Great added way to beat osteoporosis....

Today's Post:  Friday, 1-24-2013

Since the drugs now tried for osteoporosis tend to cause bad acid reflux -- and far worse, the bad events they are taken to prevent!! -- other ways to actually solve the problem are badly needed.

Mercifully there are many effective ways to do this.

(We add the new one at the end in part B.  It’s a huge advance!

Feel free to scan down and read that one first if you like.)

Each of these methods work. Why not do ALL of them?

A.  What we already knew to work before this new research:

1.  Weight bearing exercise. Women who walk a lot and do housework standing up AND who know enough to do effective strength training -- BUILD up their bones. (Of course this works for men too!)

It cannot be more directly stated.  People who do this kind of exercise several days every week tend to have strong bones.  People who are completely sedentary tend to LOSE bone strength and bone mass!

2.  Taking 400 mg to 600 mg of magnesium a day even helps strengthen bones for people taking acid reflux medication that lower their ability to digest magnesium in their food.

Plus most people without reflux are deficient in magnesium if they don’t do this! Magnesium beside its other benefits apparently helps your body build bone.

Research found that people who take tons of antacids or the proton pump inhibitor drugs for acid reflux

3.  Most people don’t yet take the most helpful amount of vitamin D3 due to the disinformation about it.

But the people who do know to take 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 and do it build their bones MUCH more effectively. 

Apparently your body needs that vitamin D3 to take the calcium you eat to build your bones with it.  Studies show vitamin D3 plus eating lots of calcium in your food builds bones. Just taking calcium without the vitamin D3 doesn’t seem to do so -- according to research testing it both ways!

(John Farquhar, MD, founder of the Stanford Research in Disease Prevention is semi-retired but still keeps up with the newest and best research in disease prevention.  Almost a year ago I went to hear him speak about how people can use the latest research on disease prevention and he recommended everyone take 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3. 

No surprise really.  When almost all people lived and worked outside, they got tended to get 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 from sunshine.  Life guards in the summer time get over 10,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day from sunshine even now -- and have zero bad effects. Sunburn maybe but NOT harm from that level of vitamin D3.)

Taking 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 has been shown cut the incidence of injuries to muscle and bones – even in football players – in half.  And, it helps people who do have broken bones or serious illnesses recover more reliably and faster.

The research shows that if you want strong bones that are far less likely to break, 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 every day is close to essential.

4.  If and apparently ONLY if you take 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3, eating foods high in calcium builds bones. (Nonfat Greek yogurt or nonfat cottage cheese has a LOT of calcium but is NOT fattening.)

Research indicates calcium by itself does NOT build your bones without enough vitamin D3.

Also, new research finds that calcium supplements release into your blood so fast if you take too much and on an empty stomach that the calcium winds up hardening your blood vessels instead of your bones! 

So, stick with food sources of calcium – OR – take your calcium supplement only after your largest meal of the day.  That makes the calcium release much more slowly and is far safer apparently for your future health and heart health.

If you eat the foods and take these other steps 200 mg to 500 mg of calcium is more than enough in supplement form to build and strengthen your bones.  From what I’ve read, taking more than 500 mg of calcium as a supplement is both overkill, unnecessary, and potentially harmful.

5.   Taking vitamin K2 also helps the calcium you eat or take NOT deposit into the walls of  your blood vessels AND tends to ensure that the calcium gets deposited in your bones instead – much like vitamin D3.  People who avoid meat may be deficient in K2 and taking up to 5,000 mcg a day of vitamin K2 does help you build your bones.

6.  Yet another dreadful and harmful result of drinking soft drinks is that the phosphoric acid in them to give the drink an extra crisp mouthfeel along with the carbonation LEACHES calcium FROM your bones. 

More than one soft drink a week is NOT a good idea for this reason. None ever is a far safer choice just for this reason alone!  Note that the diet soft drinks ALSO do this!

7.  Taking strontium as a supplement might help.  It apparently does make your bones heavier and harder than taking calcium. 

But the word I’ve gotten is that it has not yet been tested to see if your bones become less prone to fractures. It might. But it’s not been tested enough to know I’ve heard.

You also may get enough strontium without taking it as a supplement if you get your calcium from dairy foods since some strontium is in dairy foods also along with their calcium content.

(That’s why radioactive strontium from atomic bombs was once such a worry during the cold war. It then would be in the milk people drank!)

If your bones have gotten really light from osteoporosis and adding some weight and hardness to build on is needed though, in that case, taking extra strontium might make sense.

B.  Here’s the new discovery.

It’s a huge advance because it can easily be added to the others.

By itself, eating this food that they researched has a significantly large effect on building your bones. 

AND recent research shows that eating it ALSO prevents heart attacks, strokes, and can even REVERSE brain aging or prevent it!

You get far more benefit than just the boost in your bone strength.  But this new research says you get that too – and quite a lot!

It’s eating organic blueberries 3 or more times a week!

The research found this one thing to deliver 36% more bone mass AND a 22% increase in bone mineral content AND, in the research, in as little as 14 days!

In the research they may have used the equivalent of much more blueberry extract per pound of bodyweight than people would eat in a week to deliver such results so fast.

But it seems clear to me that eating organic blueberries 3 or more times a week for years as a normal part of your diet can make a very significant increase in your bone strength!

There is also a bilberry supplement you can take daily.  And bilberries are a kind of blueberry.

By the way, it’s very important to eat organic blueberries only because the kind sprayed with pesticides are quite heavily sprayed and the berries then have pesticide residue which is harmful to you.

(Both Whole Foods and Safeway sell organic frozen blue berries.  And I found the ones from Whole foods tasted better and kept better.)

The story was in the Natural Health Dossier, INH Health Watch, email of January 4^th -- 4 weeks ago.

Apparently researchers with the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center fed rats freeze-dried blueberry extract powder.

And it only 14 days later those rats had a 36 percent higher bone mass than the rats that didn’t. Those rats also had a 22 percent increase in bone mineral content.

Older rats came closer to 15% increase in bone mass than the 36 % found in younger rats.  But that’s still quite substantial!

The email also quoted a study in people showing similar results.

Conclusion:

By doing all 8 of these things -- or all 7 except taking strontium, you can make a very large difference in your bone strength with no need for the drugs which are harmful to take and NOT very effective!