Q: Dear Lesley,
 
As you know, I am one of your long standing Simba customers and this supplement has been marvellous. 
I haven't had a cold for the last 4 years even though my grandchildren are always bringing bugs home from school!
 
However, as I am now approaching 60, I feel that I should be protecting my bones with perhaps a good calcium supplement.
 
Have you got any recommendations?
 
With kind regards, 
M (by email)

 
A: Dear M,
 
You are quite right -- as we get older we do need to look after ourselves and protect our bone health.
 
A supplement that I really do like a lot is made by Lamberts Healthcare and called Multiguard OsteoAdvance. 

You can buy this from Revital (http://www.revital.co.uk/Lamberts_MultiGuard_Osteo_Advance_50)
 
This provides good levels of both calcium and magnesium.
 
I would also consider taking an extra Vitamin D supplement. Dietary vitamin D is actually a precursor hormone — the building block of a powerful steroid hormone in your body called calcitrol.

It’s been known for many years that vitamin D is critical to the health of our bones and teeth.

Vitamin D works in concert with other nutrients and hormones in your body to support healthy bone renewal — an ongoing process of mineralization and demineralization.

Vitamin D also promotes normal cell growth and differentiation throughout the body, working as a key factor in maintaining hormonal balance and a healthy immune system.

It appears that calcitriol actually becomes part of the physical composition of cells, assisting in the buildup and breakdown of healthy tissue — in other words, regulating the processes that keep you well.

Your body can’t create vitamin D on its own. Instead, it’s designed to make it through sun exposure. In theory, you can make an ample supply of vitamin D with as little as a couple of hours per week in the sun — provided the UVB rays are strong enough.

You can also ingest D through food, especially fatty fish like wild–harvested salmon. Plus, lots of foods are fortified nowadays, so vitamin D deficiency should be an easy problem to solve, right? But the truth is, we’re just not getting enough, and so many of us aren’t even close.

We lose some of our ability to synthesize and absorb vitamin D as we age. As we grow older and our skin thins, the amount of the vitamin D precursor (a derivative of cholesterol) in it decreases, too. Women entering perimenopause and menopause, when there can be accelerated bone loss, can slow bone loss by getting enough vitamin D on board.

Sunlight-generated and dietary vitamin D forms go into circulation and are passed along to the liver, where they get converted into calcidiol. This is the circulating form of vitamin D  that gets measured when you have your blood taken for a vitamin D test.

Next, calcidiol is converted in the kidneys and other organs into calcitriol This is the biologically active form of vitamin D, also known as vitamin D3. This is the form that goes to work by attaching itself to vitamin D receptors present throughout the body.

Today we know there are vitamin D receptors in some three dozen different target organs in the body! In addition to being converted in the kidneys to this active form, calcidiol is converted into calcitriol in about ten other organs in the body — the lymph glands and skin tissue, too, for example.

This shows how important Vitamin D is for whole-body wellness.

As we age, our bodies slowly lose the ability to mobilize vitamin D, a process that lowers our calcium absorption rates. It's not certain as to how sex hormones affect vitamin D conversion, but women seem to have a harder time stimulating the mechanism that builds bone tissue when their estrogen levels are reduced.

Calcium is clearly an important co-factor to vitamin D, and may lose efficacy if vitamin D is deficient or estrogen levels are low, as vitamin D appears to be the more critical factor in bone health.

Interestingly, a recent study by scientists at the University of Massachusetts found that a diet rich in calcium and vitamin D can help control some symptoms of PMS.
 
Higher Nature's Vitamin D is good -- take one capsule daily

(http://www.highernature.co.uk/ShowProductFamily.aspx?ProductFamilyID=283)
 
Also, it's important to keep your immune system functioning at the correct level so continue to take your Simba capsules daily.