Welcome, my name's Dr. Auric Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, an author and a keynote speaker. I'm CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand. blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Eric Bishop. Welcome to my podcast and videocastation. As always, I really am grateful for you tuning in and I hope you're well. Today, I'd like to talk about osteoporosis. I've probably... said before that I'm interested in this space having purchased an OsteoStrong franchise that my partner and I are running here in Hobart. Well, OsteoStrong is all about axial bone loading. What does that mean? It means putting a stress or strain through the bone. to trigger bone growth, axial loading. So loading the bone down its long axis. So trying to make bones stronger and at the same time making muscles stronger. We think it's a great sort of a great service to allow people to really maximize their health span. Having said that, that means that I'm sort of interested in osteoporosis. and muscle strength, and aging, and all those things, because they all sort of overlap. So what I'd like to share today is something that came through from Lifeforce. Lifeforce's Tony Robbins, and, well, Tony Robbins is involved, and Tony Robbins is involved with OsteoStrong as well. So a Lifeforce email came through with six tips to prevent osteoporosis and maintain strong bones with age, so I'd love to share that. with you and chat around it a little bit as we go. So point one was get enough calcium and vitamin D. Well, that's a bit of a no-brainer. I like to think of the concept of building bone perhaps a little bit like one could think of the concept of baking a cake. There are certain ingredients and steps required. Well, Osteogenic loading or loading the bone, weight-bearing exercise is the term some people use, but loading the bone obviously is required to stimulate the bone to respond. But what if the building blocks are not there? What if the body doesn't have the equipment it needs to build that bone? Imagine you want to... build a fence in the backyard. Well, that's all good and well, but you can't walk out into the backyard and just start building that fence unless you've been to Bunnings and got the bits and pieces you need. Well, calcium and vitamin D are those sort of bits and pieces. Vitamin K2 fits in there as well. Well, calcium is part of the hydroxyapatite crystal calcification that occurs within the bone mineral or within the bone matrix that becomes the trabecular and cortical bone. Vitamin D is really important because it alters calcium absorption and vitamin K2 is super important because it has a role in really impacting the balance between bone reabsorption and bone. deposition. So I tend to think calcium and vitamin D are super important, and vitamin K2 is important in there as well. Number two of the six is make resistance training part of your regular routine. Well, I think this is really valuable. Resistance training is really another word for weight training, if you like. And I think many people who are on a journey to try and maintain their health and fitness for as long as possible, recognize that some sort of weight training is critical. Well, it turns out that OsteoStrong, as it happens, is a superb way to deliver a one maximal rep stimulus to the bone and muscle. And this is a way to maintain strength in a measurable, reproducible, safe way because we're using specific equipment. with only one visit a week having said that we provide a fantastic opportunity but there's other ways you can go around generating that resistance stimulus those other ways just often take a bit more time they may not deliver the same amount of force and they're often not measured and they may well they may lead to injury as well so Resistance training, absolutely critical. Anything you can do to build up strength, maintain the strength, which is really good. Walking will probably keep you fit, for example. Swimming, cycling will keep you fit cardiovascularly. But it may not always give you the stimulus you need through those long bones to generate bone growth. The third thing on this list is limit processed foods as much as possible. There was actually a study done in 2020 in a journal called Nutrients where they really found that people who took processed meats, pastries, pizza, all the stuff without barcodes tended to have lower. bone mineral density. And is that because those additives are erosive to the bone or is it because the people who tend to consume those foods are not eating enough of the good foods? Don't know the answer. Either way, I think it's a pretty good idea for you to be thinking about the sort of diet which relies on food that doesn't come wrapped in plastic with a barcode on it. Except almost everything does these days. Well, you know what I mean. The less processed, the better. Interestingly, this particular snippet from Lifeforce suggests reduce your alcohol consumption. And just recently, I, or very soon, either before this podcast or soon after this podcast, there'll be one on metabolic syndrome. The impact of metabolic syndrome, not just on heart, but also liver, brain, kidneys, the whole lot. And metabolic syndrome is probably driven by alcohol as well. It certainly seems, as far as I can see, that much more than one standard drink a day is probably not good for most adults in the long term. increased amounts of alcohol can interact with vitamin D metabolism, calcium absorption, and really will just have an impact on good bone health. One of the things I've really become interested in is point five, and this is, again, coming back to that thinking about building bone mineral density, a bit like baking a cake. Well, you need the ingredients. And one of the critical ingredients of building bone and muscle is amino acids, which can then be converted into proteins. Well, one of the proteins, obviously, we need the muscle proteins. The myofibrils generate myosin, and myosin's the protein that pulls and contracts. But the bones need collagen. Collagen is what forms the scaffold that the hypoxiaapatite crystals form in and give us bone. So protein is critical. And in our own centre, I really take the time to speak with many of our members around the importance of calcium, vitamin... vitamin K2, but making sure they get amino acids on board as well. As you may or may not be aware, our need for protein increases as we age, partly because we don't produce it as well, partly because we don't absorb it as well, and partly because we're also often diminishing our exercise capacity. And so we need to be able to build muscle and maintain it because that loss of muscle is going to be linked to frailty and frailty linked to poor outcome in the long term. We need plenty of protein as we age. And I think that looking to protein supplements may be a very sensible thing for many people, particularly when we understand you need about two grams of protein per kilogram of weight. per day. So a 70 odd kilogram person needing nearly 150 grams of protein, that's quite a lot. If about a third of a steak is protein, then we're talking a 450 gram steak per day equivalent. Now, you can have that over the course of the day, of course, but that's still quite a lot. And I'd warrant that there would be many people as they age who don't reach that target and therefore are really putting themselves at risk of not having the building blocks on board they need to build the muscle and bone they want as they age. Number six, quit smoking. Well, if you're smoking and listening to this, that doesn't make sense because the very people who would be listening to this and tuning into Lifeforce are probably the very people who have already quit smoking some time ago. There's no question that right across the board, cigarette smoke is detrimental to our health, but would you have guessed, it actually mucks up your bone health as well. Anyway, that's it. Six tips to look after your bones as you age. Well, I hope you find that interesting. I think bones and muscle strength are super important as we age and there's no question that it's become a focus for me and a bit of a priority for me as well. I've done my weight session today. for that axial muscle and bone stimulus. Well, I'm going to wrap up there. I am going to wish you the very best. I do hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Till next time, take care and bye for now. Join the Healthy Heart Network and become part of our growing community. If you're interested in your heart health and risk of heart attack, then join. the Healthy Heart Network for only $5 as a lifetime member. This represents $55 worth of value. We offer and help people understand their present state of heart health, what their current level of risk is and the positive steps they can take to improve their risk of heart attack in the future. go to www.healthyheartnetwork.com.au and click the join the family button.
