Health and Environmental Concerns
Living coral reefs are endangered and cannot be harvested without significant damage to the ecosystem, and because of this, coral calcium is harvested by grinding up above-ground limestone deposits that were once part of a coral reef. Calcium from coral sources needs to be refined to remove pollutants of the source environment. It is marketed as a dietary supplement, but its benefits over other calcium supplements are unproven and biologically unlikely, and several marketers have been found guilty of fraud and were ordered to pay $20.4 million and to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims in the future. Additionally, coral near Okinawa has absorbed relatively high amounts of lead and mercury, leading to concern that these unregulated supplements may be contaminated. Further, coral takes millennia to grow, leading to environmental concerns.
Read more about this topic: Coral Calcium
Famous quotes containing the words health and, health and/or concerns:
“Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upwards towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Some fear that if parents start listening to their own wants and needs they will neglect their children. It is our belief that children are in fact far less likely to be neglected when their parents’ needs—for support, for friendship, for decent work, for health care, for learning, for play, for time alone—are being met.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“From a child’s play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world—what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)