Happiness is not very hard to achieve for bones. It requires three main ingredients:
- Bone use as in weight support: dancing, running etc, rebounding, and/or weight lifting. These all involve defiance of gravity. Our planet pulls everything down but weight support runs counter to that and lifts things up. This strengthens bones.
- Time in the sun; and
- The right combination of nutrients. This is a bit more tricky.
Four Necessary Nutrients
(1) Calcium and (2) magnesium go together, as most of us probably know. Each is part of the other’s metabolism. And each is stored in bones. Many laboratories offer a blood test for magnesium levels but this is pretty useless because Mg is not stored in the blood; it is released there by the bones when it’s needed for something, That would be often because Mg is involved in hundreds of jobs in the body’s daily functioning. So if you got several blood tests for it, you’d probably get different results each time.
If we take a Ca supplement and are deficient in Mg, we could be endangering our health because some of that Ca won’t be properly digested without Mg and can be deposited in joints, contributing to arthritis, or in the kidneys, leading to kidney stones. How to effectively supplement with Mg is a good question because it is not well absorbed from any capsule. It’s better absorbed through the skin. We can buy Mg flakes and put them in our bath water or in a foot bath and that works. They’re rather expensive so we can also use Epsom salts the same way.The important thing is to get Ca and Mg in balance.
(3) Vitamin D works in the gut to help with Ca absorption and a deficiency leads to weak bones known as rickets. (4) Vitamin K2 works to keep the bones’ Ca absorbed in the bones rather than getting into the blood vessels and causing atherosclerosis.
More on Vitamin D
Vitamin D has lately been a popular topic in the news. Our skin produces it in response to sunlight. That creates conflict for some people who fear sun damage on their skin and/or skin cancer. So vitamin D supplements are now popular since it is not much present in food. But this attention to vitamin D is not new. Back in the 1930s there was: (drum roll) Vitamin D Beer! This was marketed as a great health enhancer to protect us from the problems of clothing, clouds, smoke and indoor living. Smoke? Think of those movies from the 1930s where every actor held a cigarette. So people were urged to drink Vitamin D Beer every day to enjoy year-round health.
Three forms of vitamin D: D1, D2, and D3 were discovered by one Adolf Windaus in the 1920s. He was a German chemist and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on cholesterol and vitamins. D1 was later found to be a compound of substances and not a pure vitamin. D2 forms when certain plant materials are exposed to ultraviolet light and it is not formed in humans. Studies comparing D2 and D3 have concluded that D2 is much weaker as a supplement and therefore we now take D3 capsules. If you ever wondered, as I did, why they are called “D3”, now we know.
Foods with Vitamin D: salmon, sardines, shrimp and egg yolks. Food companies also add it to some foods such as milk and yogurt, orange juice and cereals. As far as I can tell, a half hour walk on a sunny day will take care of our vitamin D. We should be taking walks anyway, for blood and lymph circulation and bone health.
More on Vitamin K
As with vitamin D, there are three forms of vitamin K: K1, K2, and K3. K3 is artificial and not much recommended. K1 comes to us in vegetables and K2 is in dairy products and also produced by our gut bacteria, depending on how healthy the gut is. Besides increasing bone density, vitamin K works in blood clotting by triggering a protein to start the process. It also raises the blood platelet levels, which would be great for people suffering from low platelets, with the inappropriate bleeding that causes. Chemotherapy can lower them along with white and red cells; lupus lowers platelets, as do some viral infections, over-consumption of alcohol, and Acute Myeloid Leukemia.
However Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, my type of cancer, increases platelet levels so I must be careful not to ingest too much vitamin K. Towards that goal, I’ve stopped my long-time salads loaded with spinach, kale and lettuce, but have kept boring cabbage plus seaweed for its iodine, Ca, Mg, folate and many other nutrients. And who could give up that fantastic cilantro? The Bill Henderson protocol (RIP, Bill, and thank you) included Barley Power tablets and I still take those. They merit their own blog, maybe later.
Foods With Vitamin K: Green Leafies especially kale; spring onions, cruciferous vegetables, and cucumbers; prunes; and fermented soy and fermented dairy.
So happy bones are not too demanding. In my view they just require three basic habits: regular bone use, time in the sun, and a diet fresh, varied and colorful.