Why Your Calcium Isn’t Working

Why do so many people take calcium for decades… and still develop osteoporosis?

In this episode of Ultra Life Today, Stephen Heuer of Synergistic Nutrition challenges the conventional calcium narrative and introduces the concept of ionic calcium (Ca2+) — the form your body actually regulates. We discuss parathyroid hormone, soft tissue calcification, arterial hardening, gum recession, and why many traditional calcium supplements may miss the mark.

We also explore:

• Why bone loss increases after age 35
• The difference between protein-bound calcium and ionic calcium
• The gut’s role in mineral regulation
• Raw milk, phosphatase, and bone formation
• Microbiome strategies for improving calcium metabolism

This conversation reframes osteoporosis, calcification, and mineral balance in a way most people have never heard before.

Listen here or watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jeGr7mO1pBY

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Josh Bellieu): Why do so many people that are taking calcium every day still experience osteoporosis and bone marrow?

0:00:06 - (Stephen Heuer): Because they're taking protein bound amino acid bound calcium, which doesn't regulate, it's not giving you the ionic calcium. So the body creates ionic calcium efficiently up to age 35. After that, production, like so many other biochemical markers of youth, decline. And so from 35 forward, you're always progressively becoming more deficient in your body's production of Ca2 plus ionic calcium when you can. When you take protein bound amino acid, chelated or inorganic calcium, you're not addressing it, at least not very significantly.

0:00:46 - (Josh Bellieu): Hey everyone, welcome to Ultra Life. Today we've got episode one coming up with a guy named Stephen Hur. I'm going to introduce him, but you know, the subject of bone density may sound like a really old conversation. Haven't we solved that riddle as it relates to supplementation, diet, lifestyle, nutrients? It's not been on my radar for a while and my friend Stephen her brought it up to me and said, hey, you know, I was inviting him on the podcast and he said, I want to do that subject. I'm like, okay, Stephen is a really interesting guy, but you know, when most people hear the words bone density, they're thinking immediately of osteoporosis. They're thinking of fragile bones, brittle bones, somebody walking along that's an elderly parent and they have a hip fracture and then they go down on the floor and they think of it as kind of, it's just unavoidable. We're aging well, guess what? There's diet, there's lifestyle, there's sunlight and progressive resistance exercise. Yes, I'm dropping the P word. We're going to do that a little bit later and talk about some clinical evidence of even progressive resistance weight training. But now to Stephen Hur of Synergistic Nutrition. I met Steven several years ago and he's one of these guys. I don't even know if Stephen has letters after his name.

0:02:04 - (Josh Bellieu): He fascinates me. He's an innovator. He thinks outside the box. He is this guy that describes himself as a neutropath. What in the world is that? Well, it's not a formal medical designation to me as much as it is a reflection of his work where he's guiding people through lifestyle, dietary considerations, supplementation strategies, and often with people that have tried everything else and it hasn't worked, maybe they've overlooked something. And that's what we're going to do with Steven today.

0:02:37 - (Josh Bellieu): So we're going to cover some of these bases. And I know many of you, like a good friend of mine named Kyle Drew that was potentially going to join me today. You may want to turn the broadcast off if you hear calcium. Steven's got a unique way of bringing calcium into this equation with other supplements and cofactors. It's not going to be an infomercial that we're doing today because I'm going to be directing you how you can get a free consult with Stephen.

0:03:05 - (Josh Bellieu): And then also there's a really interesting website because he is on this bone density train to be an absolute advocate, a evangelist if you will, to make sure you never suffer the way maybe your parents or your grandparents have with these horrible things called osteoporosis, compression fractures, et cetera. So anyway, Stephen Hur of Synergistic Nutrition, welcome to the broadcast. We're looking forward to your insight, Stephen. But you know, before we get into all that, I've never really heard or maybe I did four and a half years ago and forgot, what's your personal journey about doing what you're doing now? I asked this question to every doctor, nutritionist, health coach we have on the broadcast and it's always fascinating to me. So give us a little insight into who Stephen Huer is and why you're doing what you're doing today, Stephen.

0:03:56 - (Stephen Heuer): Okay, thanks Josh, for having me on here. So Hewer is the pronunciation in English and jumping Heuer.

0:04:03 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay.

0:04:03 - (Stephen Heuer): Anyways, I was Mercury poisoned in 1976 with two dental fillings that were of the variety called high copper mercury amalgams, which released 50 to 100 times more mercury than the previous kind with not as much copper in them. So I got sore throat while I was in the dental chair and walked out of there and the sore throat never went away. So I was put on anabolic robotics. After that, my gut stopped working.

0:04:25 - (Stephen Heuer): So up to that point in time, I was an athlete. I was extroverted, happy, super, you know, no problems. And then all of a sudden, life threatening constipation. And so nobody knew, nobody was there really there to support me and figure this out. So from 16 forward, I started to fast. I did veganism for four years. I became a Seventh Day Adventist because at the time their religion taught vegetarianism, which made sense to me. Anyways, going, you know, from then until my late 20s, early or about 27, I started a correspondence course with a school called the American College of Neutropathy out of Scottsdale, Arizona.

0:04:57 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay.

0:04:57 - (Stephen Heuer): And they focused on the work of Dr. K. Reams, who was a famous soil biologist that figured out human biochemistry and how to manipulate it and help people heal their various conditions, including, you know, cancer. So that was the central focus with a lot of other information about nutrition. I got my Bachelor of science degree in 1990. So I've been in private practice from about 1989 forward. So 37 years now.

0:05:19 - (Stephen Heuer): And, you know, I've had that constipation issue that happened. Took 24 years to figure out how to fix it. It's detoxing mercury. Nine months of heavy detox of mercury When I was about 26 or 27. And then at the ninth month, taking lots of DMSA, DMPs, my bowels started working again. And then it took about another 25 years to make them 100% normal.

0:05:40 - (Josh Bellieu): You know, one thing I love about you, Steven, is you throw out compounds, nutrient substances and things that I always have to say to you when we're talking on the ph. Hold it. Pause the tape. I've never heard of that one. Now, for a guy like me that's been into this Since I was 16 years old, it's like, this is cool, because this guy is doing some interesting things that a lot of people are not doing.

0:06:04 - (Josh Bellieu): So I really have to ask this before we kick off this conversation. I gave you the latitude to choose a subject, and you pick bone density. What's got you motivated right now on this bone density train? What's got you in this kind of evangelical mode of saying, there's something going on here, and I've got some answers. Tell me about that.

0:06:29 - (Stephen Heuer): Why'd you choose that? I mean. Well, because Kerry Ream's work focused on calcium supplementation. He basically manipulated the body chemistry through various forms of calcium. So for years, I was using them in my practice, personally using them limewater, which is calcium hydroxide, calcium citrate, calcium gluconate, and a variety of other calciums. And basically, at one point, I got started to develop calcium buildup in the foramen of my neck.

0:06:52 - (Stephen Heuer): So the nerves were being pinched, and my trapezius and deltoid and stuff was all becoming dead and weird. So at the same time, I discovered the subject of ionic calcium and the unique differences of that calcium over all of the forms of calcium. So I started. I stopped taking the other forms of calcium, started to take it, and in two weeks, all this was gone. And so I continued on with that. And basically, I've been on it now for many years. And I've used it in my practice for a while. So I've had Clients reverse their bone loss or reverse their gum recession. And so, you know, in a nutshell, it's basically, everybody's trying to address the calcium subject with the incorrect form of calcium.

0:07:29 - (Stephen Heuer): Your calcium in your diet, whether it's raw milk, which is the best, or whether it's, you know, calcium from a vegetable or calcium from a supplement. It's either protein bound right now or it's going to become protein bound when it goes through the digestive process and then that goes into the bloodstream. And now that doesn't affect the parathyroid's function and it's monitoring of things. So the parathyroid tissue in the thyroid gland is monitoring the levels 24,7 of this form of calcium. So it's calcium, individual calcium atoms missing two electrons.

0:08:01 - (Stephen Heuer): That is the specific form of calcium that regulates 99% of all calcium biochemistry in the body. From adult stem cell production to cell division, to the creation of your, you know, four nucleotides to create the DNA, to the, the firing of your brain's axons to release neurotransmitters at the dendrite, to the function of your heart contraction, muscle contraction processes of your muscles and your skeletal muscles in your heart.

0:08:24 - (Stephen Heuer): All that's regulated by that form of calcium and intracellular ph, which is supposed to be 7.35, 7.45. And basically this is something that people don't know about, are suffering the consequences, and I beg to differ. When you're older and your body's debilitated, you don't have the energy to do much ex. I know resistance training doesn't necessarily require cardiovascular effort, but there's people that are still not physically strong enough.

0:08:47 - (Josh Bellieu): No question about it. Yep.

0:08:49 - (Stephen Heuer): So I say you gotta address the biochemistry. First, create energy so that people actually have the energy to exercise. Walking is great. And then you get the piezoelectric effect from walking or whatever the resistance training is to help your bones activate the osteoclasts or blasts to produce the osteocalcin protein. But that's what the atomic calcium does, or that's what ionic calcium does already by itself. Every single day, you take it. And so I've helped people reverse gum recession and bone loss with this product and a combination of cofactor nutrients needed to make it work correctly.

0:09:22 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, so you've, you've moved really fast there. You've thrown out a bunch of terms that some of our people will understand, some won't. So to kind of bring that back down to practicality, it's obvious there's a whole lot missing from this conversation of osteoporosis and bone density. Where back in the day you'd have, you know, allopathic medicine saying, ah, just go down to Walgreens and pick up some cal mag.

0:09:49 - (Josh Bellieu): And you and I know the horror stories of individuals taking these forms of calcium and the problems that it creates within a body. But is osteoporosis, let's bust some myths here. Is it a calcium deficiency? Is that truly an outdated framework? And again, let's go ahead and get it down to where the rubber meets the road here. We know tons of people get adequate calcium. I still meet elderly people every day.

0:10:19 - (Josh Bellieu): You know, I say elderly, I mean, I'll be 67 here in a few months, but I mean, I meet them every day and they're of this mindset. I've got to take my cal mag, I've got to take my calcium every day. Is it a calcium deficiency? Is that an outdated framework? Why do so many people that are taking calcium every day still experience osteoporosis and bone marrow?

0:10:39 - (Stephen Heuer): Because they're taking protein bound amino acid bound calcium, which doesn't regulate, it's not giving you the ionic calcium. So the body creates ionic calcium efficiently up to age 35. After that, production, like so many other biochemical markers of youth, decline. And so from 35 forward, you're always progressively becoming more deficient in your body's production of Ca2 plus ionic calcium when you can. When you take protein bound amino acid, chelated or inorganic calcium, you're not addressing it, at least not very significantly.

0:11:08 - (Stephen Heuer): And so your parathyroid is monitoring, it's looking for Ca2 plus ionic calcium. And once your blood levels of ionic calcium drop below 51%, the parathyroid is signaled by that deficiency to turn on parathyroid hormone production. The parathyroid hormones are responsible for making the GI tract absorb calcium more efficiently and dissolving your bone. So you start to dissolve bone as a result of the deficiency of ionic calcium.

0:11:33 - (Stephen Heuer): Because the parathyroid's trying to create biochemical homeostasis by dissolving bone and trying to create some degree of ionic calcium from dissolution of bone. It doesn't work efficiently. And it's. When you're in that biochemistry state, this is gonna be a big, you know, shatter the window glass thing. When you're in that biochemistry state, that is when inorganic calcium in your diet, from calcium carbonate in your spring or drinking water to your supplements starts to deposit in your soft tissues.

0:11:59 - (Stephen Heuer): In that biochemistry state, you develop hardening of the arteries, calcification of the arteries, calcification of the valves of your heart, calcification of soft tissues, your brain, anywhere in the body. You start to deposit calcium when the parathyroid is turned on. Excessively producing parathyroid hormone, dissolving bone. It's not the consumption of inorganic minerals like some people teach. Some people teach that drinking inorganic minerals in your water or you know, taking them as supplements is going to contribute to calcification and build up in the body. That's not true. You can look at the Hanza people, the Hansa people live to be 120 to 140 years of age and drink mineral rich calcium rich trace mineral rich rock water every day of their lives. And they consume one third a cup of rock calcium in their drinking water every day. And they have no calcification in their body.

0:12:43 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah, thanks for busting that myth related to well water inorganic minerals because I've, I've. One of my favorite health teachers, a doctor, a doctor out of Europe named Paavo Irolla, wrote some of the early, early treatises back when I was 16 years old. He was going, and he talked about, you know, the difference between well water, water with inorganic chemicals in it and how it wasn't something that was going to harm you or hurt you, but actually help you. And he, and he referenced the Huns's as well.

0:13:15 - (Josh Bellieu): So, okay, we, we've, we've really painted a picture that we need to reinforce to people. Your average calcium supplements that individuals are grabbing off the shelf out there, especially as they're aging past age 35, could potentiate problems with the arteries. And the heart could potentially potentiate other different factors as it relates to your circulatory system as a whole. So we want to move out of that mindset now. Let me ask you this though.

0:13:50 - (Josh Bellieu): As we move past the age of 35, I mean, I eat what I consider a really clean diet. By the way, I am going to be getting raw milk sometime in the future. I'm on a list of someone locally that's a good friend of mine. And so I'll be getting that every week. And I know that is just mind blowingly good on so many levels for you.

0:14:10 - (Stephen Heuer): There's also phosphatase enzyme in raw milk that activates the creation of hard tissue or bone that's destroyed through pasteurization. That's the actual thing they look for in pasteurization to determine that it's been pasteurized is the deadness, the complete inactivity of the phosphatase enzyme. So phosphatase in raw milk contributes to bone formation. And I have a lady friend who adopted a diet I told her to do drinking raw milk and she reversed her osteoporosis doing that.

0:14:35 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, please everybody send out some heavy prayers for the Department of Health and Human Services and RFK Jr. To turn around this atrocity that happened back in early 80s. I was out in California. I'd been getting Altadena raw dairy milk right at the store every day, loving this stuff. And all of a sudden I go back to visit my brother again, Stephen, about three years later and they had liter put all this legislation in place to completely destroy the raw dairy milk farming industry.

0:15:09 - (Josh Bellieu): It was an atrocity. It is an atrocity.

0:15:12 - (Stephen Heuer): Odinous Vonder planets turned that around and got the California to. Basically the laws now are that you can have raw milk in California. Altadena doesn't do it anymore, but other companies do.

0:15:22 - (Josh Bellieu): Nice, nice to know. Well, that might be one reason that somebody could tempt me to go out to la, but it would take a lot to tempt me to want to be out, out there, Stephen. So. So anyway, okay, well let me ask you this before we move into some other things and talk about vitamin D and K2 and other things that people know and natural sunlight and stuff. Here I am 35 years old. Let's pretend for a second I'm, I'm half my, my, my age right now I'm eating a clean diet. But are there things that I can get naturally even apart from raw milk because it's not available to a lot of people.

0:16:00 - (Josh Bellieu): What are things I can do in my diet? My dad used to take a supplement called carrot calcium. Do you recall that?

0:16:06 - (Stephen Heuer): I do something.

0:16:07 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, is that something? I don't even know if it's still available. But my dad, 40 years ago, my dad was saying this is an actual bioavailable form that won't hurt me. I don't know where he got that, but I think he was onto something.

0:16:22 - (Stephen Heuer): That'S still protein bound. All these, all these food sources are protein bound. You don't get ionic calcium in the diet naturally. Your body has to take regular protein bound calcium and through various mechanisms, one of them, the GI tract, your large bowel has to be a 5.5 healthy acid pH to ionize your protein bound calcium into Ca2 plus and absorb it through the bowel wall. That's one mechanism and there's others by which this ionic calcium is made. And all those mechanisms decline as you age and so you can't get it from the diet. So supplementation didn't even exist until the late 90s. I met a man in the early 2000s that created this product that I work with that you can get it from and overcome this. And when I went to the dentist years ago to get a tooth pull, that was bad and he X rayed my jawbone, he said, you have above average jawbone density and that's in my teeth. Chewing surface of my teeth grew back. I had nine pockets where my fillings are. So nine fillings on nine teeth. And the tooth had worn away around the filling and there was these deep pockets being on this, what I call atomic calcium.

0:17:23 - (Stephen Heuer): When you react it with water, it becomes Ca2 plus ionic calcium. Seven months later, I've grown back my teeth by like 85%.

0:17:30 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, you've hit the, regardless of what people are dealing with, of osteoporosis and things, when you start talking about teeth, you are in like rarefied air because everybody's going to be listening to this and go, where can I, can I get a hold of this? So that's really cool. Okay, let's go into a little bit now. Now again, I'm going to want to rewind the tape for a second. Is there a way that an individual can achieve the appropriate ph in the gut and in the bowel?

0:18:01 - (Josh Bellieu): Is going to be something where, when you say it, people are going to go, oh, I could never do that. Or is there a way to actually help facilitate that even through supplementation? Maybe sunlight, other things?

0:18:12 - (Stephen Heuer): Yeah, no, you, yeah, give it, give.

0:18:14 - (Josh Bellieu): Us the little simple primer on. I'm going to get my gut ph right? I'm going to get my bowel ph right. So that even if I've got some of these poorer forms of calcium that could potentiate even harm, at least my body's going to be processing them in a better way.

0:18:31 - (Stephen Heuer): Because we don't have enough time to go into all the details. I'm going to say first off on my website, synergisticnutrition.com you can go to the reports section. In the report section there's a report called Heal a Leaky Gut and Microbiome. And in there you get all the details of how to do that. But basically it's like you have to first take three different probiotics and make them into a yogurt. You can make that yogurt from milk or you can make it from nuts. Nuts gets a better job because it's a fiber rich food. So it feeds the growth of these organisms as they transit through the intestinal tract.

0:18:59 - (Stephen Heuer): Milk doesn't do that. I had my brother go through seven month, eight months, seven or eight months of doing this. And for the first time in his life at age 67, his constipation is gone as a result of doing this yogurt for one month and then followed up with the progrt yogurt. So there's this one full spectrum. You have to first create the foundation where these three strains of probiotics, it's called bacillus coagulans.

0:19:20 - (Josh Bellieu): Yep.

0:19:20 - (Stephen Heuer): And it's a specific strain. You don't just get any version.

0:19:23 - (Josh Bellieu): Right.

0:19:23 - (Stephen Heuer): You can get this report and you'll see the strain in there. You can get bacillus algasseri and algasseri specific strain too, and then specific strain of El Rudai. Those three bacteria, when they grow into a yogurt, they produce these bacteriasins and the bacteria when they get into the gut and these organisms are, are indigenous to the gut. So they'll, they'll, they'll actually grow in your gut and then they'll produce these bacteriasins and the bacteria sins kill the fungus and kill the pathogenic bacteria. That creates the stage for the full spectrum human strain organisms to grow.

0:19:52 - (Stephen Heuer): And the full spectrum human strain organisms is progrt. Progrt. It's the only one in the world that I'm aware of that's derived. Well, I can't even say it publicly because the company won't let me, but it's got the full spectrum of human organisms. So you're getting like what you would get if you were just vaginally delivered and breastfed.

0:20:08 - (Josh Bellieu): Wow, that's, that's really powerful what you just said. This is an incredible time because you heard Stephen just briefly mention his website, synergistic nutrition.com but also he's got an alternate website that can really help, help you get bones of steel dot com. There's different categories of individuals that struggle with osteoporosis and bone density. Steven can help you dial in there, but@ synergisticnutrition.com

0:20:37 - (Josh Bellieu): you can get a free consult with Stephen up to 20 minutes. He can begin to guide you. He's got a lot of reports on his website. He was just talking about yogurt. He was talking about gut ph, bowel ph. By the way, I am so on the train of making my own sibo yogurt, Steven, and it has been absolutely incredible, incredible for me. So thank you for bringing that into this. We're going to come back and do another episode with Stephen.

0:21:02 - (Josh Bellieu): We're going to move a little bit into talking about some of the normal things that people may miss, like natural sunlight and vitamin D, maybe K2 or some of the MK forms of vitamin D that you've heard about. We'll get into that. This is Ultra Life Today. I'm Josh Bellew. We've got Steven Hewer from Synergistic Nutrition. We're coming back for another really interesting episode. Stay tuned if you like what we're doing. Like, subscribe, Share Ultra Life Today.