May 12, 2024: Osteoporosis

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Osteoporosis is a debilitating bone disease that affects 54 million Americans. Osteoporosis literally means “porous bone,” and it’s caused when your body loses too much bone or doesn’t make enough bone. This makes your bones weak and prone to breaking. This week, we’re going to talk about risk factors that can cause the disease.

Risk Factors

Osteoporosis is most commonly associated with older, white or Asian women. One in every two women will develop the disease. Generally, women have smaller frames than men, making us more susceptible because there is less bone mass to draw from as we get older. Another reason older women are more likely to succumb to the disease is because, once we go through menopause, our estrogen levels decrease and lower sex hormones weaken bones.

Certain diseases also increase your risk either because of the medications taken for it or because they cause gastrointestinal distress including celiac, inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, lupus, liver or kidney disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Reducing Your Risk

Though the risk factors I mentioned are essentially unavoidable, there are ways to decrease your risk of developing osteoporosis through diet and exercise.

Weight bearing exercises that force your body to work against gravity prompt your body to make new bone, thereby decreasing your risk. These exercises include: walking, running, dancing, aerobics, tennis, and yoga.

Strength training also decreases your risk. When you do these exercises, your muscles pull on the bones as they work building bone strength. Strength training also makes you more flexible and lowers your risk of falling and breaking a bone. These exercises include: lifting weights, using weight machines, using elastic resistance bands, squats, and pushups.

Diet also plays an important role in prevention. Calcium, vitamin D, and protein are vital nutrients in keeping bones healthy. We associate calcium with strong bones (Got Milk?) because of how we absorb it. This absorption is helped by vitamin D and protein. If we don’t absorb enough calcium, our bones will break down what they need in place of it, and this decreases our bone mass.

While we need to make sure we absorb calcium, we do need to make sure we’re getting enough through our diet by eating dark green vegetables like kale and broccoli, fortified cereals and juices, dairy products, or sardines and salmon with bones.

We can get a dose of vitamin D through sunshine, but there are also a few foods we can eat. Fatty fish like salmon or mackerel, beef liver, cheese, egg yolks, and fortified foods like milk, cereal and orange juice all contain the nutrient.

Protein is essential for bone health and eating enough of it can help your body absorb calcium. While most of the population gets their protein from meat, we can also get it through nuts, seeds, beans, eggs, and soy.

Other ways you can reduce your risks are by avoiding alcohol and smoking, drinking less soda, keeping a healthy weight, having good posture, and doing balance exercises.

Some of the risk factors for developing osteoporosis are unavoidable, but making sure we’re getting enough vital nutrients through a balanced diet and regular exercise helps lower the risks that are avoidable.

Next Sunday, we’ll talk about how you can do some simple functional training to keep thriving in daily life.

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I hope you have a wonderful week,
​
Kelly

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