By Dr. Michael Colgan
Strong Bones - Part 4
In Parts one to three of this series in previous issues of VISTA, we discussed why North America is in a crisis of osteoporosis and why pharmaceutical drugs have failed miserably to save our bones.
In Parts one to three of this series in previous issues of VISTA, we discussed why North America is in a crisis of osteoporosis and why pharmaceutical drugs have failed miserably to save our bones. Then we reviewed eight of the 11 factors essential to build and maintain bones. Here, we continue with the three remaining factors that will give you strong, natural, drug-free bones for life.
9. Alkaline diet: The abbreviation pH means “power of hydrogen.” A food that has an ash residue that releases hydrogen into your body is acidic. A food that has an ash residue that removes hydrogen from your body is alkaline. A pH of 7.0 is neutral — neither acid nor alkaline. A pH level below 7.0 is acidic and includes substances ranging from colas at about pH 3.0 to battery acid at pH 1.0. A pH level above pH 7.0 is alkaline, and includes substances ranging from baking soda at pH 8.5 to potash lye at pH 13.0. The acidity or alkalinity of your diet is critical to many aspects of health, especially your bones, because the DNA code designed you to function well only in a very narrow range of pH.
Because the human diet was alkaline for all of our 150,000 years before there was agriculture, your bloodstream is designed to operate best in an alkaline state, at a pH of 7.35 to 7.45. You liver, heart and brain are also designed to work optimally in a slightly alkaline state. You have many defence feedback systems to keep you that way. Whenever your body senses that the blood and organs have become acidic, it pulls calcium from your bones to neutralize the acid, then excretes the calcium in your urine. To buffer the acid from a single burger, fries and coke takes about 5,000 milligrams of calcium from your bones. No matter what else you do, if you are chronically acidic you will lose your bones.
Because of the predominant acidity of modern foods, the average Canadian is almost continually in a slightly acidic state, with a blood pH of about 6.5 to 6.8. It doesn’t sound very acidic, but it is ample to slowly leach away bone. Apologists for the processed food industry deny this rise of acidity over the last hundred years of food processing, pointing to the present abundance of fruits and vegetables which are almost all alkaline. But Mr. and Mrs. Average do not eat a great deal of these, choosing instead to eat acidic processed foods. The antacid medication business in the US alone is now over $8 billion per year, almost all of it caused solely by the acidic food people put in their mouths.
To see whether or not you are losing bone to acidity, you can test your own pH using pHydrion strips from your local pharmacy. Test midstream fasting urine each morning for seven days. It should range between pH 6.2 to 7.0. Also test your fasting morning saliva. It should range between pH 6.5 to 7.5. If your urine or saliva (or both) are consistently below these ranges, then all other strategies to save your bones will prove ineffective.
Changing your diet to bring your pH into the alkaline range, where it should be, is simple. I cover the basics in my book Nutrition for Champions. A great first step is to reduce your intake of the worst acid foods such as pizza, pasta, burgers and battered, fried chicken. You know, those tasties that set your heart and gut on fire.
The second step is to increase the amount of high potassium, low sodium alkaline foods in your diet. Examples include an avocado or a cup of almonds, which contain about 1.4 grams of potassium each. A cup of dates or figs contains about 500 milligrams of potassium; so does a banana or a quarter of a honeydew melon. All are low sodium (high sodium foods are acidic) and high alkaline. I provide a list of other alkaline foods online at www.colganinstitute.com.
Seems too simple doesn’t it? This is especially true in the face of North America’s epidemic of osteoporosis, with all of its needless suffering and the expensive, toxic and ineffective drugs used to try to combat it. Nevertheless, numerous recent studies show that reducing acid foods and increasing high potassium alkaline foods grow masses of new bone.
In a representative study, Anthony Sebastian and team at the University of California, San Francisco selected American post-menopausal women who showed the typical low-level chronic acidosis of the North American population, and were losing bone despite their attempts to save it. The women learned about lowering acidity and had their diets supplemented with potassium bicarbonate to increase potassium intake by 4.5 to 9.0 grams per day. Within two weeks, their daily acid excretion declined by a whopping 80 percent, and measurements of bone loss reversed to show bone formation.
10. Resistance Exercise: Bone is a microscopic matrix of hard mineral struts, much like the zigzag connections on the truss of a metal bridge. However, unlike the bridge, which has metal that can only decay and weaken, bone is living and constantly re-growing itself throughout life. It accomplishes this miraculous feat in exact response to the nutrient materials you make available, and the stresses you place upon it by activity.
Each day, tens of millions of old, worn-out bone cells are broken down by the garbage crew of osteoclasts, which are cells that remove the mineral matrix. In order to replace the old cells, the bone requires weight-bearing pressure on each point of connection of the internal struts that support it. This pressure produces the essential electrochemical "sparks" used by the growth hormone to convert cells in the bone marrow into osteoblasts to create new molecules of bone. Simply put, no pressure, no spark, no bone. You can eat the most careful and supplemented diet, but without weight-bearing exercise, bone cannot grow.
Controlled studies have shown since the 1960s that simple bed rest destroys massive amounts of bone. Even bed rest for a few days! Most people have no idea how damaging it is. A patient confined to long bed rest of 10 weeks for example, loses between 20 percent and 30 percent of their bone. If they are over 40, they are unlikely to ever recover full bone strength again.
The skeptics say, "But they are sick or severely injured people." If you remove weight bearing force, bone loss happens to everyone. The first astronauts taught us that even the healthiest young adults lose bone. Even with exercise bikes and yoga on the first missions, they all came back showing massive bone loss. Now astronauts have the best resistance exercise programmes in order to protect their skeleton, but they still lose bone.
For the rest of us, a recent meta-analysis of clinical trials shows clearly that resistance exercise training programmes prevent or reverse about 1 percent of bone loss per year in the lumbar spine and femoral neck, for both premenopausal and postmenopausal women. In 30 years, that 1 percent totals a saving of one-third of your bone. If we all did it, and also ate healthily, osteoporosis would be a rare disease.
However, not all resistance exercise fits the bill. Most authorities now agree that jogging, cycling and swimming, although effective as aerobic exercises, do not save bone. Jogging, which may seem very weight-bearing, especially when you are running up hill or pounding downhill, is actually detrimental to bone because the regular pounding of hips and knees destroys more bone tissue than many people can rebuild in the off time. Jogging on a treadmill is even worse because most of the force goes downward and rebounds up into the joints, instead of into forward motion. Walking, hiking and dancing do strengthen the long bones of the legs and the pelvis because they bear the body weight while being generally low-impact activities.
One of the best forms of resistance exercise is contained in the Colgan Power Program. Although it was developed for power training top athletes, a modified form of the Power Program including cable machines and balance and coordination routines is used by older individuals to retain their strength, balance, and their bones as they age.
11. Complete Nutrition: Numerous people who contact the Colgan Institute seem unaware of the basics of nutrition, while being obsessive about one or two esoteric supplements, usually some wonder concoction or other that has been pushed in their faces by TV or high-pressure multi-level salesmen. I have to emphasize that you need many other nutrients to fully support your bones in addition to those covered in this series of articles. The bottom line is that no single supplement of exotic fruit, deep-sea minerals or prehistoric forest mud does much. Nutrients work only in synergy, and for that synergy to operate well you have to have complete nutrition.
Our DNA code evolved in the presence of a wide range of chemicals in the environment and learned to use many of them in various mixtures for different purposes. These are the chemicals we now call “essential nutrients.” Limited space prevents me from covering the research, but we now know that minerals other than those covered in this series are also involved in various ways in growing optimal bone. They include zinc, copper, manganese, silica, fluoride, and boron. I cover these and others in my new book, Strong Bones. My last book, Nutrition for Champions contains a list of the amounts of all essential nutrients recommended for health by the Colgan Institute. Follow that list and the 11 points herein, and enjoy strong bones for life.
Excerpted from Dr. Colgan’s latest book, Strong Bones.
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Dr. Michael Colgan
Dr. Michael Colgan, president of the Colgan Institute in San Diego and best-selling author on sports nutrition, also lectures and writes extensively on aging and is a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
