OK, we get it. There are times when bone breaks just happen. Heavy weights drop, people fall-down-go-boom, accidents happen.
Having said that, we can reduce the chances of some accidents turning into broken bones by increasing bone strength and density before the Stuff Hits The Fan, and by maintaining good bone health through proper nutrition by making sure our preps have the right types of food in them, and we know what else we need to do to keep the ole skeleton strong.
Let’s bottom line it and go from there:
The three things that impact bone health most that you have some control over are weight-bearing exercise, calcium, and vitamin D.
I’ve talked about other bones issues in a previous post on osteoporosis, you can read it by clicking here…
Here are some of the highlights that bear repeating.
Thanks to BruceBlaus* for this image of what happens to bones in osteoporosis.
Osteoporosis is very common later in life, especially — but not Only! — in women. It 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 well-known 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 not. (Bones do lose mineral with age, making osteoporosis 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, light, and take up little space), 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; I’ve read very many studies where a nutrient supplied in food just worked way better than the same nutrient supplied in a supplement.
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, unless your skin’s really dark), 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.
So those three — exercise, calcium, and Vit D — are the main pillars holding up bone density. There’s one other factor there, sneakily reaching in to add a propping hand up: Stress control. Stress causes the release of the hormone cortisol. Cortisol suppresses the release of the growth hormone that encourages the bone to rebuild properly during the remodeling process. This was overlooked for decades because much of the research on stress responses was done with male rats, and testosterone promotes bone density so much that the cortisol effect is not that great in males. It is a big deal in females, though.
Oh, and that testosterone? Cortisol inhibits its release. It also inhibits the release of estrogen, which partially protects women before menopause. After menopause, the rate of development of osteoporosis rises sharply in women. In short, cortisol is enormously helpful during relatively short-term stresses, but is a real jerk if you’re releasing a lot of it for a long time. Learning to manage stress effectively is therefore an important health prep. (One article that might help along that score is here.)
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
Click above to see all the latest 3BY Articles!
I learned the expensive way. If you break a toe(I had 3 toes broken on same foot), don’t bother seeking medical care–a boot will work just fine.
Find one from a friend…save mega bucks.
Oh, and be sure the boot fits appropriately. My doc tried to make me walk, laughed at me because I couldn’t for the pain?
Hello?? I went home and stuffed a folded washcloth on the heel part of the boot–the damned thing was too big and she was too stupid to get me a child’s boot.
The first thing she said when she placed it on my foot was….”why are you curling your toes??” because my toes didn’t exit the boot and she didn’t see them!!!