaged with everything that tells your body where to put it. Vitamins, polyphenols, antioxidants, and so on.

Your bones are built by the whole picture, not one mineral:

• Absorbable calcium from food.

• Enough protein, which most women over 40 are short of.

• Vitamin D with K2, because D gets the calcium in and K2 decides where it goes.

• And load through your muscles. Actual weight, actual resistance. Bone responds to being asked to do something.

The pill is the least important part of that list. It's just the only part anybody SELLS.

So this week: tahini in one dressing, one crucifer most days, and sardines once. That's it. Nothing to buy in a capsule.

Take a breath about your bones, Izabela. You have more control here than you were led to believe, and almost all of it is on your plate and in your muscles.

Love,

Vale

P.S. This week's video is the full conversation, including my actual verdict on dairy and the two-week test to find out where you personally land, it´s already in my YouTube Channel

And if what you've seen over these four weeks makes sense to you, my free masterclass is the next step, and after that we talk HERE´S THE LINK TO WATCH