Osteoporosis: Personally I think…

The Bone Health Revolution, the book I talked about in my post yesterday arrived late last night as an e-book.  It’s 54 pages long so it is something of an exaggeration to call it a “book” and rather dear at more than $.50 per page. 

However, in terms of the research findings, I could have written it myself.  I have reached the same conclusions after researching the field, and like Goldschmidt, have found that a change in lifestyle has brought about a change in my bone health without the help of medically prescribed medication.

Since I reached these conclusions independently, I do not think it is unfair to summarize the main points on which we heartily agree:

1.  The relationship between bone density and bone fracture, contrary to popular opinion, is not strong.  Many women, especially in Asian cultures, have far fewer fractures than we do in the West, even though our bone density in the West is much greater.

2.  Bones get thinner with age.  Period.  It’s not a disease anymore than wrinkles and grey hair are a disease.  So what is causing the fearful increase in fractures among older women especially in the West?  The problem is not thinning bones but brittle bones.  A thin stalk of bamboo might survive much greater assault because it can bend than a dense but brittle branch.  It’s the same with bones.  The question is not what is making our bones less dense but what is making them so brittle.

3.  More than anything it’s probably due to the food we eat, with a strong secondary push from our reduced exercise.  Fundamentally the problem is that we generally eat too many acidic foods and not enough alkaline foods.  Because our blood needs to be kept at neutral in order for us to stay alive, the body leaches calcium from the bones to restore the balance if we’ve eaten too many acidifying foods.

4.  So what should we be eating to get more alkaline foods and less acidifying foods?  Broadly translated into ordinary English, it means more fruit and vegetables, and fewer grain products, animal  and dairy products.  If this sounds to you a lot like the same nutritional regime that reduces cancer and heart disease, it is.  Which is encouraging.  A healthy diet is a healthy diet is a healthy diet.     

To be a little more specific, healthy alkaline foods are almost all fruit and vegetables, wine, draft beer,  mineral water, buckwheat, millet, sprouted beans and seeds,  most spices and herbs, and some nuts.  The mother of all alkaline foods are raisins and figs.  A handful of raisins or a few dried figs once or twice a day have multiple health benefits.

Acidifying foods are essential for human health, but we need no more than one acid food for about each four alkaline foods we eat.  Acid foods include almost all grains (or things made from grains like bread and pasta), legumes and beans, dairy products (including milk, which may be a surprise because it contains a lot of calcium), all meat and fish.  Hard cheeses and egg yolks are highly acidifying – the opposite of raisins and figs.

Personally, I can’t get into compulsively counting the number of acid and alkaline foods I am having every time I prepare a meal.  But I do look at the menus I serve most often and have made a few alkaline additions to meals that are high on the the acidic side. 

Foods to be drastically reduced (or eliminated altogether if your will power is greater than mine) include fizzy drinks, spinach, rhubarb, peanuts & peanut butter, milk and dairy products.  Caffeine can be a killer for bones, so if you are a coffee, tea, or soda fiend, an addiction to any of these can be worth fighting. 

5.  Do we need supplements?  Yes.  1400 mg calcium (calcium citrate tends to be absorbed the best) with half that much magnesium.  It’s a bother, but calcium has to be taken several times a day, because we can only absorb 500 mg at a time.  So it’s a waste of money to take more than that.  (I take mine with breakfast, dinner, and just before I go to bed.)  Also take either separately or in a multi-vitamin daily amounts of vitamins D, C and K, along with silicon, boron, selenium, copper, manganese, and zinc.

6.  Don’t skip the exercise.  20 minutes a day is best, but 3 x a week will help a lot.  I turn on music and do a circuit by rotating every two minutes from stretching, strength training, and aerobics.  It is the only way I have found to keep deadly boredom from turning my good resolutions into promises for what I’ll do tomorrow instead.

7.  Fosamax and the other biphosphonates that are routinely perscribed to women with low bone density might, in the long term, be extraordinarily dangerous to bone health.  It increases “density” by stopping natural bone loss.  Unfortunately, it also stops normal bone replacement.  So it may be fostering dense but very brittle bones.  It hasn’t been around long enough to know for sure.  We do know for sure that Fosamax also has some other draconian side effects for some people that make a fracture look like the preferred option.  In my opinion, Fosamax is a very high risk option in light of the alternatives.

If you want to read more but don’t want to do all the research yourself, The Bone Health Revolution is a good summary.  It’s available at www.saveourbones.com.   Osteoporosis:  the silent epidemic by Marilyn Glenville, PhD is excellent and so is her website www.marilynglenville.com.  Her book is available on www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk.   She favours changing one’s food patterns as the first strategy, but is not as horrified by the possibility of biphosphonates as Goldschmidt is – or I am.

Osteoporosis comment: wisdom or spam?

Someone has just added a comment to my November 6th post about osteoporisis suggesting that I check out her website which I did, and which turned out to be an advertisement for her book, The Bone Health Revolution.  It’s not available on Amazon or any other bookstore I can find, and the publisher is not identified.

Ordinarily I look at this kind of thing with weary cynicism, but this woman sounded so much like me that I ordered her book.

It is by Vivian Goldschmidt, a New York woman with an M.A. in nutrition and whose doctor urged her to start taking Fosamax.  Like meshe  started to do some research on the subject rather than plunge forward unheeded to follow the advice.  Much like me, she uncovered a lot of information that gave her pause, and, also like me, set out to find a natural cure for her thinning bones.

She says she’s found it and has written a book which she is selling for a few cents less than $30 (U.S.  currency).  I’ve ordered it.  Since it has to come to me here in England it may take some time to arrive, but when it’s here, I will read it and give you my assessment.

It will be interesting to compare her claimed route to success with mine.

A nun’s final vows

It’s a little embarrassing to look back and see what was so obviously going on when I made my final vows as a Maryknoll nun.  Final vows are supposed to mean final commitment, no going back, no changing your mind, no breaking the promise.  So it takes some fancy footwork to explain how I managed to take final vows, and why I am sitting here now a very married and thoroughly non-nun for more than 40 years.

I will start  with the more ego-enhancing part of the explanation which, I admit, I’ve only recently thought up.  It is that the Catholic Church itself sees final vows as less irrevocable than getting married or becoming a priest.  In fact, women outside of marriage don’t have a commitment that the Church sees as irreversible.  Men do but not women.  I think it makes it just that little less significant, that little less binding.

Baptism, and marriage, and ordination to the priesthood can’t be undone, even by the Pope.  I can’t go to Rome and say I want my original sin back, that it was removed from my soul when I was baptized and before I was old enough to give my consent and that it’s not good enough to say I can easily produce many more sins of my own.  This was my first sin and it was an original. 

I can’t go to Rome and say I don’t want to be married to X anymore either.  If I have enough money, I might be able to convince the powers in Rome that it was never a valid marriage in the first place, but if I can’t achieve that, I’m irrevocably married until one of us dies.  Likewise, priests can be unfrocked and relieved of their priestly responsibilities, but they can’t be un-ordained.  Being made a priest is a permanent state for life.

Becoming a nun, even taking final vows after many years on probation, never becomes irreversibly permanent in that way.  Rome reserves the power to release nuns from their vows. 

So perhaps the fact that I took my relationship with Peter more seriously from the start than in retrospect I took my final vows at Maryknoll was in part the result of a subtle socialization.  I always knew it didn’t really have to be for keeps.

But there are other explanations, too, for which I must take a greater share of personal responsibility.  About which, more on another post.

Psalms with passion

I have just been reading a new translation of the Book of Psalms.  It lacks the musical poetry of the St. James translation, but the contemporary approach made me realize how passionate the Psalms actually are.  People engaged with God with an immediacy that is almost non-existent in the modern world.  It is certainly far beyond anything I am capable of.

The anger, the pleas, the hope aimed at God make a modern domestic engagement look like a warm drink of water.  Who really experiences this kind of belief in God’s presence in the world today?  Someone today might pray to be cured of cancer, or to find a lost lottery ticket or car key, or to reverse the course of unrequited love.  But usually not, I think, with the total conviction reflected in some of the psalms.

I would have been less surprised to discover that the following was an excerpt from an email than from Psalm 6:

“Please, I beg you not to be so angry with me.  I can’t bear it.  Come back, if you love me.  I am worn out, I can’t work, and I cry myself to sleep, and wake up crying again.  I have lost weight, and cannot bear to be with anybody but you.”

Commiserations of the dieters

I read some blogs today by fellow dieters.  Some of them sound so familiar I could practically copy them verbatim here and sign my name.  Mostly I find myself laughing at the familiarity of the games we play, the resolutions and (mostly fruitless) self-flagellations we engage in.

As an act of recognition of our common sisterhood (or brotherhood, as the case may be, but by coincidence or design, I stumbled on more dieting blogs by women than men), here is my week’s review.  I stepped on the scale this morning having lost another half pound.  So I skimped on the last three mini-breaks of the day and celebrated instead with a G&T, an off-piste cookie, and rather larger servings of roast beef than my calorie-counter could accommodate. 

The “excuse” I manufactured was that I’d walked for an extra hour in Cambridge and did another 20 minutes circuit training.  This might not sound so bad next to what I used to call a “Sarah Lee Episode”  in which I could manage to eat an entire Sarah Lee cake without ever actually taking it out of the refrigerator.  But it’s a pitiful display because I really hadn’t earned a “celebration” yet.  If I had, it really would have been Ok, but instead I used my old rationalizing dodge. 

Well, I said I wouldn’t fudge the truth.  I’ll let you know if tomorrow is not the rather stricter day of abstinence and exercise I’m planning.  If it is, I’m going to write about something else entirely.

Surprise diet success – so far

I am amazed to discover how effective my adaptation of the “Hours of the Divine Office” (or alternatively the Muslim 5 daily calls to prayer) as a diet strategy is proving to be.

I’ve never hit on anything before that helps me keep my eye on the ball so well.  Not that I don’t have to use all the other strategies I’ve developed over the years.  Like walking out of the kitchen or jogging in place until the irrational need for something off-plan to eat subsides. 

Nonetheless, I know myself well enough to predict that my next temptation will be to take short cuts on my five daily reminders.  You may wonder how I can manage to cut short a thirty second break but do not underestimate my capacity for rationalizing my way around a diet direct from God himself.  It’s the kind of thing I’ve done a 100 times before, so I know going down that route is unfortunately both possible and self-defeating.  In this case, it’s taking out the one thing in my diet regime that has worked better than anything I’ve ever tried.  Definitely an improvement on the Cabbage Soup Diet.

I’ve lost three pounds since a week before Christmas.  Three more to go.

Breakdown service

We came to several conclusions about breakdown services while we were being extricated from the floods.

The first is that Yorkshire is a good place to break down.  Well, no place is a good place to break down, but when you’re in trouble and you’re looking for help rather than the adventure of a lifetime, Yorkshire can be highly recommended.  People there are as eager to help as New Yorkers in the middle of a black out or terrorist bomb.  The comparison arises from first hand experience.  We had offers of coffee, two emergency candy bars, hot soup, a complimentary hotel room reservation way before we knew how much we were going to appreciate it, a taxi, a dry towel, and a lot of solicitation.  And good crack, which is what they call talking up there.

We also had a first hand comparison of auto breakdown services.  The driver of the car stuck in the water in front of us sat next to us in the Little Chef.  His breakdown service, the RAC, had his car towed to a garage within two hours.  Our breakdown service, the AA, was unable to reach our car before the police finally had it towed five hours after our original call.  We were considering switching to the RAC but the garage running the towing service for the police told us that in their experience, the best breakdown service in England is Briannia Rescue.  Even on paper, their cover is superior to what we are getting from the AA, and a recommendation from the men at the cutting edge has a certain authenticity that seems worth taking seriously.

So we’re switching when our current cover runs out in two weeks.  www.britanniarescue.com

One of the lucky floods

I’ve never been in an actual flood before.  The only thing I can remember that might be related to being in a serious flood situation was getting my feet stuck in the mud when I was about three years old and having to be rescued by my mother.  At the time, I remember thinking I might sink to China, which I’d been told was on the other side of the world.  I don’t suppose I would have been consoled had I realized that the antipode to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, USA was not China but the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The flooding we were caught in on Monday was the real thing.  We were leaving the north of England, and when we looked out the motel window when we woke up, we thought we were fortunate that it was raining rather than snowing.  The flooding on the road at first wasn’t too bad.  We slowed down at the dips in the road and made sure our brakes were working when we came out at the other end.  We crawled ahead, feeling quite competent in our Volvo as we passed the occasional car overcome by the rising water. 

The first serious challenge was the bridge.  The river had broken its banks and was flowing fast over the bridge by at least two feet.  It was narrow and harrowing.  We weren’t so afraid the bridge would collapse as worried that we would be washed over the side.  We made it.  By this time, traffic was lined up miles in front and in back of us and the only possibility was to inch forward with everyone else.  We went through another half dozen pools of water and watched a mini-Toyota scoot through what was the last major flood before the road climbed into the hills.  So we were sure we could do it too.  We were half way through when the car in front of us stalled.  Coming at us in the other lane was a tourist bus.  The only option we had was to break.  Our engine stalled, and we glided to a permanent halt.  The wave of water created by the bus washed up against the car, cresting at about three feet. 

Peter and I sat there reviewing our situation.  “This is serious,” Peter remembers my saying.  I guess having this assessment come from his relentlessly optimistic partner added to Peter’s own view that our circumstances might be slightly more than merely inconvenient.  There was every reason to expect the water level to keep rising.

But a police rescue vehicle stopped and offered to take us to the Little Chef at the top of the hill.  We waded through the overflowing river with water up to our thighs and climbed in  the back.  When we got to the Little Chef, we called our breakdown rescue service and ordered a cup of coffee to warm us up until we could be towed out.  We didn’t know it, but we were going to drink a lot of coffee. 

We got home on the back of a tow truck at 7 pm the next day, 36 hours after we had begun what we thought was a four-hour trip.

The good news is that neither of us caught a cold.  We might be feeling what my mother used to describe as “sick and tired,” but in truth we are merely weary.  We are waiting to see if our car fared as well.  The serviceman at the garage where the car was towed listened to the uncooperative thud and sullen silence of the car when we tried to start it, and thinks we are going to need a new engine.  Our insurance company told us not to expect to hear before the middle of next week.

I’m not sure it’s a logical conclusion, but I feel quite lucky.  The really extraordinary thing is that Peter does too.

Life: by John Lennon

It was John Lennon, I think, who said life is what happens when you are busy making plans to do something else.  By that definition, I have clearly been involved in living for the last three days.  It certainly is not what I’d planned.

It started out on schedule.  Peter and I drove north to the Lake District on Sunday for a quick visit to his dentist.  It’s a four hour trip, but Peter likes the dentist he has on the National Health Service there, so we make the occasional trip into a little excursion.  On this particular trip, we drove through the Yorkshire Dales with their wonderfully evocative names – Blubberhouse, Stump Cross, Beamsley Hill, Kettlewell, and my two favourites (I’m not making this up) Wigglesworth and Giggleswick. 

We stopped at a roadside coffee shop where I was reminded that we were in the north of England.  There is a north-south divide in England just as there is in the States, but the affluent half is in the south over here.  The north is where the Industrial Revolution started in the mid-1850’s, and is the center of England’s coal mines.  Paradoxically, it has also been the home of poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, artists like Henry Moore, and writers like D.H. Lawrence.  It has some of the most stunning beauty in England, great cities like Manchester, and there is a strength of character here that sometimes looks like mere stubbornness, sometimes like a capacity for survival that is awesome. 

There is also among some what looks like resentment at the lot life has dealt them.  The girl who served me the coffee in the Little Chef handed it to me with an expression that suggested it was an abuse of her human rights that she should actually be required to work in order to earn her pay check.  As we drove through the cold rain under the slate-grey sky, I thought about this self-defeating sulkiness that I have seen so often among communities that think themselves ill-used.

Coming south on the way home, we were in another Little Chef just a little north of our Sunday coffee stop.  How we ended up there for ten long hours is the story for tomorrow’s post.   But in the midst of our rescue from three feet of flood water that had stalled and possibly destroyed our car along with hundreds of others, we saw the best of northern hospitality, ingenuity, and kindness. 

Dumbest idea of the year award

I have just read that some academics want students banned from using Google and Wikipedia to help them in their course work because they make plagiarism too easy and are “recycling shallow ideas and unreliable information,”

Apart from the fact that a ban on students’  using the internet would be about as easy to enforce as a ban on the ocean tide, I think it must qualify as one of the dumbest ideas of the year.  We don’t ban books because they are easy to read or contain erroneous information or shallow ideas – whatever a shallow idea may be.

If teachers can’t make error, plagiarism and illogical thought – whatever their source – an opportunity for learning, my suspicion is that they may not know how to teach.