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Vitamin K2 is More Important in the Fight Against Osteoporosis than Calcium
The numbers speak for themselves ... by 2020 one in two Americans over the age of 50 will already have, or be at risk of developing, osteoporosis!1
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Currently 10 million people in the United States have the bone disease osteoporosis. And an additional 33.6 million people have osteopenia or low bone mass, and are at risk of osteoporosis and its potential complications later in life. That’s 43.6 MILLION and that’s only right now.
And because of our aging population, along with the ill-conceived recommendations of the USDA and the FDA, the prevalence of these diseases are expected to increase to 52 million (12 million of osteoporosis and 40 million of osteopenia) by 2010, and to nearly 61 million (14 million of osteoporosis and 47 million of osteopenia) by 2020.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to be a victim of osteoporosis!
If you or a loved one are concerned about osteoporosis—and you should be—here is the simple but too often overlooked truth about how this prevalent bone disease operates. What the public at large tends not to realize— and what your doctor may not be aware of—is that both osteopenia and osteoporosis are entirely preventable.
But don’t look to the government, food industry or the drug companies to tell you about a natural, powerful, bone building treatment. They have a shortsighted plan that focuses more on continuing the “calcium conspiracy” in order to sell calcium-fortified foods and, after that fails to halt the osteoporosis epidemic, to sell expensive and possibly dangerous drugs that actually prevent the body from removing and replacing old brittle bone with healthy new bone.
What’s more, the secret to bone health lies not in increasing your calcium intake as you have always been told, but instead increasing your intake of the critical nutrients necessary to recycle bone calcium and to preserve, protect, and build healthy new bone.
You have to lose bone to make new, strong bone
Scientists call the natural process of bone loss “resorption.” Before new bone can be formed, bone cells called osteoclasts remove old bone tissue. Their bone building counterparts, osteoblasts, then come through and deposit new bone where the old bone once was. New bone is strong and flexible and much more resilient and resistant against fractures. It is also—and this is important—living tissue that needs nutrients.
It is estimated you replace about 10% of your skeletal bone tissue every year. When you were still growing in your teens and early twenties, the formation of new bone outpaced the resorption of old bone. Later, in your thirties, there was a balance in the resorption and bone formation process. However, sometime in your late thirties to early forties, resorption began to outpace the formation of new bone.
Remember, resorption is a natural process and the first step in recycling bone calcium and building new bone. So resorption is not the villain here—though that is what the makers of osteoclast-blocking bisphosphonate drugs that halt resorption (like Boniva® or Fosamax®) would have you think—nor is it the lack of calcium— though that is what the government and the calcium-fortified food industry would have you think—no, the true culprit is the medical establishment and their single minded focus on “bone mass density” as the only measure of bone health.
To put all this very bluntly: The resorption theory and the calcium deficiency theory are on the wrong track. These are faulty ideas and are causing harm to untold millions. But both ideas have great powers behind them and huge profits are at stake. And so these dangerous theories are defended to the very end.
Bone density measurements don’t tell the whole story
Currently, the only way to diagnose osteopenia or osteoporosis is to use a bone densitometer, which measures one’s bone mass and rates it compared to the average bone mass measurements of a given population. When your body is losing bone and not replacing it, your bone mass, i.e. bone density, decreases. Osteoporosis literally means “porous bones,” and old, porous bone tissue is anything but dense and it leaves you at a much greater risk for bone fractures.
But you can have dense bones that are, nevertheless, brittle. By blocking resorption, bisphosphonate drugs lead to less growth of new bone tissue and bones become more brittle. Only because we use bone mass as our measure of success, it was easy to think this approach was working. An honest mistake perhaps, but now we know better.
The big problem is that the modern drugs may not reduce incidence of fractures, the only true measure of success. They don’t work because, although they reduce loss of bone, the bone retained becomes more brittle. Dense, brittle old bone tissue that is not properly recycling calcium is much more likely to fracture than strong, flexible new bone tissue.
So the ultimate goal in bone health is to not just score high bone density readings, though that is not particularly a bad thing, but instead to prevent the debilitating fractures that are much less likely to happen when the body’s natural processes of resorption and formation are working properly and bone calcium is being recycled.
The Calcium Myth—an innocent beginning
The myth that increasing calcium intake was the key to bone health can be traced back to the creation of the RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance) nutrient recommendations created by the Food and Nutrition Board in 1941. At that time, RDAs were designed to prevent disease caused by nutritional deficiency, and the adult RDA for calcium was set at 800 mg. However, these original RDAs were created during a time when food was being rationed because of WWII. Thus, the 800 mg recommendation for calcium may have been set artificially high by the Food and Nutrition Board because they knew access to food was limited and they wanted to take that into account. This well-meaning, but erroneous recommendation stood for more than 50 years and was taken as gospel by an all too trusting public.
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