Health Tips – Osteoporosis

What is osteoporosis?

What causes bone loss?

How does lifestyle affect bone health?

An ounce of prevention

Aptly named ‘the silent thief,’ osteoporosis creeps into your life slowly and relentlessly. It steals the strength from your bones, often without a single symptom to warn you of its devastating effects. Osteoporosis affects millions of Americans, yet many people don’t know they have a problem until the disease is well advanced and they are at serious risk of bone fractures.

What is osteoporosis?

Osteoporosis is a disease that causes bone loss. It thins and weakens your bones, causing them to break easily.

Like many other parts of your body, your bones are made of living tissue. Normally, your body keeps bone tissue healthy by breaking down and removing old bone cells and replacing them with new ones. When you have osteoporosis, your body removes more bone cells than it replaces. This makes your bones brittle and porous. If you have osteoporosis, your bones become so fragile that even a simple act, such as sneezing or opening a window, can cause a fracture. 

What causes bone loss?

Your bones continue to grow in length and density until early adulthood. As you grow older, your bone-building mechanisms become more inefficient and your body gradually begins to remove more bone cells than it replaces. For men and premenopausal women, bone loss usually occurs at a rate of 1% a year. However, once women reach menopause, their estrogen levels drop and the rate of bone loss increases to 2 to 6% a year. Within the first 10 years after menopause, women are at risk of losing bone very quickly.

But age is not the only factor that affects the density of your bones. Genetics and ethnicity can also make you more susceptible to bone loss. Your risk of developing osteoporosis increases if one or both of your parents had osteoporosis, if your body is fine-boned and slender or if you are from a Caucasian, Native or Asian ethnic group.

How does lifestyle affect bone health?

Your lifestyle choices can also have a significant effect on the health of your bones. To build strong bones, your body needs a steady supply of calcium, an essential mineral usually found in foods such as milk, yogurt and cheese. Yet, many people don’t include enough calcium-rich foods in their diet to meet their daily requirements.

To complicate matters even further, your body can actually lose much-needed calcium if you eat foods high in salt or drink alcohol and caffeinated beverages, such as coffee, tea and cola. Smoking also interferes with the body’s ability to absorb calcium and is very harmful to bone health. Smokers have a higher risk of osteoporosis than non-smokers and are more prone to bone fractures. In fact, by age 80, smokers have a 70% higher risk of breaking a bone than non-smokers. (Source: Merck Frosst Canada Ltd: Do you have good bones? 2002)

Vitamin D is another important building block for strong bones. It helps the body absorb calcium and is usually produced when your skin is exposed to direct sunlight. But long, gray winter days and sedentary lifestyles often prevent people from getting the right amount of sun exposure to trigger vitamin D production. Vitamin D can also be found in certain foods, such as enriched milk, fish, liver and eggs. But, our modern diets often lack these important foods.

Without an adequate supply of essential nutrients, such as calcium and vitamin D, your risk of osteoporosis may increase dramatically, no matter what your age.

An ounce of prevention

It only takes a few simple lifestyle changes to reduce your risk of developing osteoporosis. Here are some suggestions to help improve your bone health:

Maintain a calcium-rich diet: One of the best ways to prevent osteoporosis is to include an adequate supply of calcium in your diet. Milk, cheese and yogurt are all excellent food choices because they’re high in calcium and the body absorbs their calcium content quite easily. Choose lower fat dairy foods, wherever possible.

Even if you’re lactose intolerant (have trouble digesting milk proteins), you should still be able to get enough calcium through your diet. Most cheeses contain very little lactose and are high in calcium. Yogurt is another easily digestible calcium source. You can also buy
low-lactose milk or buy drops to put in regular milk to make it easier to digest.

If you don’t get enough calcium through your diet, you can consider taking calcium supplements to help meet your daily requirements. A daily multivitamin is another good source of calcium and vitamin D. But not all multivitamins contain the same ingredients, so read the label carefully to make sure that you’re getting the right amounts of the nutrients you need.

Enjoy more vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin: It can be difficult to meet your vitamin D requirements through diet alone. Milk enriched with vitamin D is a good nutritional resource. Eggs, chicken livers and some cold-water fishes (e.g. salmon, herring, mackerel) also contain small amounts of the sunshine vitamin.

A daily multivitamin, vitamin D supplements, or calcium supplements that contain vitamin D may also help you get the right amount to meet your bone-building needs.

Make good lifestyle choices:

• Cut down on coffee, tea and other caffeinated drinks. Learn to love lattes!

• Try to limit your alcohol intake to just one or two drinks a day

• Kick the smoking habit – it’s bad for your bones and causes many other unwelcome health problems.

• Reduce the amount of salt in your diet by replacing the saltshaker on your table with flavoured salt substitutes. Limit the amount of salt that you add to your cooking and choose processed foods that are low in salt

• Eat a balanced diet. Studies have shown that nutrients such as vitamins A, C and K, magnesium and phosphorus are all important for bone development. Maintaining a  well-balanced, nutritious diet is one of the best ways to ensure that you’re getting all the nutrients you need to stay healthy and strong.

• Exercise regularly: When you exercise regularly, your body responds by building more bone mass. By including more physical activity in your daily routine, you can increase your bone strength and slow bone loss. Exercise can also help improve balance and co-ordination, which may reduce your risk of falling and fracturing a bone. 

• Consider bone mineral density testing: Depending on your personal risk factors for osteoporosis, your doctor may suggest that you have you bone mineral density (BMD) test. This is a safe, painless test that accurately measures the strength and density of your bones. The BMD test provides valuable information that will help your doctor develop treatment programs to reduce your risk of developing osteoporosis.