By Dr. Michael Colgan
Strong Bones: Part 1
Get the hard facts about your bones
At Blennerhassett Equestrian on Salt Spring Island, BC, I’m watching one of our young riders jumping a speedy gelding. Oops! The rider miss-times a jump and whack! – takes a sliding fall. A bit winded, she scrambles up immediately and re-mounts the horse, with pride hurt more than body. Young bones are strong, supple and highly resistant to breaking, so lasting injuries are rare. But, for a rider in their 50s, a fall from a horse can be serious business, because old bones are likely to be weak, brittle and prone to snap like twigs. Women are especially at risk.
Health Canada is coy about revealing the true numbers, but the US lets it all hang out. Despite the myriad of drugs that purport to keep bones strong and 60 years of promotion of milk and similar malarkey, one in every two American women over the age of 50 now shows osteopenia or bone weakening (and stats are presumed to be similar in Canada). By age 80, three-quarters of all American women have osteoporosis. Their bones are no longer strong enough to safely support the weight of their bodies. At that rate, osteopenia and osteoporosis affect more than 30 million women, and the number is rising fast. If these people suffer a fall, well…North America has one of the highest rates of hip fracture in the world.
If anyone tells you that this loss of bone is inevitable, don’t believe them.
If you want to ride horses, ski, skate, cycle, hike, dance, or do any kind of lifelong vigorous activity, you should learn how to grow strong bones. The major reason that most people lose their bones as they age is not that medical professionals don’t know how to save bone. It is rather that dissemination of this knowledge to the public is poor to nonexistent. Family doctors often try, but their efforts are buried by the huge forces of the pharmaceutical lobby and the drug marketplace.
In a nutshell, these pharmaceutical forces work against public knowledge because they are driven solely by profit. Please don’t give me the bleeding hearts ethics nonsense. Medicine, despite all of the caring folk that work in it, is controlled by profit. I know because I own pharmaceutical shares and have been to the shareholder meetings, and have also been a consultant to the Canadian and US governments’ health sectors.
There is no profit at all in showing people how to save their bones themselves, by simple supplementation and small changes in lifestyle. Consequently, neither our lobby-driven medical policy nor commercial enterprise is going to help you. Unless you acquire the right knowledge to save your bones, medical statistics over the last 60 years show that you will very likely join the majority of North Americans who become progressively spineless, hipless and legless as you age.
Some people are surprised to learn that there almost no effective manmade drugs to grow new bone. The answer lies in profits and chemistry. First, there is very little profit in developing manmade drugs that improve bone growth. Manmade drugs – not occurring in nature – are the only chemicals that can be easily patented, and thus the only chemicals that offer the protected profit margins required to snare the investments necessary for their development.
Second, the chemistry of producing manmade drugs that improve bone growth is very difficult. Thousands of substances have been expensively tried, but we are no further ahead than we were in the 1960s. The success rate is less than one in a thousand, and even those successes either turn out to cause unwanted growth elsewhere in the body including cancers, or are expensive and questionably patentable variations of natural substances, particularly carnitine and parathyroid hormone. Any new drug that fails to win both FDA approval and ironclad patent results in multi-millions of dollars in development losses. Inventing drugs to grow new bone has become a route to pharmaceutical bankruptcy. Understandably, most companies ditched it decades ago.
At the crux of the problem is the general problem of human chemistry. We have become very good at the crude chemical tasks of inhibiting or destroying processes of nature. Because we can blow up the largest tree with a handful of plastic explosives, we tend to forget that we still have a very long way to go before we are able to create even one living manmade leaf.
Bones are far more complicated than leaves. Bones are constantly being rebuilt every day by specialized cells called osteoblasts. They pull minerals in and organize them to grow new bone in strict accordance with DNA codes that we are only just beginning to decipher. In beautiful synchrony with osteoblasts, other specialized cells called osteoclasts are constantly dismantling old, damaged, and worn out bone. They are the demolition crew, the bone garbage disposal. It is a much easier chemical task to develop drugs that destroy the action of osteoclasts, meaning drugs which keep the bone that should have been broken down as garbage around longer.
Drug companies have developed a slew of chemicals called biphosphonates and estrogen receptor modulators that stop osteoclasts. They also use expensive variations on the natural hormone called calcitonin to stop bone breakdown. About 99 percent of the approved drugs used today to treat osteopenia and osteoporosis do just that – stockpile the garbage bone right in your skeleton.
Consequently, even though treatment with these drugs increases the scores shown on bone density tests, and are highly touted as successful as a result, the bones themselves get steadily weaker. Meanwhile, the patients believe the problem is taken care of and pay only scant attention to supplying the structural nutrients that are absolutely essential every day for the body to grow new bone. Even if we allow generously for the loss of bone caused by the aging of our population, it is the pharmaceutical conservation of garbage bone and the almost total lack of public knowledge of the nutrients required to grow bone that are the dominant causes of the osteoporosis epidemic.
At the Colgan Institute, we have worked for 33 years to successfully increase real bone strength in thousands of individuals, many of whom are at or near what is termed the “fracture line” when they first come to see us. Our programme is very successful. Because of the deplorable and worsening state of North America’s bones, I am going to share our programme for free within VISTA’s next few issues.
This article includes excerpts from Dr. Colgan’s forthcoming book, Strong Bones, scheduled for publication in spring 2008. This is Part 1 of four parts.
References available from VISTA.
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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.
