How to Improve Bone Health

Here are simple strategies for maintaining your bone health. Learn how to prevent bone loss that can result to osteoporosis. Find out the role of calcium in bones.

Your bones are constantly being rebuilt. Almost all bone growth takes place during childhood and teenage years. From mid thirties, bone loss is more than bone growth.

The actions that you take and the foods you eat affect the quality of your bones.

Ways to Improve Bone Health

• Eat a healthy alkaline diet to maintain balanced PH

• Many fruits and vegetables, especially greens, also include calcium

• Include exercises daily that impact bones and improve balance

• Start slow and add to your exercises over time to avoid injury

• Our bodies use the alkaline materials that are locked in our bones to balance excessive acidity

• Impact exercise (also called weight-bearing exercise) improves bone density

• You need the muscular strength to support a strong sense of balance and maintain your sense of proprioception

• Any failure of your proprioception system can lead to serious injury

• Regular daily movement, such as exercise and balance, positively maintains proprioception

• Investing in your bones only takes a few minutes each day

Risks to Healthy Bones

One of the major risks to bone health is poor minerals supply. This risk is greater in the present society than it was for our distant ancestors. This is due to the change in environment and lifestyle factors.

Cultivated plant foods like grains have far less calcium than do other vegetable food sources. In addition, dietary calcium intake was probably twice as great in pre-agricultural times as it is today.

Today we get less exercise and far less sunshine exposure than did our ancestors. There is very little vitamin D in the un-supplemented diet of most people.

Calcium is an important mineral that is needed for bone and teeth health. Calcium is also necessary for proper functions of the nerves, heart and muscles.

The Role of Calcium in Bone Health

• Several studies have shown that calcium supplementation alone or with vitamin D reduces the risk of osteoporotic fracture in elderly men and women.

• Increasing calcium intakes through consuming dairy foods or supplements eventually reduces bone resorption as fast as within two hours of intake.

• Children and adolescents are a particularly important target for interventions to increase bone mass. Research records that randomized controlled trails of calcium or diary supplementation in children for periods of up to 3 years found a greater bone mass accrual, possibly due to a reduction in the rate of bone remodeling.

• Calcium supplementation and adequate protein intake has important therapeutic value in osteoporosis and combined supplements of calcium and vitamin D are often recommended to patients with osteoporosis.

• Most calcium supplementation studies which have shown a skeletal effect have used intakes of at least 1000mg per day. Maintenance of body weight is crucial, since moderate weight loss and low body weight are associated with loss of bone mass and risk of fracture.

However, excessive calcium intake can result in hypercalcaemia, renal insufficiency or renal stones, and impaired absorption of other nutrients such as iron, phosphorus and zinc.

It has also been proven that calcium supplementation appears to have less influence on bone loss in the years immediately after the menopause, probably due to the overriding importance of oestrogen deficiency during this time.

Bone Health Related Articles

• What are Health Benefits of Calcium?

• What are the Best Calcium Foods?

• What is Calcium Deficiency?

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