Quantitative knowledge is important in view of the assertion that at least the salts of calcium have an enormous influence in metabolism, both in health and disease. The influence they exert on the formation of bone and teeth, on the coagulation of the blood and milk, on the setting of gelatine and on the "tone" of the cardiac muscle is now well known. Blair Bell states that "Lime salts are not only necessary for the construction of the body and its growth, but for keeping it healthy and in repair, and for the reproduction of the species." He affirms that the salts of lime only become pathological when they endeavour to rescue diseased structures and repair them. The deposits of lime salts in the atheromatous patches which occur in the subendothelial layer of the intima of blood-vessels, the calcification of tubercular patches, and the hardening in the neighbourhood of old wounds are well recognised. He declares that the calcium soaps found in appendicitis are results rather than the causes of the inflammation.

It is known that the fat in the food determines the nature of the fat in the tissues. The fats usually consumed, especially those of beef and mutton, containing as they do a minimum of olein, consist chiefly of saturated fatty acids, i.e., those in which the capacity of the carbon chain for taking up the hydrogen has reached its limit. This factor again determines the nature of the soaps in the wall of the intestine en route for excretion, and when they are calcium soaps of saturated fatty acids, some disease, such as mucous colitis or intestinal lithiasis, both clinically associated with appendicitis, is usually present. The fats utilised for the needs of the tissues are not neutral fats but complex phosphatides, their fatty acid radicles being largely unsaturated, and it is thus maintained by others that this indicates that the calcium, or saturated fatty acid radicle in the calcium soaps formed from butcher's meat, plays an important part in the causation of appendicitis.

Hans Meyer thinks that calcium salts have a sedative effect on the sympathetic nervous system, and diminish the permeability of the walls of the blood-vessels. When they are withdrawn from the system (as in oxalic acid poisoning), the result is an over-excitability of the whole visceral and cerebro-spinal motor nervous system.

Sir James Barr believes that the fixed lime salts, i.e., those which are linked on to the molecules of albumin, increase the viscosity and coagulability of the blood, while the free calcium ions in association with the suprarenal and pituitary secretions increase the tone and contraction of the arteries and arterioles, heighten the blood-pressure, slow the pulse, and maintain the force and efficiency of the heart. Adrenal extract and pituitary secretion lead to the retention of lime salts in the blood and tissues, while the secretions of the thyroid, ovaries, and testes increase calcium metabolism, diminish the free and fixed lime in the blood, and thus lessen its viscosity.

He states that the lime salts deposit in any tissue which is not functioning properly, and he gives a list of diseases in the causation or treatment of which lime plays an important part. At the same time he indicates that if a man takes plenty of exercise he can easily get rid of every excess of lime in his body. The diseases which in his opinion have resulted from the ingestion of too much lime, or where its exclusion from the diet is indicated, are arterio-sclerosis, angina pectoris, asthma, acute rheumatism, locomotor ataxia, migraine, and colitis, and those which have arisen because the system is suffering from a lack of lime, or which would benefit by further administration of lime in the diet or as medicine, are pneumonia, epilepsy, disseminated sclerosis, neurasthenia, eczema, muscular rheumatism, and "cramp" in the muscles. For the proper guidance of patients suffering from any of these maladies it is therefore judicious to possess a knowledge of the calcium contents of food.