Does bone broth supplement calcium or not? On the one hand, the people are still boiling bone soup to drink, on the other hand, experts believe that by boiling bone soup to supplement calcium, a day to drink 400 bowls, and even some experts directly deny bone soup to supplement calcium. This really makes the people difficult. “The relevant test proves that a bowl of pork bone soup contains only 1.9 mg of calcium, and menopausal women need more than 1,000 mg of calcium per day is far away, if only by drinking soup to meet the calcium supplement, then she should drink at least 400 bowls of bone soup a day.” Online search, many articles use similar text. But the reporter some investigation, and did not find the process and ins and outs of this test. Chen Dali, Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Southern Hospital of Southern Medical University Rather, the following two experiments are of great interest, one is Zhang Ye, Department of Nutrition, 309 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army, directly using a pressure cooker to stew pork stick bones, and one is a related experiment done by the Institute of Food and Drug Research, Marine College of Shandong University Weihai. Experiment one: boil stick bones, the fourth time to have calcium Zhang Ye of the Department of Nutrition of the PLA 309 Hospital did an experiment: 2.5 kg of pork stick bones, add 2 liters of water and 10 ml of vinegar, put it in the pressure cooker to stew, wait for the pressure to come up and stew for 20 minutes. After finishing the soup and the meat on the bones, add the same 2.5 liters of water and 10 ml of vinegar, and stew for 20 minutes in the pressure cooker as well. So on and so forth. Zhang Ye told reporters that she was using reagent paper to determine whether there is calcium, if there is calcium, the reagent paper will turn white, the more obvious the white color indicates that the calcium content is higher, but the specific content can not be determined. She found that the first three times there was no calcium in the soup. It was only after the fourth time that a large amount of calcium was gradually cooked out of the stick bones, and by the 10th time the calcium content gradually decreased, and after the 14th time the calcium was completely gone. Experiment 2: Bone broth calcium is only 4% of milk. Compared with the experiment conducted by Zhang Ye, Professor Ji Aiguo of the Institute of Food and Drug Research, College of Oceanography, Shandong University, Weihai, presided over a more rigorous scientific experiment to determine the content of calcium and other minerals in cooking bone broth and nutritional evaluation. Using 500 g of fresh pork femur bones with muscles removed, cracked and cooked by the conventional home cooking method, appropriate amounts of deionized water and ingredients such as aged vinegar, salt, cooking wine, onion and ginger were added in proportion to the weight of the bones, with the amount of water added at about 1500 ml to cover the bones. The electric stove was heated to boiling and kept slightly boiling for 120 minutes. For control, they prepared four types of soups: no vinegar bone broth, low vinegar bone broth, high vinegar bone broth, and this base broth (raw material broth without pork bones), with the same proportion of food ingredients and heating time for each group. 75 g of vinegar was added to the low vinegar group and 150 g was added to the high vinegar group. The results of the experiment showed that the calcium content of bone broth in the no vinegar group was almost equal to that of the background group. This indicates that there is basically no calcium free from the bone without adding vinegar. This is because calcium mainly exists in bones in the form of hydroxyapatite, and its solubility is very low, so it is difficult for bone broth cooked in the traditional way to play the calcium supplement effect. Calcium free from bone has 4 mg/kg in the group without vinegar, 13 mg/kg in the low vinegar group, and 35 mg/kg in the high vinegar group. The calcium content of ordinary milk is about 1000 mg/kg. The bone broth in the high vinegar group tasted so bad that people usually don’t go for it. This shows that bone broth is a calcium supplement, only 4% of milk. ~35%. Between. In addition to calcium, adding the right amount of vinegar also increases the leaching of minerals such as magnesium, potassium, zinc, iron and copper, and the content is higher when adding more vinegar. Expert summary: Bone broth is suitable for children and pregnant women The results differed due to the different ways of the two experiments. But the results show that bone broth does contain calcium. According to Ji Aiguo, bone broth is not the first choice for those who need calcium urgently. For those who have the habit of drinking bone broth, it is recommended to add the right amount of vinegar when cooking bone broth, which can improve the flavor of bone broth and get more calcium and other minerals from it, so that it can be consumed regularly for the purpose of promoting health. According to Zhang Ye, the calcium in bone broth is indeed limited if it is simply for the purpose of calcium supplementation, but bone broth is rich in nutrients. It is especially suitable for children and pregnant women, for example, they can use bone broth to make egg custard, which may have high cholesterol, but is very good for the neurological development of children and babies. Adults can also use bone broth to make stews and soups, which can add deliciousness and nutrition, so why not.