<Cathy wrote:
<Of course not.  Calcium is a mineral.  There
would be a big problem if that were
<the case, considering one of the leading sources
of calcium (milk) is
<pasteurized.

Actually, that is a valid concern. Read about it
in Frank Oski's book, Don't Drink Your Milk.
Pasteurizing milk kills bacteria, but also takes
the life out of the milk, rendering the calcium
less bio-available. The environment that the
calcium comes in is also a factor in
bioavailability. The protein level and phosphorus
(I think it was those two factors, read the book
to be sure) are rather high in cow's milk and bind

up a good deal of the calcium. Oski quotes a study

of two cultures in a similar climate (Africa I
think) where one culture consumed only about
300-400 mgs of calcium a day, from (raw?)
vegetable sources and the other was (raw?
pasteurized?) dairy-based, consuming 1100 mgs or
so a day. Yet the vegetable sourced people had
denser bones, indicating a better take-up or
bioavailability of the calcium.

I've also read about the difference between a
natural vitamin or nutrient and a synthetic one in

a booklet by Dr. Bruce Miller:
    "Dr. E. E. Pfeiffer discovered that there was
a vast difference between synthetic and natural
    nutrients in many instances, even when they
contained precisely the same atoms. Dr.
    Pfeiffer's research showed that in solution,
synthetics react differently to a beam of
polarized
    light than do their natural counterparts;
synthetics rotated the beam in one direction while

    naturals rotated it in the opposite
direction....while chemically the same, [it] is a
mirror image
    and totally unusable by the body.
        The reason that the synthetic is unusable
is that our enzyme systems are set up for
    nature and not the laboratory. Trying to fit
your enzymes to a synthetic is like trying to fit
    your right hand into a left-handed glove!"

--or perhaps trying to fit a puzzle piece in the
right place backwards.

This information is why I am very cautious about
any formula that claims it is "chemically the
same" as breastmilk, or cow's milk or any other
natural thing. Personally, if calcium is the
concern for a toddler coming off the breast, I'd
be inclined to give it raw vegetable juice in
small amounts regularly. I'd drink a lot of it
myself before weaning, because the milk gets
flavored by what the mother eats to some extent.
It would acquaint the child with the taste in a
favorable way hopefully. While I was recovering
from hyperthyroid and nursing my 5 month old son,
I drank a couple of quarts of it a day. To this
day he will eat almost any vegetable I put in
front of him and absolutely loves raw vegetable
juice. He doesn't like fruit however and I didn't
consume it as much during my recovery. I realize
that may be purely coincidental, but my personal
observation is that it is not.