One More Resource Against Osteoporosis!

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Getting more minutes of movement results in less loss of bone mineral density even when many other factors are controlled/adjusted for, according to a new high-quality Finnish study looking at hundreds of people in their 70s over the course of a year.

  • This includes relatively low-impact moderate exercise, e.g. brisk walking!

• Don’t want to cut out wheat, but do want the wheat products you consume to be healthier?

  • Today’s sponsor, Wildgrain, offers high-quality fresh bread, pastries, and pastas made with zero-bleach flour and no artificial additives!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Perfect bread substitute: these “3-ingredient” oatmeal tortillas (7:40)

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

The three* ingredients:

• 1 cup rolled oats

• 1 cup of water

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• ½ tablespoon salt

_{*For some reason, recipe titles always have a special way of counting, don’t they?}

Prefer text? You can read the text recipe here. It’s in Spanish, but if you don’t read Spanish, then Google Translate gives a perfectly good English translation.

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

🦴 MAIN FEATURE

Your Bones Were Made For Moving Too!

We know that to look after bone health, resistance training is generally what’s indicated. Indeed, we mentioned it yesterday, and we’ve talked about it before:

Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

We also know that if you have osteoporosis already, some exercises are a better or worse idea than others:

Osteoporosis & Exercises: Which To Do (And Which To Avoid)

However! New research suggests that also getting in your recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise slows bone density loss.

The study by Dr. Tiina Savikangas et al. looked at 299 people in their 70s (just over half being women) and found that, over the course of a year, bone mineral density loss was inversely correlated with moderate exercise as recorded by an accelerometer (as found in most fitness-tracking wearables and smartphones).

In other words: those who got more minutes of exercise, kept more bone mineral density.

As well as monitoring bone mineral density, the study also looked at cross-sectional area, but that remained stable throughout.

As for how much is needed:

Read more: Impacts during everyday physical activity can slow bone loss ← pop-science source, interviewing the lead researcher

On which note, we’ve a small bone to pick…

As a small correction, the pop-science source says that the subjects’ ages ranged from 70 to 85 years; the paper, meanwhile, clearly shows that the age-range was 74.4±3.9 years (shown in the “Results” table), rounded to 74.4 ± 4 years, in the abstract. So, certainly no participant was older than 78 years and four months.

Why this matters: the age range itself may be critical or it might not, but what is important is that this highlights how we shouldn’t just believe figures cited in pop-science articles, and it’s always good to click through to the source!

Read the study: Changes in femoral neck bone mineral density and structural strength during a 12-month multicomponent exercise intervention among older adults – Does accelerometer-measured physical activity matter?

👆 This paper is a particularly fascinating read if you have time, because—unlike a lot of studies—they really took great care to note what exactly can and cannot be inferred from the data, and how and why.

Especially noteworthy was the diligence with which they either controlled for, or recognized that they could not control for, far more variables than most studies even bother to mention.

This kind of transparency is critical for good science, and we’d love to see more of it!

Want to apply this to your life?

Tracking minutes-of-movement is one of the things that fitness trackers are best at, so connect your favourite app (one of these days we’ll do a fitness tracker comparison article) and get moving!

And as for the other things that fitness trackers do? As it turns out, they do have their strengths and weaknesses, which are good to bear in mind:

Thinking of using an activity tracker to achieve your exercise goals? Here’s where it can help—and where it probably won’t

Take care!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat – by Dr. Tim Spector

Why are we supposed to go low-carb, but get plenty of whole grains? Avoid saturated fat, but olive oil is one of the healthiest fats around? Will cheese kill us or save us? Even amongst the well-informed, there's a lot of confusion. This book addresses these and many such topics.

A main theme of the book is how a lot of it relates to the state of our gut microbiome, and what is good or bad for that. He also discusses, for example, how microbes predict obesity better than genes, and the good news is: we can change our microbes a lot more easily than we can change our genes!

In the category of criticism, he repeats some decades-old bad science in some areas outside of his field (i.e. unrelated to nutrition), so that's unfortunate, and/but doesn't detract from the value of the book if we keep to the main topic.

Bottom line: if you'd like to understand better the physiology and microbiology behind why dieting does work for most people (and how to do it better), then this is a great book for that.

Click here to check out The Diet Myth, and learn the science behind the confusion!

Wishing you robust health today and every day,

The 10almonds Team