But What About the Calcium?

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Welcome to the Virgin Diet lifestyle show with your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin.

So as part of the Virgin Diet, I have you dump the dairy again for just three weeks to see how your body handles it. I find a lot of people do a lot better without dairy. But the big question I get asked immediately after I say dump the dairy is, but what about the calcium? What about my bones? So I'm going to go through the real deal on calcium and bone health. Because I got to tell you, when you really look at the research, the countries that do the most dairy also have the highest instances of osteoporosis because dairy is very acidic. And that means that when you drink it or eat it, your body has to leach the calcium and out of the bones to buffer your PH back to normal. So ideally, when you're dumping the dairy, the top swap for milk actually is almond milk. And it's even better for you. Higher in calcium and not acidic. Another great source of calcium are sardines. Now, I wish I could tell you that I can handle sardines, but I'm a big baby about them. But if you can do sardines, bonus points for you. But really, calcium is just a small part of the whole healthy bones picture. You know, what is more important is that you keep the calcium that you eat and not only that, you keep it, that you absorb it. So in order to keep it, the big thing that has to happen is you have to have good acid alkaline balance. When you look at a lot of the foods that are very acidic, grains, animal products, if you are not balancing those with a lot of greens and plants and nuts, then you're going to be acidic and your body's got to get the minerals from somewhere to balance your PH back to normal. Now, simple way to resolve this is just make sure getting a lot of vegetables. You know, in the Virgin diet and Sugar Impact diet, I tell you to have 5 to 10 servings of non starchy veggies a day. There you go. That's it. And another way you can do it, you can cheat. You can use green balance, which is my healthy green drink. So if you're kind of stuck somewhere, sometimes if I'm out, I'll just go buy whole foods and I'll have some chicken and a green drink. And that's how I do my little balance. That's my quick cheat. Just so you know. So again, you want to bal animal, protein, grains, coffee, soda, alcohol. Like, hopefully you're not really doing soda at this point with a lot of plants, nuts and seeds and greens. Okay, now, to help you absorb calcium, vitamin D is key here. What I'm going to tell you first with vitamin D is you got to test for it. You know, I. One thing I've had people do for years is to check their 25 hydroxy vitamin D level into OPT. Nice to find 50 to 80 ngs per ML. And I got to tell you, I've never seen someone have good vitamin D levels without supplementation for a couple different reasons. Genetically, you may have trouble actually making vitamin D from the sunshine. Some people do, but also a lot of us have been avoiding the sun or slathering ourselves with sunscreen, which is a block for vitamin D production.

Okay.

And then depending on where you live, you may need to change your dose. Vitamin D supplementation depending on the seasons. Now important when you're supplementing with vitamin D, you also want to make sure that you're supplementing with vitamin K. I use a product, vitamin D, that has both vitamin D and K. Because vitamin K works with vitamin D, it directs the calcium to your skeleton while preventing it from being deposited where you don't want it, like your organs and your joint spaces and your arteries. And also, don't forget the magnesium, because you need magnesium to convert vitamin D into its active form so that it can turn on calcium absorption. Okay, another one. Because I hear all the time, oh, you know, walk to help your bones. No, you need to really stress your bones to help your bones. And resistance training is the key way to do that. Especially when you do full body exercises that are a little bit unstable, right? And think about things like doing a squat, doing an overhead press where you actually load the spine, or those vibrating machines that you stand on. Those are the things that really load your skeleton. That's what you want to think about doing. Now, I talk about stressing the body and stressing the bones with weight training, but be careful with stressing your body with stress because when you're overly stressed, when cortisol's up, it's very catabolic and it causes you to break down and, and also it causes you to have breakdown your GI system. And if you have poor GI system, you can't absorb your nutrients as well. So deal with your stress. Watch out for being catabolic because if you're breaking down, not building up, you're going to lose bone. And one of the great things to do there is to also up your vitamin C, the number one vitamin used by your adrenal glands to get depleted under stress. Another thing that you can do here, fish oil and flaxseed meal. Both of these can help with bone remodeling. Estrogen, of course, is huge here. It helps protect against bone loss. And I just mentioned a little bit, your gut is so key in osteoporosis. You know, if you have celiac or gluten intolerance and you've damaged the microvilli of your gut, you're not going to be able to absorb your nutrients. And if you can absorb your nutrients, then you are in deep, deep, deep trouble. So the first thing that you want to think about doing is get the gluten out. Get the gluten out. If you have not gotten the gluten out yet. Virgin diet. That's all I have to say to you. Virgin diet. So get the gluten out. Heal your gut. I use a couple different things to do that. I have a product called Leaky Gut Support that helps soothe and heal the intestinal mucosa and reduce the inflammation, create a good balance of the good, healthy gut bacteria. I use a product called Micro Balance Biome Balance to do that. And also you've got to be able to digest protein because you need protein to build great strong bones. And for a lot of us, if we're under stress over the age of 30, 35, we don't have enough hydrochloric acid to break down our protein. So you might want to think about taking some digestive enzymes. All of that can work together so that you can break down your protein. And then your food can be broken down and can go to the gut. And now your microvilli can extract the nutrients that it needs. Right? All of these things have to work together. I remember the first time that I found osteoporosis in a man. I had a guy come into the gym I owned and he had celiac disease. And I instantly sent him out for a bone density test because I was Afraid that if he'd had damaged microvilli for a long period, that he wasn't absorbing his nutrients. And yes, sure enough, he had osteoporosis. And that's another key point here. We tend to think of osteoporosis as a female disease, but it's not just a female disease. Now, a couple other things to think, think about with bone health. We tend to think about getting a bone density test for women at 50 or older. I think that is something we need to start at 20 and get a good baseline. Your most important years for building bone are when you're a teen or 20. You've got to watch if you're a mom with teenage daughters, if they're doing a lot of diet sodas or sodas that have phosphoric acid that are leaching the calcium from the bones, they could be setting themselves up for osteoporosis right then and there. This is when they want to be building bone, not losing it. So I'd love to see a baseline and then making sure that you're holding onto our building bone as you go. And the key ways that you do this again, resistance training, watching your stress, making sure you have a healthy gut, doing good oils that help with bone remodeling, having good estrogen balance, good acid alkaline balance, and of course, getting your vitamin D and K in. And then a good mineral complex, especially focusing on magnesium. And one other way that you can get magnesium. Just want to do a shout out for one of my favorite things, and that's to take an Epsom salts bath. Your skin's a sieve that's rich in magnesium. Not only is it really detoxifying and lowering stress hormones, it's also another great way to get your magnesium. So again, there's so much more to bone health than calcium. And drinking that glass of milk is not the way to have better bones. And in fact, last point here, study, the nurses health study that looked at over 77,000 nurses over 12 years found the nurses that drank the most milk had the highest rates of bone fractures. So again, let's drop that milk. Let's switch it over to almond milk. Let's put all these key strategies in place so that you have great bones, because you don't want to have the first sign of you having issues with bones being that you break your hip. You want to make sure that this never happens to you.

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