Which milk has the best calcium source?

If you ask a selection of people which milk has the best calcium source A, most people would presume whole milk.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that whole milk has the best calcium levels of all the milks on the supermarket shelf.

However, if you’re after the best source of calcium, you should be looking for the red tops. Skimmed milk has the highest level of calcium – with semi skimmed coming up behind and whole milk in third place.

Why is this? Well whole milk might contain the most nutrients, it’s all to do with fat levels. When you remove the fat from whole milk to get to skimmed or semi skimmed, the watery part of milk increases as the fat drops. The watery part of the milk is the part that contains the calcium.

While the amounts aren’t that massively different, per 100ml the figures are 122mg for skimmed milk, 120mg for semi-skimmed and 118mg for whole.

However, some people will take solace in the drinking of skimmed milk for dietary reasons, being lower in calories, fat and saturated fat.

Per 100ml, skimmed milk has 32 calories, 0.2g fat and 0.1g saturated fat; semi-skimmed milk has 46 calories, 1.7g fat and 1.1g saturated fat; and whole milk has 66 calories, 3.9g fat and 2.5g saturated fat.

What you do lose by taking the fat out of milk is small amounts of vitamin A, but you can more than make up for this by eating plenty of beta carotene-rich vegetables, which the body makes into vitamin A.

These include carrots, sweet potato, kale, broccoli, butter and spinach.