Osteoporosis is very common later in life, especially in women. We’ve all heard stories of how the old lady fell and broke her hip.
Well, usually that’s not what actually happened. In reality, she often took a step, broke her hip because the bone was so thin and fragile, and this caused her to fall.
Osteoporosis – what is it?
Such injuries pose a serious challenge to recovery even with top-notch medical care. This is not where you want to be when medical care is not available.
Thanks to BruceBlaus* for this image of what happens to bones in osteoporosis.
Osteoporosis makes it very easy to break bones, and some of these breaks are very difficult to recover from. However, good prepping can put off its development and slow its progression. Of course, I’m not a physician, so while I’m happy to share some thoughts with you, please take it as the shared information it is, not any kind of prescription.
Both the prevention and the treatment for osteoporosis rest on three main pillars: Weight bearing exercise, calcium, and Vitamin D.
Weight bearing exercise
Bones support us like the frames support our houses, but there’s a big difference: Once you build a timber into a wall, it just sits there. Bones though are living tissues, so they’re always remodeling; and they remodel in response to recent stresses.
Compress a bone with the weight of a body or by lifting something heavy, and the cells in the bone take the hint and build the bone stronger. If you don’t enjoy that sort of thing…well, I feel ya, I really do. I dislike lifting weights myself. Nonetheless, I do it twice a week because I want to be able to walk upright when I’m 80.
Lifting weights may not be fun, but it beats broken bones, hands down.
On the up side, this approach works well for people of all ages, whether osteoporosis has already developed or no. (Bones do lose mineral with age, making osteoporos inevitable if one lives long enough. The trick is to slow it enough so that it would cause a problem once you hit your 150th birthday or so.)
Weight lifting is also really doable, even if you’re holed up in the house. I keep a set of resistance bands on hand (basically giant rubber bands, and therefore cheap), but even a big can of soup can be a workable starter weight — and what prepper doesn’t have those on hand?
Calcium
Calcium is the scarce part of the mineral that makes bones hard. We get it from food or supplements. Mineral supplements do last a long time, so that’s an up side in Prepper World. Powdered dairy products are also popular preps (there are ‘creamy sauce’ mixes in most combo packs, for example), but check labels to be sure they are actually close enough to the real dairy product to still be calcium rich.
Another very high-calcium prep is to keep sardines or salmon with the bones as part of the canned food stores. These are also very high in protein and have some good quality fats, so they’re a strong choice. White beans store well and are high in calcium. Broccoli grows better than it stores, but is a good vegetable source with a lot of other benefits. I’m more of a ‘lots of food sources’ than ‘supplement’ person, myself.
It’s the canned fish that retains the (soft, edible) bones that are the Really rich calcium sources.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is needed to help the gut pick up the calcium you eat — otherwise it’s in one end, out the other. Food sources are limited. Fatty fish (there’s the salmon again) are good; as are egg yolks. If you’re getting some sun exposure (15-20 min a day is enough in summer, with arms mostly bare), you don’t need to eat it. Vitamin D deficiency was unknown until people started working indoors all day.
Relax with a some ice cream after an afternoon spent working in the sun, and all three legs of the osteoporosis trio are covered!
Many dairy products and some foods that compete with milk as a beverage (such as orange juice and soy milk) are often fortified. D3 is apparently a more bioactive form than D2, although there’s some debate on that.
Supplements have gotten popular of late, as Vit D is one of the current ‘miracle foods’ being touted in the news as some folks thinks it protects against cancer too. Just be aware that Vit D is stored in fat tissue, so if you eat too much it doesn’t just flush out with the urine. It can get toxic when seriously overdosed, which can’t really happen through food but can through supplements.
There’s no quick fix for osteoporosis; bone development and maintenance take time and persistence. In the meantime if you’ve already got it? Well, weird forces on the hip and wrist initiate a lot of the breaks, so if I knew my bones were thin, I’d be very careful of my footing when it was slippery and I’d wear a brace on my wrists when lifting awkward weights.
*By BruceBlaus (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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