How pre-war kids benefitted from calcium in food

Research has found that children who drink milk and eat cheese and other calcium in food are less likely to die from strokes as they get older.

A study undertaken found that people who were children around the 1930s and were born to working class families were found to have the highest calcium intakes, and the lowest risks of dying from a stroke.

Dairy foods and other things rich in calcium can lower the risk of dying from a stoke by up to 60 per cent the study found.

Researchers from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, and Bristol University looked into the diets of British families.

Details were taken of family diet as well as the health, growth and living conditions of the children, who were aged four to 11 at the start of the study.

The researchers traced 4,374 of the children 65 years later and checked their history of strokes against the calcium content of their diets in the original study.

Writing in the journal Heart, they said: ‘In this 65-year follow-up study of children born in the 1920s or 1930s, a family diet in childhood relatively high in calcium was associated with reduced risk of mortality caused by stroke, with calcium intakes above 400mg/day associated with 40-60 per cent lower mortality due to stroke compared with those with daily calcium intakes below 400mg/day.’

The experts found that children with a high calcium intake were also 25 per cent less likely to have died from any cause at the 65-year follow-up than those with the lowest calcium intakes.

No link was found between calcium intake and death from heart disease.