thescience

Osteoporosis

The advice to drink milk as a way of combating osteoporosis is erroneous advice. This is so because far from protecting the bones, dairy milk actually causes osteoporosis. All the latest medical research is clearly indicating that dairy milk increases bone turnover (the rate at which calcium is processed into the bones and then out again). High bone turnover weakens bones by depleting the body's limited reserves of bone-making cells. Dramatic advances in stem-cell and bone research are showing that the body has a finite reservoir or 'capacity' for making new bone. When you consume dairy milk this greatly increases the amount of calcium that is 'pumped' in and out of bones, thus depleting valuable bone-making cells and weakening bones. Osteoporosis is not about how much calcium you consume, it's about how much bone turnover you generate. To avoid osteoporosis we need to reduce bone turnover - this does not reduce bone-density, but it does preserve valuable bone-making cells. The way to strengthen bones and avoid osteoporosis is to avoid dairy milk and eat a healthy varied diet. This provides the body with more than enough calcium, while at the same time preserving bone-making cells.

Exercise

People sometimes get told to do more exercise to protect bones. This advice is not only wrong, but counterproductive. Doing more exercise increases bone turnover (the formation and break-down of bone). Bone turnover uses up bone-making cells, and as mentioned above our bodies only have a finite capacity for producing such cells. When this finite capacity is reached we are on the road to osteoporosis.

For the technically minded, bone-making cells are produced from osteoblast lineage, but for reasons explained in the book, osteoblast lineage has a finite capacity for the production of osteoblasts. Hence, we get osteoporosis when we no longer produce enough osteoblasts (bone-making cells).

Exercise of any kind uses up precious bone-making cells. We therefore want to be sufficiently active or do enough exercise to keep the body fit and healthy for everyday living (no more, no less). Exactly how we do this is simple, and this is explained in the book. Doing prolonged vigorous below-waist high impact exercise increases bone density in the short term, but this comes at a terrible price – it brings nearer the day you may get osteoporosis. Clearly, leading a physically active life is essential for general good health, but some kinds of exercise actually promote osteoporosis.

Getting enough calcium in the diet is no problem as we only need to absorb less than half a gram of calcium daily for good health and strong bones. Even a poor diet based on 'junk food' provides plenty of calcium. People do not get osteoporosis from a lack of calcium in the diet, they get osteoporosis from a lack of bone-making cells in the body (see above).

Taking calcium supplements is bad for health. As explained in The Milk Imperative, calcium supplements cause harmful calcification in the body. And harmful calcification is at the root of many serious illnesses, from heart disease to cancer. Calcium supplements cause harmful calcification because the excess calcium this causes in the body cannot be tolerated by the bloodstream. Some of this excess calcium gets excreted, and some gets assimilated into the bones, thus using up valuable bone-making cells. But some gets 'dumped' into organs and soft tissues of the body to cause harmful calcification. Evidence for this, and the way this happens is fully explained in the book.