Health desk,4th april’13 – Getting plenty of calcium from foods has been shown to lower the likelihood of kidney stones in those most at risk, but a new study makes clear the benefit isn’t just linked to milk products. In a large new analysis, men and women who consumed the most dietary calcium from foods had about 20 percent lower risk of developing kidney stones than peers who consumed the least calcium.

“This is another piece of data to suggest that there’s no role for dietary calcium restriction for kidney stones,” said lead study author Dr. Eric Taylor, a kidney specialist at Maine Medical Center in Portland. Although most stones that form in the kidneys are made of calcium oxalate, people should not be afraid of consuming calcium in foods, Taylor told Reuters Health.

On the contrary, past studies have found that eating calcium-rich foods – though not taking calcium supplements – seems to ward off stone formation. Since those studies focused almost exclusively on dairy products, there was lingering doubt about whether some other component of milk might be responsible for the effect. So Taylor and his colleagues set out to see whether the results held true for calcium from non-dairy foods.

They analyzed data from three large studies that followed more than one million men and women, sometimes for decades, and included periodic detailed food questionnaires.

The researchers divided those participants into five smaller groups, based on how much calcium they consumed from dairy and other sources over as long as 20 years.Only participants who were generally healthy and had never suffered from a kidney stone before dietary data collection began were included.For both dairy and non-dairy sources of calcium, people who consumed the most calcium were least likely to develop painful, symptomatic kidney stones – overall, their risk was 77 percent of that seen among people who ate the least calcium, Taylor’s team reports in the Journal of Urology.