poet_kelly.....I've got a small calcium question - Thanks in advance!

Went to my 3 month follow-up appt. today.  I got some information from them regarding calcium - according to them the new update for adults is 1,200 mg. daily, and lots of mg's of those can come from food.  Is that anything you've heard?  I'm still going to continue my intake based on the information I've read here - minimum of 1,500, buit just checking if you had read any updates.  Also, another question regarding iron.  My serum iron level is 15, ferritin is 10, iron saturation is 5.  Obviously low.  The direction I received was to  increase my daily iron to 3 times daily.  I'm not sure how I'm going to slide that in with the calcium I'm taking, but I'm thinking that will hopefully do it!  Thanks, as always, for the many answers you give!  Do you take over the 60 mg. of the Fe Carb?

I just reviewed the 2013 guidelines from the ASMBS after reading your question, to make sure I didn't miss anything.  I don't think I did.  I see they are now recommending that lap band patients get more calcium from food and less from supplements, but they don't say that with regard to RNY, VSG, or DS patients.  The reason some surgeons are now recommending less calcium supplements, I think, is due to a study that came out a while back that showed a correlation between taking calcium supplements and heart attack.  However, that study was not done in people that had  WLS of any kind, so they were absorbed all the calcium they took, both in supplement form and from food.  In addition, that study did not control for the type of calcium supplement taken.  For instance, there is a big difference between calcium carbonate and calcium citrate.  Since more calcium supplements contain carbonate and those are usually cheaper than citrate, there is a good chance that's what many of the study subjects took, but we don't know because they didn't control for it.

at this point, I plan to continue taking 1500 mg daily.

Your iron is super low, yeah.  What kind of iron are you taking?  I use carbonyl iron, which is all elemental iron and it's absorbed better in RNY folks than things like ferrous sulfate, and it also usually does not cause constipation.  I take 75 mg a day.  we can absorb a pretty big dose at one time so depending on how much you're taking, you may not need to split it in to three separate doses.  Maybe you can just take it twice a day?