Limit Your Risk Factors
While you can do nothing directly about your family history of osteoporosis, you can at least eliminate the majority of the following known risks of getting the disease:
- High sugar intake
- Cigarette smoking
- Excessive alcohol and caffeine intake
- High protein diets (because they encourage high mineral losses in the urine)
- Low calorie weight loss diets
- High milk and dairy product consumption (due to excess phosphorus)
- Drinking exclusively distilled water
- Physical inactivity
- Excessive physical exercise
- Never having been pregnant
- Diuretics (water pills)
- Anti-seizure medications
- Anticoagulants (“blood thinners”)
- Antacid abuse, all anti-ulcer drugs
- Digestive disorders leading to trace mineral malabsorption
- Overactive endocrine glands (especially hyperthyroidism)
- Long-term use of prescription steroids like prednisone
- Numerous vitamin and mineral deficiencies
Do Regular Weight-Bearing Exercise
Regardless of what prescription or natural remedies you are using to fight osteoporosis, there is nothing that can take the place of daily weight-bearing exercise.
Unless the bones are challenged to function, no amount of calcium, estrogen, or any other remedy for that matter will make a difference in bone mineral density.
In other words, use it or lose it. Brisk walking, using arm and ankle weights, sit-ups, leg lifts, and dozens of other exercises could be done with the help of a chiropractor, physiotherapist, or personal trainer.
Modify Your Diet
As with all our body tissues, bone is sensitive to diet and lifestyle habits. The typical Western diet high in refined carbohydrates, animal protein, fat, and canned/processed foods has been linked to a greater incidence of osteoporosis simply because such a diet is inadequate in a large number of nutrients.
This typical diet is also excessively high in phosphorus, a mineral that, in large amounts, antagonizes calcium in the body.
Interestingly enough, milk and dairy products-the foods most often recommended for healthy bones-are excessively high in phosphorus and may actually promote osteoporosis. In fact, the more dairy products consumed, the worse the osteoporosis incidence. In areas of the world where dairy product consumption is the lowest, osteoporosis is virtually non-existent.
Avoid Sugar
Refined sugar contains virtually no vitamins or minerals at all, so it dilutes our nutrient intake, resulting in an across-the-board 19% reduction in all vitamins and minerals in our diet.
Thus, we are getting less of the nutrients that play a role in maintaining healthy bones, including (but not limited to):
- Magnesium
- Folic acid
- Vitamin B6
- Zinc
- Copper
- Manganese
Avoid Refined Carbohydrates
When whole wheat is refined to white flour, many vitamins and minerals are lost:
- Vitamin B6 (72% loss)
- Folic acid (67% loss)
- Calcium (60% loss)
- Magnesium (85% loss)
- Manganese (86% loss)
- Copper (68% loss)
- Zinc (78% loss)
Since grains make up about 30% of the average diet, consumption of refined grains depletes the total daily intake of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).
Avoid Caffeine
Caffeine-found in coffee, tea, chocolate, soft drinks, guarana, yerba maté, and analgesics-has a diuretic (water and mineral loss) effect. This diuretic effect causes mineral loss from the body, leading to lower bone mineral density.
Avoid Alcohol
Another diuretic, excess alcohol causes abnormal mineral losses.
Eat Less Animal Protein
Excessive dietary protein may promote bone loss.
With increasing protein intake, the urinary excretion of calcium (calcium loss through the urine) also rises because calcium is mobilized to buffer the acidic breakdown products of protein.
In addition, the amino acid methionine is converted to a substance called homocysteine, which is also apparently capable of causing bone loss.
So these are some of the things you can do instead of resorting to bone density drugs. In my next blog, I will discuss supplements you can take to help prevent and reverse osteoporosis.
