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Camp Calcium goes coed
 By Steve Tally
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Camper James Harris checks his percentage of body fat under the watchful eye of Heather Lock. (photo by Tom Campbell) |
For the first time, teenage boys were welcome at Purdue's Camp Calcium, and approximately 50 young men accepted the invitation.
In previous years, only girls attended the camp, as researchers tried to calculate the amount of calcium young women need to prevent osteoporosis later in life.
However, according to Connie Weaver, distinguished professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue, recent studies have found that millions of men also suffer from osteoporosis.
Weaver says factors such as physical activity, diet and hormones can greatly affect the amount of bone growth in the teenage years, and that these factors are different for males and females.
"Males are more efficient at building bones, but they may require more calcium to build larger skeletons," she says. "We don't know to what extent the changing hormones of adolescence play in this process. That's one of the things we're working to find out."
For years, the medical and scientific communities have assumed that the calcium dietary needs for boys are the same as those for girls, according to Berdine Martin, research associate in Purdue's Department of Foods and Nutrition. "But there haven't been any studies to actually determine if that is true," she says. "It's important that we do these studies to determine if the dietary needs are the same for both genders."
This summer's Camp Calcium was the seventh since the program began in 1990. Campers attend two three-week camps as part of a major research project aimed at determining the amount of calcium needed for proper bone growth in teenage boys and girls. Researchers provide meals for the students so they can be certain of their daily dietary intake, and they check campers' waste and blood samples each day.
Information from Camp Calcium was used by the National Academy of Sciences to establish new dietary guidelines for calcium in 1997.
"Camp Calcium is unique--no one else has been able to conduct this type of research, which requires the total dietary control of the participants for weeks at a time," Martin says.
But to the campers, Camp Calcium doesn't feel like a tightly controlled research project. Instead, it's six weeks of fun. This summer the boys were treated to mini-sports camps, field trips, movies, nutrition and health classes, and educational opportunities set up by the chemistry and physics departments and the School of Veterinary Medicine.
The camp is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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