The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen, mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition in I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, we're going to discuss osteoporosis, a bone condition that affects both women and men, and you'll find out what you can do about it, plus later we'll tell you what's new in mothers and give you a chance to win a 100 gift card.

So listen carefully to the cohort this week, but first up, we are joined today by another prominent physician when it comes to alternative medicine. Dr. Allan sasson is the founder and medical director of the institute for progressive medicine. He's been practicing medicine for over 40 years, and is an associate clinical professor at UC Irvine Medical Center, plus a certified defeat autism now physician. His Institute treats people of all ages through comprehensive state-of-the-art new medicine techniques, and we welcome him back to the mother's market radio show, Dr. saw, and how are you?

I'm fine, Kim, thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Today we're talking about osteoporosis, and researchers estimate that one in five women over the age of 50 have osteoporosis, that's a big amount or that's a large amount, and we do wanna start talking about... Asking what is osteoporosis?

Osteoporosis literally means thin bones, so the calcium that used to be in the bones kind of dwindle as you get a little bit older, and when it reaches a certain point, it's called osteoporosis, there's an earlier point called Osteo-Pena, which means the bones are getting thin, but they have not reached a point where that's diagnostic, but this situation is reversible at any point, so in my opinion, it's better and get it earlier rather than late, 'cause it's easier to handle who gets osteoporosis?

Two-thirds of the osteoporosis in women, one-third is in men, so it's wrong to think that because a guy is a guy, he's not gonna get it because guys do get it, and it can be just as serious and guys that... As it is in women, so it's important to look at both sexes and to go after in both sexes.

We talked a little bit before the show, and I was mentioning my grandmother had osteoporosis, and you see people walking around kind of hunched over, and the kind of the thought is lack of calcium. What else can we talk a little bit about, because you told me something that was interesting and there's a lot of factors involved, a big part is the lack of exercise and the inability to stay in a straight posture as you get older, gravity keeps pulling you forward and pulling you down. So after a while, you're all bent over like a question mark, and when we should be an exclamation point, but that's not like that anymore, so there's ways of handling that, of preventing it from happening, and even if it does happen, actually reversing it. Osteoporosis is one of the many diseases we know about that are chronic, that are reversible and preventable, so it's a great thing to be working with because we have so much success, as you are saying that we all outstation our seats. Is there something that we should all be doing as exercise, even when we're sitting in our cars are... Every day that we can start to do as our posture, something that we can do that's just getting ready to go to work or school or whatever we can do.

Well, the thing that works against us the most is sitting... No, we weren't made to set, but we created... Somebody created the chair, and maybe it was Mr. Chair, but everybody is in chairs now, and the more you sit in a chair and the more your muscles with her an atrophy, we don't maintain our posture, the chair is holding you up, you're not holding yourself up.

So one of the things I do when I'm in front of the computer at home is set on one of these swiss balls, where even though you're sitting, you're still having to use your postural muscles to maintain yourself is just one very simple way of working to help yourself, but sitting in a chair for eight, nine, 10 hours a day is a deadly situation, you've gotta do something to counteract that, and those whistles are also good for your core, which obviously is good for your posture, and I think you did when it was in a military exercise, right before when we were talking before, we do that, I try... That's pretty cool. I do it just about every day, and I teach my patients to do it because it helps to maintain a straight posture, and that not only helps your bones, it helps all those other tissues between the bones and the meniscus that's in the joints and the pad that's between the vertebrae, all of these things need to be protected, so it's not just calcium and it's not just osteoporosis, it's a whole thing about protecting the musculoskeletal system, and that's what leads to when it degenerates the pain that we develop in middle age and older, it's not just the athletes who get beaten up on the field to get osteoarthritis and degeneration, it's... All of us, if we don't take care of ourselves.

So osteoporosis is a big part of it, but the rest of it is taking care of your whole musculoskeletal system, and there's exercises, they're stretching, there's heat, there's all kinds of stuff that you can work with to protect your spine and your back and your legs and your knees and all those things that we get up and grown about in the morning, say, Oh my gosh, what happened to me? You know, that's all handle able... Oh, that getting older thing out, because we're talking to the listeners right now, but can you kind of describe it as best as you can with that military cover stances and that exercise, the best you can help to have a picture of basically, you hold yourself as straight as you can, you straighten your back and you tuck your chin in like you watch the people in London, you know those guys with the tall hats in the military tactician and hobbies, and then you... Yeah, the babies, and then you pull your shoulders back and you pull your arms out straight and behind you, and then you turn your thumbs, both of them out, and you pull up your arms as hard as you can and you just hold that pose for about 30 to 60 seconds. It's a core, the most effective one is actually when you're lying on your stomach doing it, and then you lift your head off the floor and I still tuck your chin in, but that's kind of hard to do in an office. People see you lying on the flesh and what's he doing?

But you can do it in a chair and nobody will say anything with at home, you can do it on the floor. And those are very effective.

And you stick your chest out... Right.

To touch out.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. And do you feel that stretch there, so... That's good. And how many seconds do you hold that for a 30 to 60?

I've done it for three minutes, but you don't start with three minutes 'cause then you'll never do it again.

Well, that is good. And that is called the military Corus. If you can start to get and work up to 30 to 60, that's great, and then... Or to three minutes.Can then get osteoporosis.

Yes, Men do.

As I mentioned, one-third of the osteoporosis problems occur in men, and it's for the same reasons, it's a deficiency of calcium, but there's other minerals that are really important, magnesium is important for bones. vitamins like vitamin D is critical, and we've done studies and lots of other people have done studies in the last few years showing that there is almost a universal deficiency of vitamin D, so we typically will put people in Vitamin D. I have found that if you take 5000 units a day, you will not run into trouble with it, so I take 5000 units five days a week, and I tell most of my patients, even if they don't do blood levels, you don't have to do blood levels just take the 5000 units, five days a week, no problem, you're not gonna run into excessively high blood levels, and then the risk is virtually now, at what point is too early to get started on that? At what age level?

Well, it's recommended that even kids beyond vitamin D, the dosage recommended for them is considerably less, so babies might be 200 to 400 units a day, maybe in a 10-year-old, it would be a thousand units a day, and as you get older... And I would say when the risks are considerably higher and the sun exposure is much less, because once you're out there in the working world and you're at a desk and not outside playing soccer, the sun exposure is gonna be quite a bit less, so the vitamin D level is gonna be a lot less. So I think those folks in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, I think 5000 units is fine. Some people would disagree with that. The official recommendations are, they have been raised, but now it's on to 2000 efficiently, but I found that 5000 units is quite safe, and I've had patients with vitamin D levels, if you consider normal to be above 30 and abnormal below 30 and really abnormal below 20. and severely abnormal, anywhere below that, I've had patients whose vitamin D level was seven... Wow. And you can tell by looking at them 'cause their pale, they haven't been in the sun, and a lot of them have skeletal problems, so they have trouble walking, so they don't go outside, and if you're not in the sun, you're not gonna make it, and if you're in the sun and you're all covered with clothes and sunscreen, so you don't get skin cancer, which makes sense 'cause there's so much of that around, you're not gonna make vitamin D. so don't worry about being in San, just take it. Take it as a supplement. It's totally safe.

I think you mentioned it, but if you can repeat it. Because the numbers are really staggering, how many patients do you see with osteoporosis?

Well, we do bone densities in our office all the time, so I'll pick up osteo pen or osteoporosis, and probably half the people that we test... I have one or the other. And again, a lot of people who have it don't know it, basically, osteoporosis is not symptomatic.

You can look at somebody and see that the back is curved and the head is forward, and this looks like someone who probably has osteoporosis, but most people won't even show the postural changes, a lot of people look, okay, but then if you do a bone density on them, you find that it's really low, and I've seen bone densities outrageously low, if a person has been injured or ill, say someone has had polio or someone's had a stroke and they're not able to walk and they're in a wheelchair most of the time. Those folks are really at risk because they're not moving and it's action against gravity that promotes calcification and bone maintenance, and if you're not working against gravity, someone who's in bed a lot, someone who has a problem and can't get around, they are the most severely at risk it's almost to be expected that a person like that is gonna have osteoporosis and they need more work, and the other thing is because osteoporosis is reversible by action against gravity, walking, running, anything where you're upright, these folks because they can't do that, they need all the other steps done to try and protect their bones, you talked about that bone density test, is that how you do test is that... Let's talk a little bit about what that test entails.

Yeah, so called the DECA scan, and it's a very low dose x-ray, there's less radiation involved, and people that are always worried about how much radiation they're gonna get these days from an x-ray procedure, this is considerably lower even than a chest film, it's a minute dose of radiation, it's about the amount you get from walking out in the sun for three or four hours, so it's very minute, so it's totally safe, and we get photos of the bones in the lower back and in the hip, and sometimes we'll do the risk... Those are the three areas that are the most measured related to osteoporosis, and you get a print out what is normal for this age, for this weight, and you can see there's numbers, so if the number comes out as minus 25, that's a comparison of the person's bone density with a 30-year-old when the bones are the densest, and if your mind is 25 standard deviations compared with that person, that's a definition of osteoporosis, and the lower that number goes, the worse it is. So I've seen people who remind us, 35 minus five... Minus six is the lowest I've ever seen now, and that person was in a wheelchair, and you measure the hips and you measure the spine, both routinely... We always do that, but sometimes if a person has a lot of arthritis and the spine is bent and they have all these bones, pairs are gonna get a false reading, so in those cases, we'll measure the hips only and the wrist, 'cause you get more accurate readings spine bone density is the most common to have osteoporosis, and in that situation, you get fractures, a lot of times they're micro-fractures and the person may not even feel them, but the bone is getting shorter and shorter. The person's losing height, Veloso fight is not only from the disks getting there, the discs between the vertebrae, but also the vertebrate, getting these little fractures in them, and they get condensed, so you will lose half a centimeter or a centimeter, and over time it gets to be... More and more, sometimes a fracture will be exquisitely painful, I was just gonna ask you that, that sounds very painful, that's probably the minority of people... Now, a lot of people get these micro-fractures and they don't know what's happening, and then they get a bigger fracture and then they really know because they get a severe, terrible pain in their back or their lower back...

Yeah, lower back, you don't tend to get these in the upper back or the neck because there's not as much weight on them, it's the lower back that's taking so much of the body weight, and those things take six to eight weeks to heal the pain a long time, oh my goodness, these days they have surgery to fix these things, they put some kind of glue where the fracture is in a small surgical procedure, which... And some people has been very beneficial because the races, the pain, the literature says it isn't any better than just letting it heal by itself, but the whole idea here is, let's keep that from happening, let's keep the person from getting these fractures... Oh my goodness, very painful that This is really interesting information and we have to take a break, but there is plenty more to learn right now from Dr. sass and so police stay with us. We'll have to take a break. But we will be right back.

Welcome back to the mother's market radio show, and we wanna take the time to remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market, or download from our website, mother's market dot com, click building for radio and listen to past shows, plus download healthy recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with Dr. sasson and we're talking about osteoporosis, really interesting information coming around, and last you mentioned about shrinking and losing our height, and that really scares me 'cause I'm only 51, so I'm really interested about this, but can you talk a little bit of about drinking... No, first of all, a lot of the laws and height is just related to a change in posture as people are drawn forward in the back gets bent for... Or do you lose height, so if you can get your back straight, you'll gain height, a lot of people, when they're sitting in the exam, Tamera looking at... I say sit straight and they're doing taller just immediately. So if you just work on keeping your posture in the right way, you gain or maintain height that way, a lot of the real loss and height that occurs is not due to the vertebrate getting fractured, although they will reduce somewhat... Most of it is from the discs between the verte brain, these are connective tissue, and they get dried out and they get split and things happen to them over time, we don't have a really good explanation for it, but a lot of it is probably due to different exercises that we've done, or injuries like rear-end car accidents and things like that, that damage the discs between the bones, and if the disc strength, and of course, you a shrink and there's just as many discs as there are verb. We have a whole bunch, 12 plus seven plus five discs in the body, so it's quite a few in feature, them shrinks just a little bit, you can lose an intro too just from that.

So those are the major reasons. And I think being in a good physical program will help to maintain height, you don't wanna be doing the wrong kinds of things and getting injured, but maintaining a good pasture and supporting the bones and taking nutrition, drinking a lot of water, which is supposed to help the discs and not get dried out, those are all good things to be working with, I think as you get older, it's probably not a good idea to be working with very heavy weights, maybe that's for the 20 and 30-year-olds who are really strong, but I think doing some work with weights, maybe five pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, and doing lots of repetitions, you can build up your mouse, support the spine, work with the core without getting injuries. So I have some ladies who just get started, maybe they're 90 pounds and 69 years old, I say, start with two pounds. You don't have to have much. Sometimes you can just work out without any weights, just using your arms and range of motion and that kind of stuff, and stretches are really very, very important 'cause it's... One of the things that occurs is people get tight, and the tighter you get, the more pain you have, so it's very important to be doing good stretching exercises, and again, in the right way, you wanna warm things up before you stretch, you wanna stretch after exercise, those are all good times to help maintain the health of your muscles, and it's all connected... It's not just bones. It's bones, it's muscles, it's ligaments, it's tendons, it's all of those things working together. And you can't just say, Oh this, this is the problem right here. It's usually a combination of factors all together working to create problems. I was reading something the other day, where low back pain is often secondary to neck problems, and when you focus on the neck and you fix what's going on in the neck, even if the person has no next symptoms, the low back gets better.

So these things are all connected. It's not just this or that, we're a unit, everything is working with everything else, and that's why core muscles in the abdomen are just as important as your spine muscles, they're all working together to support each other and you gotta work with all of them. And we do activities like playing golf, which only works with certain muscles or something like tennis, which is a lot of really fast movement, rapid changes in position and twisting and all that, people who do that a lot, or set ups for problems, unless they're doing things like stretching and working with the core, you have to support everything, and that's how the professional athletes these days who are so well trained, it's critical to be doing these activities to maintain the body, but it's not just the athletes, it's all of us. They should be doing it.

Oh, that's excellent information. And you're right. Everything is connected together. What about pain in your joints and bones? It does not mean osteoporosis. Well, pain in the joints is usually not osteoporosis, the problem with osteoporosis is it's a quiet disease, so things are happening when you could be beginning when you're 30 years old, but then it's evolving over time. And a lot of people, they don't know what's going on until they break something... So a person falls down, breaks a hip, well, if they'd fallen down 20 years ago, they went to Broken, they help... They broke the hip because the bones are weak, because there's osteoporosis going on, so then you gotta do an operation, they have to have the happened or they have to have the hip joint replaced, which is a very big deal, and in older people is even a bigger deal, the story is that 10% of the time a hip fracture in an older person results in death, they're not dying from the fracture, they're dying from the complications of being in the hospital, having surgery, getting blood clots, infection, all of these kinds of things, and sometimes even the Surgery doesn't work well, although these days the methods for surgery are superb, so most of the people I've seen who have had hip fracture hire placements have done extremely well. The orthopedics is remarkable these days with what they can do... That's a really good point. I've heard the same thing. And you're right. Things have changed since. It's 20-11 now, isn't it?

You kind of just this but what bones are affected... Now, the main bones are a lumbar spine, so that's lower back, one, two, three, four and five, and the hips, and there's the right hip and the left hip. A lot of times we see on the bone density studies that we do is that the left hip has a thicker bone on the right hip and say, Why is that I'm walking on both legs, but we favor one leg, and a lot of people will put more weight on one side than the other, either because of back pain or because they're strongly right-handed or strongly left hand, they just favor one leg and that leg turns out to have thicker bones than the other, so it's a good, interesting thing to look at to tell the person to say, Well, we're gonna work on your right hip because your left hip is thicker, but it's not like that, you always work with both sides, and certainly when you're taking nutritional supplements, it's gonna affect the whole body. And I think it would be nice to go over those items, the things that we recommend beyond just calcium and vitamin D, 'cause there's other items that are helpful and when are they?

Well, vitamin K has been found to be useful for bones, so we generally will supplement with that, and we don't even measure the level, I just give it to people because it's very safe to take Vitamin K unless you're on a blood thinner called cumann, which in which case, you don't wanna be taking vitamin K, But if folks are not on blood thinners, which is most people, then it's very safe to use. We started about five or six years ago using a mineral called strontium, which is very effective in supporting bone density, there was a study that came out, it must be at least 10 years ago, I remember reading it was a lead article in the New England Journal about strontium itself increasing bone density and preventing fractures, so not only makes them bones thicker and makes a bone density study look better, but it's actually preventing fractures from occurring, and it was substantial, it was like 30% or 40% reduction in the incidence of these things in people who are taking strong Tom, so I give everybody strong to him, he's got osteoporosis or the milder form called osteopath, and we see bone entities going up, and one of the main things I wanted to mention is that since this is a reversible disease, and the preventable disease, we will do bone down and C from year to year that the bone density is improving, it's not just stable and it's not just going down slower, it's actually going up, so after three or five or even 10 years, in person who used to have osteoporosis doesn't have it anymore.

Their bones are now normal.

That's incredible.

And you've been watching us over the course of three years, at what point... What age group? Have you been seeing this?

This could be anybody.

And I've had 80-year-old people who had thin bones get better at... One of the things I didn't mention is the use of hormones, which is kind of controversial, we use that as a major treatment, even more so now, because some of the standard medical drugs have gotten some negative comments about them, negative studies, the bishop Nate, that people take that doctors routinely give to people who have osteoporosis or have conditions where they're gonna get osteoporosis, they put them on these drugs, and it can lead to mandibular problems, so the Jawbone becomes defective and a dentist doing work on people's teeth will refuse to do the work until they get off the drugs for at least three months because they realize in some cases, it's not gonna heal, so you pull out a tooth or you do some major dental work and it doesn't heal, it's called osteoporosis, so the bones and the mandible and the jaw bone actually die, they don't heal and they may take years to heal, so Dennis are very aware of that these days, and a lot of people are aware of it now because they read... And another thing that occurs is that there's a faulty deposition of bones with the drugs in some people, and we can't predict ahead of time who it's gonna be, but they're having fractures that have developed in the femur, that's the upper leg bone as a result of this medication creating faulty bone, so it's not really a good bone, and we use hormones to create the good bone.

Do any drugs cause osteoporosis?

There are some drugs of people around steroids for auto-immune disease or for asthma conditions requiring steroids, they will make bones pretty thin, people have been in high doses of steroids for a long time, say three months, six months, can get osteoporosis, they can get another condition called osteoclasts of the hip, where the bone actually dies and those people need hip replacements, so if you can get some very serious conditions as a consequence of being on steroids, usually in the higher doses... This is fascinating information. I'm blown away by everything else that you've been telling us about how we can prevent that, but is there anything else you want people to know about osteoporosis that we haven't covered yet?

Not from a dietary standpoint, sugar and the bones, alcohol is a big deal for sending bones to cigarette sarees, which are not nutrients, they really send the bones... You have a person who's drinking alcohol and smoking at the same time and doing a few other things like eating the wrong food to those folks are very high candidates for osteoporosis.

Very interesting. Well, thank you very much for your time, Dr. sassanid, we look forward to having you on again. In the meantime, you can catch more of Dr. sasson on his website, I progressive Med dot com, and learn more about his passion for alternative medicine and other great things he's involved with, and we look forward to our next visit. Thank you so much, thank you.

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Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,