Osteoporosis

[jcml12]

I know many of you have indicated that you have Osteoporosis and I was diagnosed a few month ago. Are any of you taking that aweful medicine with many side effects or have any of you had good results on natural products and what if I may ask worked for you. I will not go on the meds due to many of the horrible side effects but am also nervous about this diagnosis. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

[tex]

The reason why so many people develop osteoporosis is because most people have a magnesium deficiency and/or a vitamin D deficiency. If you have plenty of magnesium available in your body, and plenty of vitamin D in circulation, you should have no problem reversing an osteoporosis problem.

Osteoporosis is a known side effect of gluten sensitivity and IBDs. Why? Because untreated gluten sensitivity causes a severe malabsorption problem, making it impossible to absorb enough magnesium and vitamin D unless both are supplemented heavily. IBDs also deplete both magnesium and vitamin D because of additional malabsorption issues caused by additional food sensitivities. And the most popular medical treatment for IBDs involves the use of a corticosteroid. Again, corticosteroids rapidly deplete both magnesium and vitamin D.

That's why so many people have an osteoporosis problem, and it's why plenty of supplemental magnesium and vitamin D will reverse the problem.

I definitely agree with you that the bisphosphonates prescribed by doctors to treat osteoporosis should be illegal. Like PPIs, they are iatrogenic drugs that just bring more repeat business for the medical profession, at the expense of their patients' health.

But you won't see many mainstream doctors prescribing magnesium (or enough vitamin D to actually get the job done), because they are trained to dispense drugs, not dietary advice. They have virtually no training in nutrition or diet issues.

You probably have enough calcium in your diet already, but if you decide to take a calcium supplement, be sure that you take it in a 1:1 ratio with magnesium, otherwise you can end up with way too much calcium in circulation which can have adverse health effects.

Tex

[Blueberry]

My mom has thinning bones. She was placed onto one of those medications as you mention. Both of us were not thrilled reading the side effects listed.

I shared this article with my mom about the importance of not only minerals but also eating a good amount of protein to keep bones strong and health. The article is on a study Dr. Heaney wrote about. He's an osteoporosis expert.

"The Paradox of Osteoporosis Irreversibility"

http://blogs.creighton.edu/heaney/2014/ ... ibility-2/

excerpt from his article:

...Bone is not just calcium. It is made up, first of all, of a protein matrix within which the calcium salts are embedded. Soak a bone in acid and you remove the calcium. But what’s left still looks like the bone you started with, except now it’s rubbery rather than hard. It’s now all protein and no mineral. The key point is that, while bone is the body’s reservoir of calcium, that calcium is tied up as part of a structure, the largest component of which is protein. When the body needs calcium and has to make withdrawals from the skeletal reserves, it does so not by leaching the calcium from this protein-mineral complex, but by physically tearing down microscopic units of bone and scavenging the calcium that is released in the process. Inevitably, therefore, the protein matrix – the structure – goes as well.

In order to profit fully from a high calcium intake, a patient who has lost bone needs to consume enough protein to allow the body to rebuild the lost structure. Otherwise all that a high calcium intake can do is to prevent the body’s further tearing down of bone to meet the calcium needs of other body systems and tissues. That’s a good thing to do, but it is not enough. Nevertheless, it is precisely to prevent that draining of the body’s calcium reserves that a high calcium intake (whether from food or supplements) is today a vital part of the standard of care for patients with osteoporosis. Even so, the failure of nutritional replacement to rebuild lost bone is what originally set the stage for the entry of pharmaceutical agents, some of which can produce substantial bone rebuilding.

That landscape began to change a few years ago when an insightful investigator at the Tufts Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston noticed that a high calcium intake did, in fact, lead to increased bone gain if the patient’s intake of protein was high. Bess Dawson-Hughes had previously published the results of a calcium and vitamin D supplementation trial, producing a better than 50 percent reduction in fracture risk in healthy elderly Bostonians with those two nutrients alone. But, like others before her, she noted that, while high calcium intakes reduced or stopped bone loss in her treated subjects, the two nutrients didn’t lead to bone gain. They didn’t, that is, in individuals consuming usual protein intakes. However, in a subset of her treated patients, who, it turns out, had protein intakes above 1.5 times the RDA (0.8 g/kg body weight), bone gain was dramatic (while it was zero in those with more usual – and usually thought “adequate” – protein intakes). The figure below shows the 3-year change in bone mineral density (BMD) at the hip in the calcium- and vitamin-supplemented participants in the Tufts study. Only with the highest protein intakes was there appreciable bone gain.

Ca-Prot_for_blogFor me, it was an “Aha!” moment. Why hadn’t we thought of that? It was known that bone is 50 percent protein by volume (but only about 20 percent calcium by weight). And it was known that when bone is torn down (as with estrogen or calcium deficiency), its protein is degraded in the process. So it made sense that, to rebuild the lost bone, you would need not just calcium but fresh protein as well....

[jcml12]

First of all thank you both for replying! My head is spinning with information from specialists and it is a bit scary! My Vit D is perfect, Magnesium and Calcium are perfect as well. The doctor did a 24 hr Urine and it showed high Calcium in my urine which the doctors said it meant that I was not absorbing in my bones but peeing it out. I take 10,000 iu of Vit D daily and this keeps me at a good level. About 3 years ago about every six months I kept dipping into the very low levels of Vit D and the doctor would put me on RX and then I would be fine. It wasn't until I started seeing a Naturopath did I get the right amount. Three years ago I also had been on Prilosec for almost 30 years. Never did one doctor say anything about it and when I saw the Naturopath for the first time she nearly fell off her chair when I told her how long I had been on it. She said that it is very hard on the bones and does not let the natural stomach acids do what they need to do. Long story short I weaned off of them, started eating clean, watching gluten but still ate some and then a couple years laster (last year) the MC happened. I believe it is all connected but none of the MD's will ever say that. I also think the low vit d for many years had an impact as well. I just hope I can make it improve. I walk 3 to 4 miles almost daily and I purchased a weight vest to wear a hour a day (read that this helps). Can't do the RX which I feel is like poison and I have researched and read that there is not a huge improvement on the bone but of course the doctors think its better than nothing. I am in pretty good shape so I pray daily that I won't ever fall and that I'm making the right decisions. Like with other things that I have reached out to you all for you are so honest and helpful and it always makes me feel better. Thank you! PS: Tex have you ever done a poll on how many MC people have Osteoporosis?

[tex]

Magnesium and Calcium are perfect as well

Here is why that statement is based on invalid assumptions:

Our calcium reserves are mostly stored in our bones and our teeth. Virtually every cell in the body also contains a small supply of calcium because calcium is used for cellular signalling, but the bulk of our calcium supply (that can be drawn upon as needed by the body) is in our bones. Our magnesium reserves are stored in our muscle cells. Both calcium and magnesium are vital electrolytes, so the blood levels have to be maintained within relatively narrow "normal" ranges. If electrolytes stray very far out of their normal serum ranges serious health consequences are the result.

But doctors have no way to measure our calcium reserves. They can measure bone density, but that's an indirect method, and it really doesn't show how much calcium we have in reserve. There is a tissue test to measure magnesium reserves, but I have yet to hear of a single example of where a doctor has actually ordered such a test. Instead they rely on the serum tests, because they are fast, easy, and cheap.

But the serum tests are useless and meaningless until our reserve supplies of those 2 electrolytes are completely depleted, because as long as even a tiny supply of those electrolytes are still in storage, whenever our diet is insufficient in either calcium or magnesium, our body draws enough calcium from our bones, or magnesium from our muscles, in order to keep our blood levels within the normal range. It's only after our reserve supplies are totally exhausted that the blood levels can suddenly shift to below the normal range. This can happen at any time, but it often happens in the wee hours of the morning, after we haven't eaten anything for hours.

Ever wake up in the night with severe leg or foot cramps? That's a warning that those muscles just ran out of magnesium. In some cases it can be a signal that the body is running out of available calcium, or another electrolyte, such as sodium, but magnesium deficiency is typically the cause of leg and foot cramps in the middle of the night. The heart is also a muscle, and it contains stored magnesium. Have you ever wondered why most heart attacks and strokes occur first thing in the morning? Doctors wonder the same thing, because they don't understand magnesium and how to measure magnesium reserves.

Here's how osteoporosis develops. We run low on calcium in our diet, so the body pulls calcium from our bones to make up for the deficit in our blood. That's not a problem, because normally the calcium will be subsequently replaced again when the diet contains a surplus. But if we run low on either magnesium or vitamin D then the body cannot utilize the calcium in our blood to rebuild bone tissue. When that happens, the calcium is wasted (because there is no way to save it. If this happens repeatedly, eventually osteoporosis develops, as the bone calcium supply becomes more and more depleted and it cannot be replaced because of inadequate magnesium.

Magnesium in the blood (together with adequate vitamin D) automatically regulates calcium to make sure that whenever the blood contains more calcium than it needs for normal electrolytic balances, the excess (amount of calcium) is transferred to the bones where it is stored as new bone tissue (provided that the diet contains adequate protein, as blueberry pointed out).

IOW, calcium depletes magnesium reserves in the body. If the magnesium supply is insufficient to keep up with the demand due to an imbalance (IOW, less than a 1:1 ratio of magnesium to calcium in the diet) in the long run, then the body will purge the excess calcium in urine, rather than transferring it to the bones. This is the case when serum blood levels always remain within the normal range. If serum calcium is high, then there could be a parathyroid problem corrupting the regulation of calcium levels, but that's very unlikely if your serum calcium levels are always within the normal range.

Doctors don't understand magnesium, and how it is used by the body, and because of that they have a blind faith in the worthless blood tests that they use to measure magnesium levels. That test is only of value in ER situations, because if a serum magnesium test is actually below range, the patient is at an elevated risk of a heart attack or stroke. Something needs to be done relatively quickly, in order to correct that deficiency. Been there, done that. But the magnesium blood test is worthless for the purposes of normal health monitoring.

If my goal were to stop wasting calcium and use it to build new bone tissue instead, then I would significantly increase my magnesium supplementation, either topically or orally. And of course, . . . that's exactly what most of us here are doing.

Tex

[brandy]

Blue, thanks for sharing the article. I'm going to bump up my protein. JCM, I'll be interested in hearing how you like the weight vest. JCM, I was just diagnosed with -2.5 T score which is beginning osteoporosis so I'll post what I am going to do. I'm still thinking things through....give me a couple of days.

I walk 3 to 4 miles almost daily

Mom is age 82 with osteo. We are three generations with bone issues. Mom has always been a big walker....like 3 miles per day. Even now she does around 3/4 of a mile per day. She did fosomax in the past and also the injections. (This was before the dangers of these drugs were known to the public.)

She has really good agility and I think it is due to her high many decades of high activity level. Mom has aids due to mid stage alzheimers and we have a tough time hiring aids that can do the walking....i.e. Mom is in better shape than a lot of the aids in their mid 50's. If the aid can't walk 3/4 of a mile a day we don't hire them on and sadly a lot of the aids can't do that level of walking.

I'll try to post some additional thoughts in several days.

Brandy

[JFR]

Mom has aids due to mid stage alzheimers and we have a tough time hiring aids that can do the walking....i.e. Mom is in better shape than a lot of the aids in their mid 50's. If the aid can't walk 3/4 of a mile a day we don't hire them on and sadly a lot of the aids can't do that level of walking.

Brandy

That's depressing to think it's hard to find aids that can walk 3/4 miles a day.

Jean