Οστεοπόρωση: Ιδανική Διατροφή

Hi! I'm Stelios Pantazis. I'm a doctor and I specialize in medical nutrition and metabolic disorders. Today, I'd like to tell you the ideal diet for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a condition that affects the bones and increases the risk of osteoporotic fracture, namely bone fracture. Osteoporosis may develop at any age, but the older we get the more likely it is to suffer from it. Osteoporosis affects women much more often than men, and it is estimated that many women over 60 suffer from osteoporosis or osteopenia. Osteopenia is a mild form of osteoporosis that is very likely to develop into osteoporosis, if it's not treated. Osteoporosis does not cause any symptoms, so that you can know if you suffer from it or not, and the only way to know if you suffer from it is the bone density test. Unfortunately, many people find out that they suffer from osteoporosis after a fracture, namely after they suffer the worst development of this condition. Osteoporosis is associated with a series of risk factors, namely a series of factors that increase the risk of osteoporosis. These factors are the following: Age. As I said in the beginning, The older we get the more likely it is to suffer from osteoporosis. Family history. Studies have shown that if your mother or father suffers from osteoporosis, it's more likely that you will suffer from it too. Diet. In this video, I'll tell you which foods you should eat more often, in order to reduce the risk of osteoporosis, or if you suffer from osteoporosis, to reverse it. Exercise. One of the strongest messages that we can give our bones to become strong is exercise. The ideal exercise to increase bone mass is resistance training, for example, with weights or weight lifting equipment, while the least effective exercise is swimming. Smoking. Many people associate smoking with lung cancer and heart disease, which are certainly destructive effects of smoking, but even people that live long without suffering from something like that run a significantly greater risk of osteoporosis. Finally, some conditions increase the risk of osteoporosis, therefore if you suffer from osteoporosis, you should find out, with your doctor's help, if you suffer from any of these conditions. The good news is that most of the factors that I mentioned are reversible, namely it is up to us if they will happen to us or not. Obviously, we don't choose our parents. Therefore, you can do nothing about your parents' osteoporosis. But you can do a lot of things to change your diet, your exercise level and smoking. If there is no condition causing osteoporosis, regulating these three factors can reduce the risk of osteoporosis significantly. Today, we're only talking about diet, and specifically about the foods that help and reduce the risk of osteoporosis. Calcium. Most of you know that calcium is the most important inorganic component of bones. Moreover, the calcium in our body is almost exclusively in our bones. Only a small amount of calcium is found in the other cells. The foods with most calcium belong to the dairy family. Dairy is the best source of calcium for people that are not lactose intolerant. But not all dairy are equally beneficial for the health of the bones. If you want to choose the best dairy for your health, you'd better choose fermented dairy, namely the dairy that have undergone fermentation, such as yoghurt, soured milk and kefir. If you're lactose intolerant or you avoid dairy because you follow a vegan diet, you should know that legumes, especially beans and green leafy vegetables, are also rich in calcium. In fact, per calorie, green leafy vegetables contain much more calcium than dairy. However, the many fibers contained in green leafy vegetables make calcium absorption a bit more difficult. If you avoid dairy for any reason, I'd recommend watching the video I've posted on how you can take sufficient calcium, although you avoid dairy. Vitamin D. Vitamin D is the most important vitamin for the health of bones, although it plays a much more important role in other processes and procedures in the body, as I've said in previous videos. You can take vitamin D either through your diet or after exposure to the sun. Unfortunately, dermatologists repeat that we should avoid exposure to the sun, therefore this barely leaves us any choice to have sufficient vitamin D in our body, because too few foods are rich in vitamin D. This is why most people that want to have vitamin-D sufficiency often need to take dietary supplements with vitamin D for a big part of the year. However, many foods that contain vitamin D are healthy in general and worth being included in your diet, such as sardine, anchovy, mackerel, horse mackerel, trout and other small fish that swim near the sea surface and are exposed to the sun much, in order to compose vitamin D.