Osteoporosis
Written by Chicagohealers.com practitioner Peter Glidden ND – Osteoporosis is the gradual thinning of bones over time ” making them brittle and weak and therefore, much easier to break. Osteopenia is the very beginning of this process of bone thinning; Osteoporosis is when the thinning has become full fledged. Someone who has full fledged Osteoporosis has very weak and brittle bones, and even a simple fall on the kitchen floor can result in a broken wrist, leg, arm or hip. The main reason why the medical community is concerned about treating Osteoporosis is that when an elderly woman falls and breaks her hip, the surgery and rehab necessary to treat it are expensive and dangerous. 30% of the elderly women who have this hip surgery die from its complications. Most of the women who survive the surgery are never the same after it, the quality of their lives suffers, and the last years of their lives are rendered horrible because of it. A small percentage of women with Osteoporosis will also be bothered by back and or leg pain, and this is another reason to treat it.
Osteoporosis is much more widespread than is revealed by medical statistics because there are few outward signs of the disease in the early stages. One of the first outward signs is loss of height between your hips and neck. (If you don’t know how tall you were in early adulthood, you can estimate that height by measuring the width of your arm span, since arm span and height are nearly equal at skeletal maturity.) Subtract your arm span from your head-to-heel height to give yourself a rough indication of your height loss. Any substantial difference may be a sign of osteoporosis. Another sign is what’s called transparent skin. If you can see the edges of both the large and small veins on the back of the hand then you may have osteoporosis as this reflects a lack of collagen in the skin’s outer layers. One study of older women with osteoporosis showed that 83 percent had transparent skin while 13 percent did not.
What causes it?
Osteoporosis is not caused by a Boniva or a Fosamax deficiency! There are a number of reasons why Osteoporosis develops:
Smoking cigarettes. The mechanism here is unclear. It may have to do with arsenic deposition in the bones (arsenic is in cigarette smoke), it may have to do with the acid-causing effects of cigarette smoke. No one is quite sure. But if you are a smoker ” especially a thin, White smoker, your Osteoporosis risk increases dramatically.
Eating meat specifically and animal products in general. A Michigan State study found that by age 65, the average woman who ate meat had lost one-third of her skeletal structure. Meanwhile, vegetarian women of comparable age had less than half the bone loss and were more active, less likely to break bones, maintained erect postures, and healed bones more quickly. The Inuit (Eskimo) have the highest osteoporosis rates in the world. In a study of 217 children, 89 adults, and 107 elderly Inuit in Alaska, researchers found that they had lower bone mineral content, onset of bone loss at an earlier age, and development of bone thinning with a greater intensity than white Americans. The scientists attributed the greater degeneration to the acidic effects of the Inuit’s high meat diet. The human body is constantly trying to strike a balance between being too acidic and being too alkaline. A healthy human body likes to be alkaline, but when we eat certain foods (meat, refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and animal products) our bodies become acidic. Because the body does not like to be acidic, it steals calcium from the bones and dumps it into the blood to make the blood alkaline again! When somebody eats acid-forming foods every day, the bones become thinner and thinner because the body is constantly stealing calcium from them to make the blood alkaline! The other side of the coin here is that if you do eat meat, it is possible to have strong and healthy bones. To accomplish this you must ingest adequate amounts of calcium and trace minerals every day. One of the reasons that the Inuit had such a high degree of osteoporosis was because there was hardly any calcium or trace minerals in their diets. Skeletons of Neanderthals have been found and forensically examined. Their bone density was perfect ” and they ate a lot of meat. They also supplemented their diets with wood ash which was very high in trace minerals, thereby negating the bone destroying propensity of a diet high in animal protein.
Not enough exercise will also help to make the bones thin. When healthy men in their 20′s and 30′s are shot up into space they start to develop Osteopenia! Why? Because there is no more gravity putting stress on their bones! Why does this matter? Well, when we walk around on the earth’s surface, each time we take a step we are putting stress on our bones, which then send a message to our brains asking it for more bone building stuff (calcium, phosphorus, etc.). Lifting weights does the same thing. When astronauts are floating around in a low gravity environment for more than a few days, their bones STOP asking the brain for help and become thin as a result. This brings up an interesting point that not many people are unaware of. Our bones are constantly renewing themselves ” chewing up and getting rid of old bone and replacing it with new bone. Bone regeneration is a very dynamic process and is affected by MANY things, the most common of which are: ageing; certain diseases; lack of physical exercise; not enough calcium in the diet.
Diseases like Rheumatoid arthritis, Cushing’s disease, and Primary Hypoparathyroidism, Thyroid disease (Hyper thyroid).
Prednisolone or corticosteroid treatment for prolonged periods (greater than 5mg daily for 2 months. Some Cancer treatments.
All of the above circumstances will negatively affect bone integrity, thickness, and strength, but the single largest causative factor in the genesis of Osteoporosis, and the one which eclipses all the others is calcium deficiency. Osteoporosis is a calcium deficiency disease. Period. This fact was proved conclusively by extensive research done with animals in the 1970′s. If you have bone spurs, arthritis, degenerative disc disease, chronic low back pain, bad teeth, PMS, high blood pressure, kidney stones, Bell’s palsy, osteopenia, or osteoporosis ” you are suffering from a calcium deficiency. If you have any of these diseases, are taking a calcium supplement , and still have the illness ” then the particular calcium product you are taking is inferior. It is that simple.
In our mad rush to stave off illness we often get focused on a single nutrient, and forget about the larger picture. The body is a complex system of interconnected and inter-related parts. There are 91 essential nutrients that need to be imported into the human body each day in order for it to function properly (60 Trace minerals, 16 Vitamins, 12 Amino acids, and 3 Fatty acids). We need to have ALL of these nutrients in play in order for each of them to be effective individually. If we are suffering from osteopenia or osteoporosis and we take calcium, but ignore the other 90 nutrients, the calcium will not be absorbed nor laid down properly by the body, and the disease will persist. 1500 mg of calcium/day, plus all of the other 90 nutrients will completely eliminate osteoporosis within 12 weeks with most people.
In the treatment of osteoporosis, Glucosamine sulfate is also an important nutrient to remember. Glucosamine sulfate KCl is the matrix of the bone structure around which calcium is attached and laid down. The lack of this particular nutrient in a calcium centered osteoporosis treatment is another reason for its’ failure. If you were to take a chicken bone and immerse it into a bottle of vinegar for 4 weeks, all of the calcium in the bone will be dissolved out of it by the acid in the vinegar. What remains in the bottle will look just like a chicken bone , and it may in fact appear as if nothing has really changed in the bone at all. But if you then take the bone out of the vinegar, it is so rubbery and pliable that you can easily tie it into a knot. The rubbery material that has remained after the calcium has been dissolved away is the glucosamine matrix of the bone that the calcium binds to, giving the bone its strength. If you leave glucosamine sulfate out of your osteoporosis calcium formulation, you will get inferior results every time.
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