Vitamin D

How can healthy lifestyle changes affect Osteoporosis?

What is Osteoporosis ?
Osteoporosis is a disease caused by weak and porous bones that fracture easily. It happens mainly after menopause in women and particularly those who are small boned or underweight. Bone mass is dependent on the stress, or weight, placed on bones. If not prevented or if left untreated, osteoporosis can progress painlessly until a bone breaks.The more you use your bones to walk, run, lift weights, the heavier and stronger your bones will be.

Healthy Lifestyle
The best way to keep your bones healthy is to establish a healthy lifestyle. One should stop smoking, avoid drinking too much alcohol, get enough calcium and vitamin D through your diet or with supplements, do weight-bearing exercises to help keep bones strong, avoid high doses of thyroid hormone or cortisone-like medications.

- Exercise is very important for slowing the progression of osteoporosis. Exercising for more than three days a week for more than a total of 90 minutes a week reduces the risk for osteoporosis and fracture in both older men and women.
Careful weight training exercise applies tension to muscle and bone.
Regular brisk long walks improve bone density and mobility and may relieve osteoarthritic pain.
Exercises specifically targeted to strengthen the back help prevent fractures later on in life.
Abdominal exercises, lower back exercises, yoga, Pilates, and tai chi help strengthen the spine.

- A combination of calcium and vitamin D can reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
Good dietary sources of calcium include milk, yogurt, and other dairy products, dark green vegetables such as collard greens, kale, and broccoli, sardines and salmon with bones, calcium-fortified foods and beverages such as cereals, orange juice, soymilk.
Dietary sources of vitamin D include fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, and tuna, egg yolks, liver, vitamin D-fortified milk, orange juice, soymilk, or cereals. Sunlight on your skin activates the production of vitamin D in your body.

- Smoking and excessive use of alcohol reduce calcium absorption which can lead to bone loss. This is especially true for women who smoke, as smoking lowers estrogen levels.
Giving up these two unhealthy habits is a simple lifestyle change that can lower the chance of getting osteoporosis.

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Vitamin D – Vitally important to human health, and deficiencies can cause major problems

Doctors and people in the health industry know that Vitamin D is vitally important to human health, with the lack of Vitamin D influencing many problems in the human body. At the same time, a large number of people in the world suffer from Vitamin D deficiency (projected numbers of 1 billion the world over). Considering the huge impact of Vitamin D deficiency, it seems more clear that providing Vitamin D in the form of nutrition tablets / supplements is necessary. This becomes even more important when one considers the results of this study (link)that considered the impact of deficiency of Vitamin D on various genes in the human body that can impact cancer (and bet many of you never thought that Vitamin D could have something to do with cancer – one normally thinks of Vitamin as health supplements, not connected in any way to dangerous diseases).

Scientists have found that vitamin D influences more than 200 genes, including ones related to cancer and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis — a discovery that shows how serious vitamin D deficiency can be. Vitamin D deficiency is a well-known risk factor for rickets, and some evidence suggests it may increase susceptibility to autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes, as well as certain cancers and even dementia. With this is mind, the group looked at disease-associated regions of the gene map to see if they had higher levels of VDR binding. They found VDR binding was “significantly enriched” in regions linked to several common autoimmune diseases, such as MS, type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s disease, as well as in regions associated with cancers such as leukaemia and colorectal cancer.

Vitamin D is created by the exposure of the skin to sunlight, something that has reduced over a period of time. Vitamin D can also be found in some natural occurring foods such as fish liver oil, eggs and fatty fish such as salmon, herring and mackerel. In addition, Vitamin D can also be provided as supplements, and it seems to be important that health departments ensure that people are getting these supplements.