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Avoiding Osteoporosis: Stress and Nutritional Factors You Need to Understand
134 Plays1 year ago
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, Christian Jornov here.
Osteoporosis Risks and Early Prevention
00:00:03
Speaker
Today, I'm going to rivet you with the topic of osteoporosis and how can we avoid it? And when I say we, the group with the highest risk is white women, basically. That's a fact. And that's my client population is mostly white women.
00:00:28
Speaker
from the age of 30 to about 65 or so, so I figure
00:00:34
Speaker
it's probably going to serve the most people if I start recording more of these educational videos. So it's an important issue, obviously the older you get, but it's also important to not necessarily focus on it when you're younger, if you're let's say in your thirties, forties, fifties, but at least put in place the few little bits and pieces that I'll discuss.
00:01:05
Speaker
that are going to help you avoid having to deal with this issue later in life because the problem with issues like this is they take decades to develop and when they occur, it's often too late or we're at that point, we're just managing symptoms and stuff like that, which is not exactly how we want to age.
Christian's Longevity Book Vision
00:01:26
Speaker
The whole sort of reason I started this longevity book series, how to actually live longer volume one is
00:01:33
Speaker
because I want people to reach their 90s.
00:01:38
Speaker
effortlessly, right? I really believe we should be able to reach the age of 90, as long as we start early enough in life, we should be able to reach the age of 90 without any major issues. At that point, maybe we can start creaking and stuff like that. But until then, we really need to be thriving super hard. I'll give you an example why, right? So we went last year,
00:02:04
Speaker
with my wife and my daughter, we went to see a homeopath up in the mountains here in the south of Portugal. And this dude was 80, German guy, really cool guy, super serene, skin flawless, flawless, glowing skin, which is a great sign of health, almost no wrinkles.
00:02:30
Speaker
And he was glowing. He had an aura. His health was emanating out of him. And I asked him, of course, how old are you? 80. I couldn't believe it. I could not believe it. So this guy.
00:02:45
Speaker
knows how to take care of his health. And I am sure that when he's 90, he might be a bit more bent over, a bit creaky, or maybe a bit more wrinkled. But if he continues in the same vein, he'll be easily going into his 90s and beyond, right? So this is what I want for you. And this is why I think we have to start, or at least I have to start,
00:03:09
Speaker
focusing more on some of the basics because a lot of us, unfortunately, are not doing the basics right. Obviously, when I work with my clients, we cover a lot of the basics and the fundamentals, but I figure it would also be beneficial to start putting my
00:03:31
Speaker
my rationale down on paper a little bit more than recording these kinds of videos. So anyway, three and a half minutes.
Understanding Osteoporosis and Prevention Strategies
00:03:39
Speaker
As you know, brevity is not my strong point. Osteoporosis. And I want to talk about the stress connection, not just the nutrition connection. I know everybody knows calcium, calcium, calcium. Maybe some people know vitamin D, but there's more nuance to the story as always.
00:03:58
Speaker
Osteoporosis means literally porous bone and it's basically characterized by low bone mass and microarchitectural deterioration of bone tissue leading to enhanced bone fragility and consequent increase of fracture risk. And usually it's asymptomatic until something happens, like a bone is broken or some kind of severe backache or kyphosis of the spine occurs, right?
00:04:24
Speaker
And as I said, post-menopausal white women. And again, the problem with this kind of issue, why you want to start thinking about putting things in place decades before it could become a risk factor is it results in spontaneous factors of the hip or the spinal vertebrae. Now, half of the men and women
00:04:49
Speaker
Men and women over the age of 55 have low bone mass osteopenia or osteoporosis. That's half. That's according to one of my endocrinology textbooks. And one in six Caucasian women suffers a hip fracture, mortality after which is as high as 20% in the first year. So we got to start taking this seriously early. One third of hip fractures occur in men.
00:05:17
Speaker
and have been associated with an even higher mortality rate than women. And when it affects the spine, chronic pain, debilitation, depression, reduce the quality life of the person,
Inflammation, Hormones, and Aging
00:05:28
Speaker
right? So a little bit of theory, of course, always is good in the beginning just to make sure we are on the same page. We know what the issue is, what's happening, right? But I think what's interesting to discuss is,
00:05:44
Speaker
What causes this bone loss, right? And in my book, my textbook of natural medicine in the chapter on osteoporosis, they talk about anything that feels chronic low grade inflammation will trigger the cellular pathways that activate osteoclasts and or hamper the ability of osteoblasts to produce new bone, promoting bone loss.
00:06:14
Speaker
The way I remember it is osteoblasts build, they build bone and osteoclasts see, kill osteoclasts sort of cause bone resorption and breakdown and so on. So generally, obviously it has to be balanced, but generally detrimental factors will increase the
00:06:38
Speaker
um, osteoclast or osteoclast activity and decrease the osteoblast or building activity. And that over time, this imbalance causes bone loss, right? So anything that feels chronic, low grade inflammation.
00:06:52
Speaker
will trigger the cellular pathways that activates osteoclasts. So as you may know, if you have gotten my book, How to Actually Live Longer Volume One, in chapter one, I discuss the primary drivers of aging and dysfunction. And one of those is inflammation. And there's a lot of things that cause inflammation are diets, toxins, stress, and so on and so forth, right?
00:07:20
Speaker
We'll discuss some strategies to avoid that on the podcast in general, but it's good to know that chronic low-grade inflammation is one of the factors causing this, because a big part of the book is all about how to reduce stress, inflammation, and oxidative stress.
00:07:44
Speaker
These are the drivers, not just of premature aging, but disease itself, degeneration and itself. Other contributors to osteoporosis, so high prolactin. Now, most people generally haven't really heard of this prolactin. It's a hormone slash neurotransmitter. I guess it's more of a hormone. And we can measure this in the blood, right? So prolactin.
00:08:13
Speaker
is when a woman is lactating, its level can get increased. It stimulates calcium to be released from the bones, and that can basically help the woman create milk for the child. So that's why it's called prolactin, but it can also be elevated due to other reasons in men and in women that have nothing to do with pregnancy, right? So another
00:08:42
Speaker
contributor to osteoporosis can be a high parathyroid hormone. This is something that we can also measure very relatively cheaply and we can catch early. So hyperlactin, high PTH or parathyroid hormone, these are markers you can get at your doctor tomorrow if you went to them, right, or to a clinic or whatever else. So catching these early is very, very valuable.
00:09:09
Speaker
So keep that in mind, prolactin and parathyroid hormone.
Dietary Considerations for Bone Health
00:09:15
Speaker
What's interesting is that an insufficiency of calcium in circulation in your bloodstream can trigger the secretion of parathyroid hormone, which is a clue, right? So what will cause an insufficiency of calcium in our circulation? Obviously, it will be when we are not eating enough dietary calcium, right?
00:09:41
Speaker
So other things that contribute to osteoporosis include hypogonadic conditions, corticoid excess, we'll cover that in a little bit. Other things that can contribute to osteoporosis include gastrointestinal,
00:09:57
Speaker
and nutritional factors such as vitamin D deficiency. This is another thing that we can catch quickly and early and cheaply, and we can address, right? Calcium deficiency or low intake, again, something we can recognize quickly. I know during my first conversation with a client, before they even become a client, still when we're in the prospective client stage,
00:10:27
Speaker
That first conversation, I almost always know if that person is getting enough calcium. And generally, most women, unfortunately, are not getting enough calcium. What's crazy is that the RDA for women is between 1,000 and 1,200 milligrams of calcium per day.
00:10:46
Speaker
And you need somewhere in the region of a liter or a quart of milk to, I think that exceeds it slightly, right? I think that's probably in the range of 1,400 or so.
00:11:03
Speaker
But that's how much dairy in a day you would need to consume to actually meet your RDA. And that also leaves the minor fact that it has to be spaced out during the day because you only absorb a certain amount of calcium at one time. It also has to factor in
00:11:28
Speaker
Is your digestion working? Are you absorbing it well? Do you have the enzymes? Are they being produced? Are other things in the diet potentially binding with the calcium and making it un-bio-available? So there's a lot of factors. So just to meet the RDA, which the RDA is not really
00:11:52
Speaker
there for your thriving optimal health sort of thing. It's there to keep people alive so people aren't dropping left, right, and center on the streets. And then there's questions about how well the government are handling people's, you know, protecting people's health, right? Because the government has to protect our health. So other factors can contribute. So, so far we've covered high prolactin, high parathyroid hormone,
00:12:19
Speaker
certain hypogonadic conditions, corticoid excess we'll cover in a second, gastrointestinal and nutritional factors. So you can have enough calcium, but if you don't get enough magnesium, that's a problem. If you don't get enough vitamin D,
00:12:34
Speaker
That's a problem. If you don't get enough vitamin K, that's also a problem. And then there's a bunch of other co-factors that are involved in the building of bone, right? Now, other than that, we have a lot of different pharmaceutical drugs are actually very detrimental. And I'll cover a couple of them. There's just way too many to really cover in one video.
00:13:00
Speaker
or one podcast. Anytime you take one of these topics and start digging in, it's a rabbit hole that you can spend weeks on. So I figured, let me give the most important information and a few bits and pieces you can start doing today as opposed to getting lost in the weeds and all the theory. So drugs and treatments, high alcohol intake,
00:13:28
Speaker
various conditions, rheumatoid arthritis, COPD,
00:13:36
Speaker
What's important to remember is it takes longer to build bone than to break bone down, right? So you really kind of have to not let this slip because the biggest reason for this is because stress can actually contribute to this whole debacle of bone loss as you age.
00:14:01
Speaker
Now, I will probably do a separate video on this, but as I discussed in the book, how to actually live longer, volume one. Stress can quite literally make you fat and give you diabetes, cause you to get sick more often or develop thrush or candida overgrowth, and it can accelerate osteoporosis and sarcopenia, which is loss of muscle mass.
00:14:24
Speaker
and muscle weakness. And it can also precipitate cognitive decline, contribute to dementia, make you depressed, cause high blood pressure and contribute to heart disease. And in more extreme cases, stress can even cause or trigger psychosis. So
00:14:44
Speaker
You may have also read in the first chapter of the book, I discuss certain conditions that are known and recognized in scientific literature to be triggered
00:15:00
Speaker
or caused by the use of glucocorticoid medications. So cortisol mimicking drugs and one of those is steroid induced osteoporosis and
00:15:17
Speaker
Here is the crux of the matter. So cortisol inhibits bone formation, suppresses calcium absorption, increases loss of calcium through the urine, right? So this means that if you are under chronic stress, especially when coupled with a low intake of calcium,
00:15:43
Speaker
This is the recipe for osteoporosis later in life, right? Because all that cortisol excess will inhibit bone formation, suppress calcium absorption, increase loss of calcium through the urine. And then if you're not eating dairy, if you're let's say doing a plant-based diet, that will further exacerbate the issue, right? So stress,
00:16:14
Speaker
Stress is a big one. We seem to think a lot of these things are, you know, certain things are only stress mediated, like psychological conditions. We think depression, you know, schizophrenia, whatever, these things are just caused by psychological factors. Well, some of us think that other people think it's genetic, whatever, but
00:16:37
Speaker
But we also, we also look at other issues where we think it's only nutritional, right?
Stress, Fasting, and Nutritional Advice
00:16:42
Speaker
Or you didn't get enough vitamin D, you got rickets, you didn't get enough calcium, you got osteoporosis. You kind of can't separate the mind and the body. So there's a lot of
00:16:55
Speaker
purely, quote unquote, psychological issues that are driven by nutrient imbalances or deficiencies, for example, anxiety and so on. And there's a lot of physical ailments that psychological stress is a massive driver of, right? And the reason that is the case
00:17:19
Speaker
is because psychological stress basically entails the same hormones and biochemical mechanisms as does physical stress. So whether you're at the computer here, like angry at your boss or whatever, or you're running away from a bear or you are
00:17:45
Speaker
dying of starvation, touch wood, sorry for the morbid examples, the mechanisms are the same, the same stress hormones are increasing. So daily life unfortunately creates this hormonal milieu where as I mentioned already high cortisol which many of us are living in this high cortisol state
00:18:06
Speaker
We are inhibiting bone formation, suppressing calcium absorption and increasing loss of calcium through the urine. And then a lot of us are not supplementing our diet and or we are not eating well. And when I say we're not eating well,
00:18:25
Speaker
To be perfectly honest, to be perfectly blunt, I mean, we're eating too many damn plant foods, especially a lot of grains and seeds and nuts and beans and crap like that. And we're not eating enough high quality.
00:18:41
Speaker
Pastured all that good stuff organic animal products that that's what I mean and I know I have to be kind of blunt because I've just Seen enough of the damage that a high plant food diet has done to In some cases some very young people way too young to have the the health problems that they're having And obviously it gets worse as one one ages, right? So Where did I want to go with that? right
00:19:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So where I was going with that is this stress. You might say I'm not that stressed. I have a pretty easy going life. But if you're doing intermittent fasting, low carb diet, if you're doing a lot of
00:19:26
Speaker
too much exercise, which is difficult to, I suppose, quantify easily. If you're doing all this intermittent fasting, low carb diets, these things are actually acting as a stressor, right? I believe women should not fast
00:19:45
Speaker
Even 14 hours is starting to stretch it. I recommend to my clients 10 to 12 hours is more than enough because as soon as your liver glycogen levels start to drop,
00:20:00
Speaker
you start to kick in the stress hormone response, glucagon, cortisol, eventually adrenaline, and you start to break yourself down. First, you're breaking down glycogen stored glucose, but
00:20:16
Speaker
Sooner or later, you start to break yourself down, your structure, muscles, bones, joints, and so on. So there is no point in doing this, and it's actually counterproductive for weight loss because these stress hormones, adrenaline, actually drives insulin resistance.
00:20:38
Speaker
And cortisol, when it's elevated over time, actually stimulates the deposition of fat around the trunk and the face. Okay. So remember this, you, you, I think a lot of people are underestimating the amount of stress they're under.
00:21:03
Speaker
I really have to get this put on a billboard up somewhere and they are overestimating the quality of their nutrition. Not necessarily that they don't buy high quality food, but they're
00:21:19
Speaker
choices of food are skewing a little bit too much towards grains, not seeds, and a lot of plants that don't have a lot of essential nutrients in the form of high quality.
00:21:35
Speaker
You know be vitamins fat soluble vitamins that are only found in animal products the right types of fat saturated fat not these polyunsaturated fats that oxidize super quickly and once they become part of us that means we oxidize super quickly and what is oxidation.
00:21:55
Speaker
It's aging, it's rusting, right? And so on and so forth. The protein, the amino acid content of the foods and so on and so on, right? So you may be underestimating the amount of stress you're under or you have been under, which is driving these sort of processes. And you may be overestimating the quality of your diet. I guarantee you that because
00:22:23
Speaker
I work with people almost every day. I speak to clients and at the start of the program, usually a lot of people have a lot of gaping holes in their nutrition and their stress management. So that's why I'm saying it, not to be super high and mighty.
00:22:41
Speaker
But I am just, and as I read out now what to do, you will see, oh, I'm not getting that nutrient. Oh, I'm not getting that nutrient. So you will see that a lot of us have a lot of room to improve, right? And that's why I'm doing the video to kind of shed a little bit of light wherever I can, right?
00:23:05
Speaker
What to do? Well, calcium intake. Let's tackle that. Number one, calcium intake. So if you, if you don't eat dairy, and when I say eating dairy, I mean, like I said, already a liter of milk is.
00:23:24
Speaker
1200 milligrams of calcium, maybe a bit more on my goat milk. I get organic goat milk from me and my daughter. I think it's about 1400 milligrams per liter, so roughly that much for a quart, a little bit less. And I think cheese is more concentrated, cottage cheese is more concentrated, right?
00:23:48
Speaker
you will get more concentrated forms of sources of calcium so milk is that i suppose one of the less concentrated sources of calcium but if you're not getting a liter in and even i stopped getting a liter in every day because there's quite a lot of fat in the in the goat milk there's five five grams of fat per hundred
00:24:10
Speaker
So if I drink a liter, that's 50 grams of fat, and then I'm eating other fat sources. So I just start ballooning up super fast if I drink milk, ad libitum, as it were, right? So calcium, I believe most people need to supplement, right? And there's two ratios that you supplement it with. Generally,
00:24:40
Speaker
two to one calcium to magnesium you always want to take calcium with magnesium and
00:24:48
Speaker
one-to-one calcium to magnesium. So this is how we supplement it, right? So it depends on the person. It depends on other factors usually, but I've switched to a product, thorns, calcium, and magnesium. It's chelated, malate, right? It's malate. It's kind of cool because we also, I recommend all my clients to do liver flushes.
00:25:15
Speaker
And you need to take malic acid. So taking the malic acid in the form of calcium and magnesium malate, it basically adds more malic acid, keeps the stone soft. So you're gonna be more prepped for the liver flush, but that's kind of besides the point. So what I'll do is I will include a link to this calcium, but here's the thing, right?
00:25:39
Speaker
You can take the calcium and magnesium. That's great. But at that point, if you're doing one thing, you want to do a few other things right. So you want to take vitamin D.
00:26:00
Speaker
And that helps with calcium absorption. You want to take vitamin K because that balances D and it also helps with shuttling the calcium to the right place. So in the bone and not in your soft tissues, leading to soft tissue calcification and a host of other problems. So this is where if you start one thing, it's good to
00:26:28
Speaker
to go all in if you can because sometimes one thing is not enough sometimes one thing can cause an imbalance in other things right so you start with calcium you have to balance that with magnesium you have to balance that with vitamin some vitamin D
00:26:46
Speaker
Vitamin K, but if you're taking fat soluble vitamins, you want to balance the fat soluble vitamins. This means you need E and K. E is great for many reasons. I have a whole chapter in my book on how to protect ourselves from polyunsaturated fatty acids. Vitamin E is one of the tools in that
00:27:06
Speaker
battle against these very pervasive toxins. They are toxins, right? We're not meant to consume that much polyunsaturated fat as humans, right? We're consuming orders of magnitude more than we should be, right? So vitamin E is super essential in this scenario in any context in the modern world, pretty much. But then you also have to
00:27:35
Speaker
balance that with vitamin A. And I actually personally don't use supplemental vitamin A. I eat liver once, twice, sometimes three times a week, and a smaller amount if it's spaced out over the week or if it's one sitting, slightly larger amount, but roughly the same amount each week. And then I have my child, my daughter, she has a little bit. Once, twice a week, my wife,
00:28:03
Speaker
And I give some to my dog, because this is a nutrient bomb. This is the multivitamin that you find in nature. And you will get fat-soluble vitamins. You will get vitamin A that will balance the other stuff. You get fat-soluble vitamins, but because we only eat it once, twice a week, some people don't even do that. Not all of my clients desire to eat, unfortunately, liver.
00:28:32
Speaker
But in those cases, adding eggs and egg yolks especially is a good source of a lot of these nutrients. So you can always do that. Plenty of egg yolks. This is again where we go back to the plant-based stuff. There's just things in eggs and meat and milk.
00:28:51
Speaker
and liver that you will find nowhere in the plant kingdom. So if you truly want to be healthy for a long time and thrive, I think most people will need to eat animal foods to some degree. And then here's the other thing. So liver, because it has all these minerals,
00:29:11
Speaker
there's a lot of other co-factors that are not as prominent in the calcium slash bone health slash osteoporosis discussion, but these include things like boron, zinc, copper, manganese, silicon, selenium, iodine, even strontium. So a great source of that is liver.
00:29:36
Speaker
And actually this is something I wanted to mention at some point, but kind of has been, I've been wondering, I had been wondering for a while, wait, how is it possible that we have such a high RDA for calcium, right? A thousand to 1200 milligrams a day. And the only source is milk ostensibly or dairy. How in the heck did people used to survive back in the day or did they just not
00:30:06
Speaker
did they just have very porous bones and they just survived until 30, 40, 50 years of age and then they disintegrated because you know nature doesn't care for about you after you've had you know your progeny and so on so and then it kind of struck me at some point a few I guess two three months ago people all people
00:30:28
Speaker
pretty much used to hunt animals. And when you hunt the animal, you don't throw anything out. Or when you find the carcass that you then eat like a scavenger, because we have the acidity of our stomach is very similar to scavengers. So there's, there's decent evidence that we were also scavenging a lot, not just hunting, because hunting is hard. Catching anything, any mammal with four legs,
00:30:54
Speaker
It's not impossible and it's taking it down with like a stick or stone spear is very hard and so on and so forth so.
00:31:06
Speaker
But even if you do, you were not going to throw away. You're not just going to have the filet mignon and then throw the animal away. So what were people doing to make a short story long here? So people were eating the bones. I really believe they were eating the bones.
00:31:24
Speaker
and they were getting a lot of these nutrients and what better place to get the nutrients required to build bones eating bones because they will have not just calcium and magnesium and you know all the other minerals are just listed but there will be a huge proportion of it will be protein in the form of collagen right so
00:31:48
Speaker
This is another area where our modern diets are severely lacking, right? First of all, many people, especially as they get older, especially women as they get older, they don't need enough protein.
00:32:02
Speaker
They may have digestive trouble. First of all, makes it hard to eat, let's say a lot of meat and so on. Makes it hard to extract the nutrients from that nutrition. But what it also does is it makes them avoid that stuff. So I've worked with some ladies that they don't like red meat.
00:32:25
Speaker
They don't like how it sits in their stomach, and that actually can stem from certain deficiencies and certain other issues. For example, if you're zinc deficient, let's say because you have a gut problem, inflammation that's causing malabsorption, that zinc deficiency
Digestive Issues and Nutrient Absorption
00:32:45
Speaker
can feed into a reduced ability to produce hydrochloric acid.
00:32:51
Speaker
which means it will be harder to digest meat and extract the zinc from the meat, which is the best source of zinc. And then that feeds forward into the zinc deficiency, reduces ability to create digestive enzymes because some creation of some synthesis of some of them is zinc dependent. So this creates a feed forward cycle. So those ladies, they actually might feel better on
00:33:20
Speaker
a plant-based diet, but that's making the issue worse and worse and worse, right? So with some folks, we actually use hydrochloric acid for a while to help with that issue, right? So they can start eating more high-quality meat, but you have to be careful because if the person has certain dysbiosis, it can actually make it worse. I think it, not I think, I know if you have H. pylori,
00:33:49
Speaker
want to be very careful with that, it can actually make things worse. So these are things you really, some of these things are a little bit, you don't want to mess with. But my point there is if you're eating the bones and or you're making bone meal or bone broth and then so you make the bone broth
00:34:08
Speaker
and then you can crush and grind the bones to a powder, then you're making bone meal. That's a great supplement. So if you're kind of DIY, you want to do more natural stuff,
00:34:23
Speaker
something more sustainable than buying a supplement like a calcium supplement, mineral supplement, you can actually make your own bone meal. And for a while there, I was collecting bones, putting them in the freezer, but I just, it was a little bit too much effort and work. I would make the occasional bone broth, but then it was just
00:34:41
Speaker
Too much stuff going on, but I probably will do that eventually right the thing is my dog she eats all the bones we like usually chicken bones and stuff when we chicken so
00:34:56
Speaker
I also don't want to deprive her of the bones, you know what I mean? It gets complicated here. But if you are a DIYer, get the bones whatever way you can after eating, collect them, you can boil them for a while, make bone broth, then you can grind them in a blender or whatever. And then you can supplement, let's say a tablespoon or a teaspoon and put it in soups and so on and so forth. So that is, I believe, one of the
00:35:23
Speaker
the great ways in which our current diet has changed that is contributing to a lot of these health problems. Remember, or maybe you might not even know, bone is about a third to 40% they say collagen, right? So collagen is protein, it's amino acids of various kinds.
00:35:53
Speaker
That means that there's a lot of protein in bone, which means if you're not eating enough protein, especially if you're not eating enough collagen, that means that over time, you're likely to be in a deficit with the calcium, with the other minerals.
00:36:12
Speaker
with the collagen, the vitamin D and so on and so forth. So adding increasing protein intake, important. And adding collagenous protein is very important. So the best way to do that, so the ways I recommend to my clients is glycine, the amino acid. So this is a major constituent of collagen.
00:36:35
Speaker
about a third of collagen is glycine. And this is the way I sometimes like to frame it to people. Think about it this way. Let's say your bones on your body weigh, I don't know, 10 kilograms or 22 pounds. Let's keep it simple. Let's say 10 kilograms is what your bones weigh. Let's say 30 to 40% is collagen.
00:37:00
Speaker
of that, let's say 33% for easy math. So 10 kilograms of bones, 33% of that is collagen, about a third of that is glycine. So you could say that of your bone mass about 11%, let's say in this example,
00:37:26
Speaker
is glycine, the amino acid glycine. So that means that you have a kilogram or more of glycine in your bones. Here is the interesting piece that I'm actually going to be presenting on this in a couple of live workshops at the end of the month.
00:37:55
Speaker
This is where people have to bridge the gap in understanding this. Glycine is a part of collagen, but it's also a major part of your detoxification system.
00:38:13
Speaker
So over the decades, as you reach the age where osteoporosis may become more of a risk factor for you, over those 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years,
00:38:27
Speaker
You've been bombarded with a lot of different toxins from the modern environment, which means that if you haven't been getting enough glycine and collagen and bones and stuff like that in your diet and all these other bits and pieces and protein in general,
00:38:44
Speaker
you have a great reserve on your body to protect yourself from these toxins, right? So the body will gladly break down a little bit of bone to get a little bit of glycine and all the other amino acids for other more important, more vital for immediate survival functions. So you can, this is where people are like, oh, but you know, so-and-so is 80 years old
00:39:14
Speaker
They don't supplement and they're totally fine. That person...
00:39:19
Speaker
being exposed to what we're being exposed to now, they can get there. You can get there. You can get very far in life without doing very few things right. But in the meantime, the body's making up those deficits. So if calcium is insufficient in the diet, prolactin will go up or parathyroid hormone will go up and you will break down some bone, get the calcium in the bloodstream because calcium is used for a number of other vital functions and so on.
00:39:48
Speaker
If not enough, if a lot of toxins are coming in, like many people, in many people's case, like from pesticides and plasticizers and so on and so forth, pollution, and they're not getting enough protein and not getting enough of the amino acids, the body will break down itself, including bone, which is a great storage site for some of these amino acids. And then with those amino acids,
00:40:14
Speaker
the cells will create the antioxidants required to detoxify these problematic toxic compounds. So your immediate survival is put way, way, way in front of your bone health. And this will work. This is why humans are so damn resilient because we have this storage capacity and the body is incredibly good at
00:40:41
Speaker
triaging and then compensating for one thing, but what is it doing? It is robbing Peter to pay Paul. So it's robbing itself one area where that's less important for immediate survival, is given less priority so that something is taken away, broken down, sent over to the liver,
00:40:58
Speaker
antioxidant enzymes detoxify the compounds you're still alive bodies like jobs done. But what happens when you get to sixty seventy eight years and all of the suboptimal things keep accumulating this is what i'm teaching you.
00:41:15
Speaker
And what I help clients with is we're going to optimize things now. First of all, we're going to reduce the toxins coming in so that burden is reduced to begin with. But then we're going to give all the building blocks, nutrients, the energy required to deal with all of these things coming in still without having to rub our own body. This, I think when people get this, they're like, damn, I wish I started working with you 10 years ago. Well,
00:41:42
Speaker
10 years ago, I didn't know this stuff, but as I got healthy, as I figured out a bunch of stuff, I had to share it with more people because once you grasp it, once you get it, you're like, okay, so I'm reducing stress because stress increases cortisol. Cortisol liquefies my lean tissue, my bones, my joints, my skin, my
00:42:11
Speaker
parts of my organs and so on, just so glucose could be made to survive the stress that I'm getting myself into. It also increases calcium loss, inhibits calcium uptake, inhibits bone formation. It basically kind of holds the
00:42:33
Speaker
production of new proteins in many senses because when there's a big emergency, you're stopping production regeneration and so on and you're figuring out how to survive. This is what stress is. That's what it causes. The only problem is that the current society we're in, stress is a daily factor and it did not used to be like that or it would be very
00:43:00
Speaker
there was always stress but it would be intense but very short lived right so that is the the food side of things the moral of the story here is protein is just as important for
00:43:18
Speaker
bone health as for other health, right? It's not just calcium.
Protein, Insulin, and Bone Health
00:43:23
Speaker
You have to balance the minerals. You have to balance those with the fat soluble vitamins. You have to continue getting the B vitamins because they're crucial for energy productions. But, excuse me, if you eat eggs and liver, you're going to be covering a lot of those bases, right? So this is a big issue for women. They're already under-eating at the state
00:43:47
Speaker
in which they are when they come to me and sometimes they're in their early thirties sometimes they're in the forties fifty sometimes during the sixties but in almost all cases i would venture to say they're under reading even when wait.
00:44:02
Speaker
Even when excess weight, they believe is an issue. Even in those cases, most women are under-eating. And this becomes harder as we age for some of the reasons I already explained. So focusing on protein and especially collagen
00:44:20
Speaker
Collagenous protein, gelatin is a great one, very easy to incorporate into the diet. I'll discuss, I have to discuss it in a separate video because I want to wrap this one up. But this is so important, right? Getting the collagen, because the other thing is, right, we can synthesize collagen, we can make our own glycine, but it's
00:44:46
Speaker
It's insufficient for our daily needs. That's why collagen decreases and the body's ability to produce collagen also decreases, they say, by one to one and a half percent per year. Right. So we have to be adding these things.
00:45:02
Speaker
exogenously from the diet, from supplementation in some cases, because we just don't get enough of them. There's no secret when you actually kind of lay it out. That is the key to a very long and very healthy life is getting a shitload of good nutrition into you.
00:45:24
Speaker
Right? Not being bashful with nutrition and staying stress free or learning how to aggressively ameliorate stress. And this is another massive topic that I've done a lot of research and experimentation on.
00:45:44
Speaker
I know I'll share a lot in the coming episodes, but I'll have to wrap this one up. But aggressive stress reduction is, I would say, my forte at this point, right? So very important to balance both of those. I won't really talk more about calcium. I had, like I said, you can really rabbit hole of these things. So calcium, the fact that
00:46:09
Speaker
In the US, the average dietary intake of calcium in the US these days is about 600 to 700 milligrams, far short of the 1200 to the 1500 milligram intake that is recommended. That's the recommended, not the optimal intake, remember.
00:46:32
Speaker
Why do I recommend calcium and magnesium supplementation? There you go. Because most people aren't meeting their requirement. This is from the textbook of natural medicine. By age 65, in both men and women, calcium absorption is only 50% of adolescent absorption levels. That's huge.
00:46:54
Speaker
So this is why, again, I like to incorporate digestive enhancement into a person's program, especially if we're trying to claw back health from a health issue. You need that extra support.
00:47:10
Speaker
Yes, we already covered the effective calcium absorption requires vitamin D, three, and then utilization requires K2 and so on and so forth. But another thing is magnesium, right? So 60% of the magnesium in the human body is in the bones.
00:47:29
Speaker
So it's a key constituent of the bone matrix. So we cannot forget magnesium. It's another one of those things that most people's diets are quite badly deficient in. Here's the thing. Here's another thing, right?
00:47:46
Speaker
too much protein, and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second, but too much protein actually results in calcium excretion in the urine, rather the phosphates in the protein, they require calcium to balance. So if you eat a bunch of protein, let's say you eat a big steak,
00:48:07
Speaker
It's it's not optimal because it will leach some of the calcium from your bones. So what I recommend to my clients is to Obviously you're gonna be taking calcium and magnesium with meals So when you take the calcium with the meal that balances the phosphates, but here's the thing
00:48:27
Speaker
I also recommend to my clients to take glycine with meals or collagen or gelatin unless it's already a balanced meal in terms of lean protein.
00:48:41
Speaker
and collagenous protein. So best example of that would be something like a chicken wing, so the wings have the collagenous part, like the skin, and then obviously there's meat in there. So that would be a much more balanced snack. The problem with that kind of
00:49:05
Speaker
with chicken wings is even when they're organic, most of these organic chickens even, they're being fed a lot of grains. So their fatty acid profile is very Omega-6 heavy. So that is not an optimal food to eat. There are some tricks and tips how to get the Omega-6s out of that. But
00:49:25
Speaker
it's getting too long winded now. So when you're eating steak, when you're eating protein, it's really good to take it with glycine to balance the methionine in the steak, another kind of long story, and also with calcium. So this is another thing I teach my clients. And that is another thing
00:49:48
Speaker
briefly is hyperinsulinemia so if your insulin is high it can actually inhibit the kidney's ability to reabsorb calcium so more is lost in the urine so if you have a high insulin it could be because of
00:50:06
Speaker
various metabolic issues not necessarily because you eat too many carbs but it can actually be exacerbated if your fat intake especially if it's omega-6 fat intake that can actually contribute to hyperinsulinemia or elevated insulin level so another cheap
00:50:29
Speaker
and very valuable marker to get is the fasting insulin marker. If that is above three to five, you are creeping into some kind of, let's just say suboptimal territory. I've seen it much higher in some clients and that will cause issues over time. The thing is, while the person is younger and healthier, the
00:50:54
Speaker
The high insulin, basically it's signifying insulin resistance and this means that cells are not responding to the
00:51:10
Speaker
signal of insulin to uptake glucose, right? So what a younger, healthier person will do is their pancreas will crank out more insulin. So this will kind of get the job done.
00:51:25
Speaker
But over time, this obviously will wear out the organs will cause a lot of other other health problems and so on. So I do touch on that in my book, but it's a little bit of a long story. But it's just another thing that is the fasting insulin marker is like $15, 15 bucks. And it's really valuable information to get a baseline on, right?
00:51:49
Speaker
And then there's more and more and more, like I said, this could go on and on. I would just finish this discussion with the textbook of natural medicine. Those guys are a little, they're not very, the naturopaths, they're great people.
00:52:06
Speaker
the editors and so on. But it's written by a lot of authors that are kind of of the old guard where they were basically brainwashed and indoctrinated to think that saturated fats are bad, cholesterol is bad. And while there's a lot of really good information in those books, they
00:52:27
Speaker
tend to really poo-poo the animal protein, the animal fat. And a lot of those folks are just going to die with those ideas and beliefs. But
00:52:43
Speaker
In spite of that, they actually state that saturated fats in meat and dairy products from organically raised pastured animals contain significant amounts of bone-protective fatty acid conjugated linoleic acid, so CLA, conjugated linolenic acid. Over the last 20 years,
00:53:08
Speaker
CLA has drawn significant attention for improving bone mass, reducing body fat, cardiovascular diseases and cancer, and beneficially modulating immune and inflammatory responses. In contrast, meat and dairy products derived from animals fed the animal version of the standard American diet, which is 50% hay and silage.
00:53:32
Speaker
and the 50% grain are high in pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats and low in CLA. So meat and dairy products from grass-fed animals contain 300 to 500% more CLA than products from cattle fed the conventional diet. So
00:53:51
Speaker
Always remember food quality matters. Food quality matters so much, especially in today's world. So the challenge, the big challenge of today's world is the food production methods, right? So we have to know what the threats, risks are. And armed with that information, we have to know what decisions to make in order to mitigate those risks, right?
00:54:19
Speaker
And this is what I teach my clients. If you need more help with your health journey, please feel free to book a free intro session. Link is down below. It takes you to my website. Call is completely no obligation. So if it's not the right time for us to work together, if it's not a fit,
00:54:41
Speaker
That is it. And maybe I can give you an idea or two anyway during our conversation. Yeah, so I hope you found this useful and I'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for watching.