While there are a myriad of uses for both calcium metal and its various compounds, most people associate calcium with supplements.

Calcium is one of the most abundant substances in the crust of the earth and is well-known as an essential nutrient, especially for bone health.

The supplement industry knows this and they sell a hell of a lot of calcium. The 2024 global market was estimated to be just shy of six billion dollars and it is expected to grow by half in the next ten years.

The supplement business is a big one. Globally, vitamins and minerals and other such things generate about fifty billion dollars in annual revenue and that’s expected to double in ten years.

Most of these things are of dubious nutritional value and are even possibly harmful. The industry is mostly unregulated and the medical claims made by its salespeople are mostly nonsense. Nonetheless we love our supplements!

With that famous-named asshole now in charge of health for the entire country things are only going to get worse. There will be a lot more “alternative” medicine foisted upon us. Americans have a rich tradition of snake oil peddlers and we will be embracing more and more of that stuff as we drift further into medieval mumbo-jumbo.

There are plenty of things wrong with modern medicine. But that doesn’t mean you throw out good science and replace it with hippie bullshit. It’s just like recognizing the deep, systemic flaws with a capitalist economy. You don’t dump the whole shebang and go full commie, fer chrissakes. That’s NOT an alternative. You don’t go from a free market to a command-and-control economy because, like, uh, you couldn’t come up with anything else?

We have this tendency to see all problems as binary. You have a problem with modern medicine? OK, the smart move then is to get rid of the entire apparatus and replace it with sassafras tea, kombucha, and pilates. Good grief!

The problems that are worth solving never have simple solutions.

These days we have more knowledge about the body and nutrition than ever before. The problem is that we are buried in information. That’s not the same thing. Knowledge is hard-won. Information is easy. Anyone surfing the internet for nutritional advice will be quickly overwhelmed with masses of factoids, sales pitches, and contradictory materials. And increasingly, the same material reproduced at a dozen different sites! Actually learning—gaining knowledge—from all that shit is difficult at best.

Going back in history, the ancients knew they could heat limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO₃) to make lime (calcium oxide, CaO), also known as burnt lime or quicklime. Lime was used for mortar. Lime is still the most important ingredient in modern cement. You can imagine the scale of global concrete use and that will tell you about the huge demand for calcium! Good thing it can be found in large quantities all over the earth.

It wasn’t until 1808 that Humphry Davy isolated calcium metal from quicklime via electrolysis. Calcium metal is used in alloys and steel-making. Calcium compounds like calcium sulfate (CaSO₄, aka gypsum), used to make sheetrock or drywall, and calcium chloride (CaCl₂), commonly used to de-ice roads, are ubiquitous.