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When you visit Matthews Internal Medicine, we do what we can to help you avoid chronic issues and diseases later in life. Helping you when you’ve been diagnosed with a disease is one thing, but helping you avoid problems in the first place is even more effective. One ailment that we place a heavy focus on at our practice is osteoporosis. This disease affects so many older Americans, but can nutrients like calcium or vitamin D help? That’s what we wanted to find out.
What Is Osteoporosis?
Osteoporosis affects bone health. It occurs when your body is making too little bone, losing too much bone, or both. This disease is more common in women than it is in men, so women especially have to focus on osteoporosis prevention efforts. The name of this disease means “porous bone,” because your bones can end up looking more like a honeycomb than a solid object at a cellular level. This can cause a variety of problems.
Fractures are common in patients with osteoporosis. It doesn’t even have to be from a big fall or a car accident in some cases. If the disease is advanced enough, a small bump or even a sneeze can cause a broken bone. This is obviously a painful disease that affects millions of people, but what’s the best way to prevent it? Vitamin D and calcium could hold the key to osteoporosis prevention.
Osteoporosis Prevention
Instead of treating your osteoporosis, our preventative medicine experts would like to help you avoid it in the first place. It’s a serious disease that can cost you money and cause other health problems. Fortunately, some lifestyle changes could help you avoid it.
From a young age, getting enough calcium is important. It’s found in dairy products, like milk and cheese, and in some green leafy vegetables. You can also find it in nuts, like almonds. Eating just a handful or so of nuts per day can actually make a big difference in the fight against osteoporosis.
Having more vitamin D in your diet can also improve your bone health. Dairy products offer this nutrient, but vitamin D can also be found in some other food groups. You’ll find it in salmon and tuna. You can also find vitamin D in egg yolks. Whether you’re snacking or sitting down to breakfast, you can find a way to get more vitamin D and calcium into your diet.
The reason you need more calcium is that this nutrient makes bones stronger. When you have lower levels of calcium in your body, your bones give up some of theirs to compensate and restore your calcium levels to normal. If that continues to happen, your bones will start to get weaker.
Ensuring that more vitamin D and calcium make their way into your diet can help keep your bones healthier in the long haul. And it’s never too early to start thinking about your bone health and osteoporosis prevention. Even what you do in your teen years can affect you later on in life. So visit our practice today and see how you can help fight back against osteoporosis.