Osteoporosis: What Contributes to Bone Loss

"The simple truth is that if we live a balanced lifestyle, we actually need very little calcium (of the right sort) to maintain healthy bones. The problem we have is not that we get too little calcium but rather that we have made choices that dramatically accelerate the rate of bone loss, to the point that we can never consume enough calcium to overcome the deficit. What accelerates bone loss to such a degree and what can be done about it?

• Lack of sufficient weight-bearing exercise accelerates bone loss. Thus, increasing exercise helps reverse it.
• Insufficient boron and vitamin D3 contribute to bone loss.
• Insufficient magnesium in the diet is more of a factor than insufficient calcium. One study showed that, after nine months, women on magnesium supplements increased bone density by 11 percent.
• Increasing the amount of gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) in the diet helps increase bone density.
• Avoiding fluoride in your drinking water is vital. Fluoride collects in the bones and, although it technically increases bone mass and density, the evidence is strong that fluoride intake can dramatically reduce the quality of your bones and double the incidence of hip fractures. Bottom line: although your bones may be denser if you have fluoride in your water, they are far more brittle.
• Balancing out hormones. Does that mean that I’m recommending hormone replacement therapy? Hardly. HRT, as it is practiced, increases your risk of cancer and offers only a temporary reprieve from osteoporosis. What most people don’t realize is that bone loss accelerates rapidly in women once they stop using estrogen, causing acatch-up effect. By age eighty, women who had taken HRT for ten years and then stopped for ten years would lose 27 percent of their initial bone density, while those who were never treated would lose about 30 percent. The only way you would get continued benefit is to take HRT for the rest of your life, which would likely be shorter because of the increased risk of developing breast and endometrial cancers. HRT doesn’t build bone -- it only slows the rate of loss for a short period of time and at great risk. Natural progesterone cream, on the other hand, increases bone strength and density by stimulating osteoblasts, your bone-building cells, and does not carry the same risks.
• Fosamax is problematic because it works by totally destroying the equilibrium of the bone-building process by killing osteoclasts, the cells that remove old bone so your osteoblasts can build new bone in its place. Yes, if you kill off the osteoclasts, your bones are going to get denser because instead of replacing old bone, the new bone willcram itself into whatever space it can find. Unfortunately, this also means that your bones are going to get weaker because you’re not eliminating the older damaged bone. Fosamax builds a house of cards that must ultimately collapse.
• But all of the above factors pale in comparison to the problem of a high acid diet. This is the reason the incidence of osteoporosis has soared and why more men are now suffering. A high-acid diet (meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy, cooked grains, and refined sugars) leeches calcium from your body by forcing it to use calcium from your bones to buffer the high acid content so that your blood pH remains constant and you don’t die. The problem with dairy is that because of its high phosphorus content, it actually takes more calcium to buffer it than you actually receive from the dairy, thus the high incidence of osteoporosis in countries that consume a lot of dairy. I am not saying that dairy is the biggest culprit -- most of the other acid foods are worse, particularly high-sugar, phosphoric acid -- laden colas -- I just single out dairy because it’s always identified as building strong bones, when the opposite is true."     

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