Research
Micronutrients & recovery
Increasing dietary protein intake improves intestinal calcium absorption and suppresses parathyroid hormone (PTH) secretion, thereby benefiting skeletal health without causing negative calcium balance.
Eating more protein helps your bones by improving how your body absorbs calcium and reducing levels of parathyroid hormone (PTH), which can weaken bones if too high. This benefit occurs without causing bone loss, even though more calcium is excreted in urine.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Recent studies show that the increase in urinary calcium excretion is due to improved intestinal calcium absorption, and high protein diets do not result in negative skeletal calcium balance... Because increasing dietary protein increases intestinal calcium absorption, over time this effect could be beneficial to the skeleton by suppressing PTH secretion.
Why this rating
Based on calcium isotope studies and controlled trials.
Source
Increasing Dietary Protein Requirements in Elderly People for Optimal Muscle and Bone Health
Erin Gaffney‐Stomberg et al. · Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2009
DOI 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2009.02285.x
narrative_reviewCited 226×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Increasing dietary protein intake to 1.0–1.2 g/kg/day in elderly individuals maintains nitrogen balance and calcium metabolism without adverse renal effects, serving as a safe baseline compromise until higher-dose long-term trials are completed.Good
- Elderly individuals require higher protein intakes (1.6–1.8 g/kg/day) to achieve muscle anabolism due to an impaired anabolic response to mixed meals and reduced insulin sensitivity compared to younger adults.Good
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