Preventing Osteoporosis with Better Bone Health

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Instead of milk, green leafy vegetables, such as kale, are key to building stronger bones.

Our bones define us, make us beautiful, provide leverage for movement and allow us to stand upright. We build bone until our third decade. After that, a steady loss begins, like sand slipping through an hourglass. Nevertheless, while osteoporosis has become a major public health problem, it is not inevitable. A number of strategies will keep your bones strong—and some of them run counter to the party line on osteoporosis prevention.

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Granted, some of the osteoporosis risk factors are outside of your control—namely being older, female, menopausal or white. Happily, you have some control over a fleet of bone-robbers: inactivity;
stress overload; malnutrition; cigarette smoking; being excessively thin; hiding from the sun; and excessive consumption of caffeine, alcohol, sodas, salt and acidifying foods. (More on acidifying diets in a minute.) The point is that you can put the brakes on bone loss. Here’s how.

Move Your Bones

Physical activity tones bone and muscle, and strong muscles minimize the risk of bone-shattering falls. To stimulate new bone formation, the exercise has to stress the bone. Weight-bearing
exercises—walking, jogging, jumping rope, climbing stairs—maintain hips and spine. Strength-training exercises (working against the resistance of weights, elastic bands or tubes, or your
own body weight) also strengthens your bones.

It’s never too late to start. Research shows that endurance and resistance training boosts bone mass in elders. Exercises like tai chi and yoga that improve balance are valuable to help prevent falls. One study showed tai chi reduced bone loss in postmenopausal women.

“Mix it up,” suggests Amy Joy Lanou, Ph.D., associate professor of health and wellness at the University of North Carolina and coauthor of Building Bone Vitality (McGraw-Hill, 2009). “Walk every day. Practice yoga or garden a couple days a week.”

Eat for Bone Health

Ask the average American how to build strong bones and he would probably say, “Drink milk.” Th at reply’s dependability is thanks to the millions of dollars poured into the “Got Milk?” campaign, which features photos of celebrities with milk “mustaches”—as though they lap up the stuff like cats.

In her book, Lanou and coauthor Michael Castleman highlight data suggesting that dairy consumption does not reduce fracture rates. In fact, fracture rates are higher in countries where dairy consumption is high, such as Norway and the United States. In many parts of the world—including those with relatively low fracture rates, such as Asia and Africa—humans don’t drink milk once they’ve been weaned.

Acidic Diets Affect Bones

Curiously, before agriculture gave us a ready supply of dairy cows and cereal grains, humans had more massive bones. So says Michael Bizeau, Ph.D., assistant professor and coordinator of the nutrition program at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Our ancestors ate non-grain vegetables, fruits and, when the hunters got lucky, meat. Bizeau thinks we still haven’t adapted to a grain-heavy diet, which can generate acid and inflammation and which contains phytates that bind minerals like calcium in the gut.