All you need to know about your bones!!
Did you know that your bones are always changing? Every day of your life, some bone cells die and some new bone cells are created. From birth until your early 30s, you can easily make lots of bone cells. So long as your diet supplies the necessary nutrients, you not only replace bone cells that die, you have extras left over to lengthen and strengthen your bones.
Past the age of 35, new bone cells are more difficult to make. Sometimes there is a shortfall: more bone cells die than you can replace. In the orthodox view, this is the beginning of osteoporosis, the disease of low bone mass. By the age of forty, many women have begun to lose bone mass; by the age of fifty, most are told they must take hormones or drugs to prevent further loss and avoid osteoporosis, hip fracture, and death.
Women who exercise regularly and eat calcium-rich foods enter their menopausal years with better bone mass than women who sit a lot and consume calcium-leaching foods (including soy “milk,” tofu, coffee, soda pop, alcohol, white flour products, processed meats, nutritional yeast). But no matter how good your lifestyle choices, bone mass usually decreases during the menopausal years.
For unknown reasons, menopausal bones slow down production of new cells and seem to ignore the presence of calcium. This “bone-pause” is generally short-lived, occurring off and on for five to seven years. We noticed it in scattered episodes of falling hair, breaking fingernails, and the same “growing pains” we experienced during puberty.
The idea behind bone scans is a good one: find women who are at risk of broken bones, alert them to the danger, and help them engage in preventative strategies. There’s only one problem: bone scans don’t find women who are at risk of broken bones, they find women who have low bone density.
Focusing on bone mass, we lose sight of the fact that a strong correlation between bone density and bone breakage has not been established, according to Susan Brown, director of the Osteoporosis Information Clearing House, and many others. We lose sight of the fact that women who faithfully take estrogen or hormone replacement still experience bone changes and suffer spinal crush fractures.
Bone-pause passes and the bones do rebuild themselves, especially when supported by nourishing herbs, which are exceptional sources of bone-building minerals and better at preventing bone breaks than supplements. The minerals in green plants seem to be ideal for keeping bones healthy. Dr. Campbell, Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, has done extensive research in rural China where the lowest known fracture rates for midlife and older women were found. He says, “The closer people get to a diet based on plant foods and leafy vegetables, the lower the rates of many diseases, including osteoporosis.” Women who consume lots of calcium-rich plants and exercise moderately build strong flexible bones. Women who rely on hormones build bones that are massive, but rigid.
Hormone replacement regimes do not increase bone cell creation; they slow (or suppress) bone cell killers (osteoclasts). There is a rebound effect; bone loss jumps when the hormones are stopped. Women who take hormones for five years or more are as much as four times more likely to break a bone in the year after they stop than a woman of the same age who never took hormones. Women who build better bones with green allies and exercise nourish the bone cell creator cells (osteoblasts).
It is never too late to build better bones, and it is never too soon. Your best insurance for a fracture-free, strong-boned cronehood is to build better bones before menopause. The more exercise and calcium-rich green allies you get in your younger years, the less you’ll have to worry about as you age.
Calcium is, without a doubt, the most important mineral in your body. In fact, Calcium makes up more than half of the total mineral content of your body. Calcium is crucial to the regular beating of your heart, your metabolism, the functioning of your muscles, the flow of impulses along your nerves, the regulation of your cellular membranes, the strength of your bones, the health of your teeth and gums, and your vital blood-clotting mechanisms. Calcium is so critical to your life that you have a gland (the parathyroid) that does little else than monitor blood levels of Calcium and secrete hormones to ensure optimum levels of Calcium at all times.
When you consume more Calcium than you use, you are in a positive Calcium balance: extra usable Calcium is stored in the bones and you gain bone mass (insoluble or unusable Calcium may be excreted, or stored in soft tissue, or deposited in the joints). When you consume less Calcium than you use, you are in a negative Calcium balance: the parathyroid produces a hormone that releases Calcium stores from the bones, and you lose bone mass.
To ensure a positive Calcium balance and create strong, flexible bones for your menopausal journey, take care to:
1.Eat three or more Calcium-rich foods daily.
2.Avoid Calcium antagonists.
3.Use synergistic foods to magnify the effectiveness of Calcium.
4.What do we need to make strong flexible bones? Like all tissues, bones need protein. They need minerals (not just Calcium, but also potassium, manganese, magnesium, silica, iron, zinc, selenium, boron, phosphorus, sulphur, chromium, and dozens of others). And in order to use those minerals, high-quality fats, including oil-soluble vitamin D.
5.Many menopausal women I meet believe that protein is bad for their bones. Not so. Researchers at Utah State University, looking at the diets of 32,000 postmenopausal women, found that women who ate the least protein were the most likely to fracture a hip; and that eating extra protein sped the healing of hip fractures.
6.Acids created by protein digestion are buffered by calcium. Traditional diets combine calcium- and protein-rich foods
7.Bones need lots of minerals not just calcium, which is brittle and inflexible. (Think of chalk, calcium carbonate, and how easily it breaks.) A
8. Because minerals are bulky, and do not compact, we must consume generous amounts to make a difference in our health.
9. Green sources of calcium are the best. Nourishing herbs and garden weeds are far richer in minerals than ordinary greens, which are already exceptional sources of nutrients.
10. But calcium from green sources alone is not enough. We need calcium from white sources as well. Add a quart of yogurt a week to your diet if you want really healthy bones. Because the milk has been changed by Lactobacillus organisms, its calcium, other minerals, proteins, and sugars (no lactose) are more easily digested.
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