The question for you this week is if you had to choose one thing that would add calcium to your diet, to keep your bones strong, which food would you choose?
When I ask people this question, most people would say dairy, like milk.
But what is interesting is that it is not your richest source of calcium. If we take a look at the studies, the studies say that the countries that have the highest dairy intake have the highest rate of osteoporosis and hip fractures. In essence, the people that drink the most milk will have the worst bones.
We should realize that the sources that have the richest calcium are green leafy vegetables. For example, As far as the amount of absorbable calcium, it is far better in green leafy vegetables.
In our office, there are other ways to strengthen our bones to promote bone health. You can do it by doing weight-bearing type of exercises. This will add more stress to the joints, which will cause the body to start laying down more calcium in those weight bearing joints. The weight bearing joints, such as the hips, are the most frequently fractured bones of the body where people have osteoporosis.
What we do in our office is tell our patients to walk for 15 minutes with weights. We kill two birds with one stone when we do that, because we add weights on the body in certain areas that actually add stress to the joints as well globally correct the posture. So, our patients get two great health benefits: the weight bearing stress to the joints to get more calcium plus the correction to their posture.
Check out our video above to see examples of how we add the weights to our patients.