Rebuilding Better Bones At 55

Dr. Doug Lucas shares a case study of a woman who went from osteoporotic to not within one year. Here’s how she did it:

From within

Ruth is a 55-year-old, small-framed, underweight woman with a strong family history of osteoporosis and multiple fractures.

Her risk factors included: negligible resistance training, recent fractures, early menopause, estrogen deficiency, and an ill-managed long-term vegan diet with low protein intake.

Note: the “ill-managed” there is, if you’ll pardon the pun, load-bearing. That is to say: a vegan diet is totally fine if you do it right, just as an omnivorous diet is totally fine if you do it right.

• In the case of an omnivorous diet, doing it right = avoiding red meat, avoiding processed meat, keeping saturated fat to a respectable minimum, remembering to get enough plants too
  • Otherwise, you’ll have problems with your gut, heart, and more
• In the case of a vegan diet, doing it right = getting enough calcium, vitamin D, vitamin K, and protein
  • Otherwise, you’ll have problems with your bones

Ruth’s situation, in numbers: spine T-score declined from –3.5 to –4.1 before treatment, with hips around –2.6, placing her at very high fracture risk.

For any unfamiliar with how these scores work, those are standard deviations from the norm (i.e. a score of zero would be the absolute norm) for one’s age, sex, menopause status if applicable, and broad ethnic grouping.

In Ruth’s case, the biggest issue was hormonal: she had a fear of HRT that stemmed from a mother’s early metastatic breast cancer, which had nothing to do with HRT, but there was that very misleading and popularly misrepresented study that caused a lot of people to believe it was causing cancer.

So, after some reassurances, individualized HRT was started with estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA, with appropriate monitoring along the way.

In the category of dietary factors, gut rehabilitation enabled higher protein tolerance, while supplements were streamlined to focus on metabolism, detoxification, and cardiovascular support. Her protein intake was increased from 30–40g per day to over 100g per day.

As for exercise, her running was replaced with a gradual reintroduction of resistance training after her vertebral fracture, starting with bodyweight work, then weighted vests, and osteogenic loading devices.

Her results so far, by the time this video was made (one year after she began working on this):

• spine bone mineral density improved about 10%
• hips improved 7.4%, moving out of the osteoporosis range

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

21% Stronger Bones in a Year at 62? Yes, It’s Possible (No Calcium Supplements Needed!)

Take care!