Do you suffer from osteoporosis?

If you do, you may be deficient in MAGNESIUM and BORON 

Nutrition is vital to prevent osteoporosis. 

Bones are not just made up of calcium. Many other trace elements are equally important including magnesium, zinc, selenium, boron, chromium and others. We know essential fatty acids are important as are vitamins C, D, K and the B group. In order to make healthy bones, we need the whole spectrum of vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and trace elements. 

By taking just calcium it is possible to unbalance other trace elements and worsen the risk of osteoporosis. Drinking milk and eating cheese is claimed by many to be bad for you.

1. Make sure you have a daily dose of the nutrients listed above, especially magnesium and boron. You can choose the foods rich in these from this website. 

2. Eat foods that are rich in sulphur and minerals. Make broth from chicken bones (old Chinese remedy for arthritis!) and/or high protein diet.

3. There are two vitamins which are particularly important. The first is vitamin D. Absorption of calcium from the gut is a vitamin D dependent process. It is not so much a question of how much calcium is in the diet, but how much can be absorbed from the gut? Once absorbed, does it go to the right place? Without vitamin D calcium could be deposited in the wrong place such as arteries (hardening) or gall bladder and kidney (stones).

It is impossible to get adequate vitamin D through sunshine during a British winter. The daily requirement is one quarter of that time necessary to tan or turn pink on arms and face. Either use a sun lamp, or a winter holiday. 

4. The second important vitamin is vitamin K. This is highly protective against osteoporosis because it strongly stimulates bone production. Vitamin K is found in green leafy vegetables, eggs, and meat. Antibiotics can reduce vitamin K by 50% since bacterial fermentation of foods in the gut is an important source of vitamin K. Antibiotics kill the gut flora, so be sure to take extra K-rich foods. Caution: vitamin K is antagonistic to warfarin and should not be taken as a supplement with anti-coagulants.

Experts do not recommend prescribed female sex hormones to prevent osteoporosis. Any benefit is temporary and bone is rapidly lost when the hormones are stopped. Female sex hormones are associated with increased risk of oestrogen dependent cancers, thrombosis, mental disorders and chronic fatigue. Having said that I do have some patients who cannot stop their HRT because they relapse at once.

It's a highly lucrative disease -- more than 17 billion dollars were spent treating osteoporosis in America in 2001 alone. But osteoporosis is nothing more than brittle bones, or a loss of bone mass or bone density. There's really nothing complicated about it.

Osteoporosis is really caused by only three things. They are: 1) diet, 2) physical exercise, and 3) lack of exposure to natural sunlight. It's really not that complex.

When it comes to diet and osteoporosis, most people think that a lack of calcium is the number one dietary concern. But this isn't true -- calcium is only a minor factor when it comes to preventing and treating osteoporosis. 

Many scientists say the primary dietary cause of osteoporosis is the consumption of highly acidic foods and food ingredients, such as refined white sugar, refined white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, soft drinks, cookies, candies, sweets, desserts, and anything containing sweeteners. When you consume highly acidic foods, your body has to come up with a strategy for buffering the acidity of those foods with alkaline minerals, and the way it does that is by reaching into your bones to find those alkaline minerals such as calcium and magnesium, then releasing those into your bloodstream to buffer the acidity of the food ingredients you have absorbed. In this way, your body can balance the pH of its blood and keep you alive.

Find out more about Magnesium

Send e mail to Body Language    Site sponsored by SureScreen Diagnostics Ltd www.surescreen.com Copyright exists on all material within this site. Please ask approval before you refer to it. This page last modified: August 15, 2005.