It’s easy to overlook bone health, especially in favor of things you can actually touch and see. But your bones play a crucial role in everyday life despite being hidden from view.
Bones give your body structure, anchor your muscles in place, and protect your organs. They’re also storehouses for calcium.
Unfortunately, bones also weaken with age, leaving you susceptible to fractures — even from minor stress, like coughing, sneezing, or bending over. And the people with the highest risk of this happening are women.
But that doesn’t mean your bone health has to decline with age. Instead, you can take action to protect yourself, and you’re never too young or too old to start.
Dr. Adepero Okulaja helps people in her care at The Doctor’s House live their best lives to reach and maintain total wellness. She believes in a whole-body approach, including proactive strategies to prevent disease from occurring and detection in the earliest stages. For women, that means talking about bone health.
Bone basics
Did you know bone is living tissue? These hard structures in your body are continuously changing, breaking down old bone and replacing it with new bone — a process known as remodeling.
When you’re young, remodeling causes your bone mass to increase. In most cases, bone mass peaks around 30 years of age. At that point, remodeling continues, but you start losing more bone mass than you gain.
That’s when your risk of osteoporosis starts.
Osteoporosis makes bones brittle and weak so they can break easily. This chronic disease can affect anyone, but women have the highest risk of the condition.
These high rates of osteoporosis also make a woman’s risk of breaking a hip equal to the combined risk of uterine, ovarian, and breast cancer.
Women and bone health
Two key factors lead to osteoporosis: The amount of bone mass you had by age 30 and how quickly you lose it afterward.
If you have more bone mass “in the bank,” you’re less likely to develop osteoporosis. However, women also lose bone mass at a much faster rate than men.
Approximately 10 million Americans have osteoporosis — and 80% are women. Why? The primary reason is from falling estrogen levels during menopause.
This important hormone is involved in more than reproduction. It also protects bones. As estrogen declines, bones can become weaker, increasing the chances of osteoporosis.
Additional factors that jeopardize a woman’s bone health include:
- Eating a low-calcium diet
- Being physically inactive
- Using tobacco or alcohol
- Having a small frame or being extremely thin
- Severely restricting food
- Taking certain medications
- Being white or of Asian descent
- Having a family history of the disease
Fortunately, it’s never too late to take action to protect your bones, and Dr. Okulaja can help get you started.
Protecting your bone health
The first step in taking care of your bones involves scheduling a consultation so Dr. Okulaja can assess your overall health and help identify your individual risks. She can give you the strategies you need to prevent or slow your bone loss moving forward.
Proven ways to protect your bone health include:
- Consuming a nutritious diet
- Maintaining a healthy weight
- Getting plenty of exercise every day
- Limiting alcohol to one drink per day (or avoiding it completely)
- Quitting smoking
Dr. Okulaja also recommends getting plenty of calcium and vitamin D — a nutrient required to absorb calcium properly.
After assessing your health, Dr. Okulaja can offer personalized guidance on how to add these vitamins to your daily diet, either with food or nutritional supplements. The in-house vitamin line at The Doctor’s House can match the unique needs of various genders and ages.
Dr. Okulaja also offers IV hydration/infusion therapy. This service can address nutritional deficiencies and other wellness issues at a faster rate by delivering important nutrients directly into your bloodstream.
In addition to these methods for protecting your bones moving forward, Dr. Okulaja is an experienced internal medicine specialist who can provide chronic care management if you already have osteoporosis.
It isn’t easy getting older — and it’s never easy being a woman. But there are ways to protect your health so you look and feel your best, no matter your age.
Could your bone health be at risk? Contact The Doctor’s House to schedule an anti-aging assessment with Dr. Okulaja in Edina, Minnesota, today.
