There are two facets of our anatomies that are basically dead. (By dead, I mean not sentient, not comprised of living cells, inanimate, muerto, y’know…dead.) Our hair and nails. (The parts we cut, shave, and clip.) And yet we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about these very parts…

Ironic, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t have bad pancreas days or bad adrenal medulla days… we don’t have had hair days. And, uh…we don’t have Cowper’s gland salons, we have nail salons…

If I seem to vamping here a bit, it’s because there’s a very simple, succinct, and unadorned answer to this question: NO.

Dietary calcium intake has nothing to do with the quality of your fingernails or your toenails. Consuming more calcium will not make your nails less brittle or smoother or grow faster. Nor will it prevent those occasional white spots on the fingernails (which are called “leukonychia,” and are usually caused by some long-forgotten injury to the base of the nail or by an allergic reaction to nail polish, and which disappear as the nail grows out.)

If you need further proof-c’mon, don’t you trust us by now? –peruse the December 14, 2000, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, specifically a study by Dr. Ian R. Reid of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Dr. Reid’s research, involving over 680 women who took either calcium supplements or placebo tablets, showed that there is no correlation between taking calcium supplements and nail quality.