Alexis Unlimited

Hello World!  I never knew this about almonds… Did you? I wish I did when I was younger, but they probably didn’t know about it back then.  After all, I come from the “dinosaur” era, when little was known about a lot of health issues. I never even heard of osteoporosis when I was young. How about you? Please let me know what you think about this by leaving a comment below…

Most of us think this is only a women’s issue, but my father had osteoporosis and my mother didn’t so it affects men as well. Do you know anyone with osteoporosis?

Eat More Almonds to Prevent Osteoporosis

A population study suggested that your eating almonds could protect you against osteoporosis.

Currently, an estimated ten million Americans suffer from osteoporosis   (I am one of them), causing more than a million fractures, including hundreds of thousands of hip fractures, a common reason people end up in nursing homes. Many older women say they’d rather be dead than break their hip and end up in a home.

Your bone is a living, “dynamic organ

that is constantly renewed through a process of remodeling and modeling” involving bone breakdown by cells that eat bone, called osteoclasts, and bone formation by your cells that build bone, called osteoblasts.

Osteoporosis

is caused by your having an imbalance between bone loss and bone gain,

most often related to your hormonal changes that occur during menopause. (I was diagnosed in my mid 50’s) Is there anything we can do to help tip the balance back in your bone’s favor?

There are a number of specific compounds in plant foods that we eat. that look promising, but, as a researcher talked about in her video Almonds for Osteoporosis, they are based on in vitro studies where researchers basically just drip some plant compound like cranberry phytonutrients on your bone cells in a petri dish and see a boost in your bone-builder cells or a drop in bone-eater cells. But no matter how much people like cranberry sauce, you’re not injecting it into your veins.

For phytonutrients to reach your bone,

they first have to get absorbed from your digestive tract into your

bloodstream and make it past your liver before they can circulate to your skeleton (sounds like a long trip to me). So, what we need is a so-called ex vivo study, where you take people, feed them a food—or not, then you draw their blood a few hours later, and you drip their blood onto their bone cells to see if there’s any difference.

Normally, I’m not impressed with studies funded by marketing boards that pay for studies like the one that found that your eating almonds improved cycling distance and your athletic performance, compared to your eating cookies. But the study the researcher discussed in her video mentioned above was brilliant, not surprisingly, given it was performed in the world-famous lab of Dr. David Jenkins.

There was a population study

that suggested that your eating almonds could protect against osteoporosis.

Researchers could have simply dripped some almond extract on bone cells, but that’s not testing the whole food. Instead bone cells could be treated with the blood obtained from donors who had been fed the whole food to directly test the effects of these foods at your cellular level.

So, researchers exposed human osteoclasts, your bone-eating cells, to blood obtained before and 4 hours after your eating a handful of almonds.

But, wait.

If you ate a handful of almonds every day, wouldn’t you gain weight?

That’s almost 200 calories a day. Women in one study added a handful of almonds to their regular diet – maybe 35 nuts as a mid-morning snack and they were instructed to eat as much as they wanted for lunch and dinner that day. What happened? They ate less. In fact, they ate so much less, they canceled out the nut calories.

In the study, the participants all had the same breakfast and then 0, 173, or 259 calories’ worth of almonds as a snack, before eating as much lunch and dinner as they wanted. The nuts appeared to be so filling that the subjects ate less for lunch or dinner such that, at the end of their day, there was no significant difference in total caloric intake amongst any of the 3 groups.

Part of the reason

we don’t tend to gain weight when adding nuts to our diet may be because we end up flushing nearly one third of the calories down the toilet because we just don’t chew well enough. This is why we think there’s so much less fat in our bloodstream after we eat whole almonds compared to the same amount of almond oil taken out of the same quantity of nuts.

Back to the study:

So, researchers wanted to see if they could suppress the activity of the cells

that eat away our bones. What did they find? Blood “serum obtained following your consumption of an almond meal inhibits human osteoclast formation, function, and gene expression, providing direct evidence to support the association between your regular almond consumption and a reduced risk of developing osteoporosis.”

The researchers also tried before and after eating other meals, including rice and potatoes, to make sure there wasn’t just some effect of eating in general. But, no: The protective effect you get appeared to be specific to the almonds.

I find this to be great information as I have osteoporosis. I was diagnosed in my 50’s and I broke my arm about 6 years ago;  This was my first broken bone ever…

Well, I hope everyone has a great happy healthy day!