PodClips Logo
PodClips Logo
The Peter Attia Drive
AMA #37: Bone healtheverything you need to know
AMA #37: Bone healtheverything you need to know

AMA #37: Bone healtheverything you need to know

The Peter Attia DriveGo to Podcast Page

Nick Stenson, Peter Attia
·
16 Clips
·
Jul 18, 2022
Listen to Clips & Top Moments
Episode Summary
Episode Transcript
0:11
Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek. Ask me, anything or am a episode of the drive podcast? I'm your host Peter attea. At the end of this short episode. I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full along with a ton of other membership benefits. We've created or you can learn more now by going to Peter Atia, m.com forward, slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the ask me, anything
0:35
episode.
0:39
Welcome to ask me, anything AMA episode 37. I'm once again, joined by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we dive really deep into one subject, bone health. This is a topic. We get a lot of questions about but we decided to save our am a for a time when we had accumulated enough questions that we could cover this comprehensively, which as you've gathered by now is sort of how we like to do things because it allows us to go much deeper. So, in the same way, we're going to cover the following. We look at why
1:09
Why everyone should care about bone health. In other words, why is this such a priority? Not just for yourselves. But also for your children, we break down what bone mineral density is how its measured and how much variability exists between people between Sexes and how it changes over the course of your life. We also talked about what influences it both early in life and later in life, we look at differences between men and women when it comes to this health and why menopause has such a disproportionate effect on the bone mineral density of women, we then get into ways that you can improve.
1:39
Bone health from exercise to nutrition supplements and of course drugs we end the discussion around what happens when we're forced to be sedentary and how you can work to minimize the damage during these periods. As a reminder, if you are a subscriber and you want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of this video on the YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy. Am a number
2:03
37.
2:09
Here. Welcome to another am a how you doing
2:13
doing? Well, man, the final seven episodes of Ozark drop tonight. We're recording this April 29th. Interesting date for two reasons, by the way. The other thing that occurred to me this morning is that the days and dates in this year, 2022 are the same as they were in 1994. So I was like, oh my God. Today is Friday, April 29th, which is the same as it was in 94. So on Friday, April,
2:39
29th in 1994 was the practice day at Imola and that's when Rubens barrichello had that horrible, horrible accident, we can link to the accident where he basically hit the chicane and launched into a barrier and amazingly only escape with a concussion and a broken nose. The following day, which is the same day as tomorrow will be, which was Saturday April 30th, was when Roland ratzenberger was killed, which made it the first fatality in formula.
3:09
In 12 years, the last one being Jill Villeneuve in 1982 and then of course, Sunday May 1st which will be the same this year was when Sena die
3:19
all in
3:19
1994. Yeah, I was at the same race. You had these three horrible accidents resulting in two fatalities in one weekend. But again to think the exact same days this year is it was 28 years ago. I didn't notice that until today
3:34
this is really off topic, but do you still have the skill that you had back in the day where you
3:40
Remember what day like day of the week? A date
3:43
was only if I can Peg it to something but not as profound as it used to be.
3:48
I remember in meetings, we used to just throw out random dates and then we would fact check it. Feel like we wasted a lot of time doing
3:53
that. Someone would tell me their birthday, and I would tell them what day of the week. They were born on
3:58
on the complete opposite. End of that. What we're going to talk about today is the topic that we get asked about a lot, and we've gotten a lot of questions that have come in, but we've never really Dove, really deep into it, which
4:09
It is what we're going to do today, and it's kind of all things. Bone, health, bone, mineral, density, osteopenia, or osteoporosis, things of that nature. And I know this is something that you work a lot with in your patience. And I know it's something that's a really big interest for people and so our hope is that we can go through this episode and focus on why is this important? So why should people care about this people listening right now? They'll be a subsection of them that are going to be super interested and they will be probably
4:39
Subsection, who are maybe younger. They've never really thought about their bone health and they might not think it really applies to them, but our hope is in the beginning. At least we'll walk through why they should care about this and why they should focus on it early on in life. And then from there, we'll talk about how bone health changes. As people age the differences between Sexes when men and women and then we'll also focus on things on how people can improve or help their bone health, become better from physical activity to nutrition supplements, drugs and more. And
5:09
Then if all that goes, well and we still have time which is always 50/50 on how these amas go. Will also focus a little bit on people dealing with acute injuries and how they need to think about this which I know is something that you're interested in given your recent shoulder surgery and now you're not as active in one side of your upper body as you used to be. All that said, I think before we start going through those questions, it's going to be helpful to set the stage a little bit. Just so everyone is on the same page and the definitions.
5:39
We're talking about. So why don't we start with? What are some of the types of Bones will be referring to? Because at least for myself coming into this, I just kind of think a bone is a bone and I don't really think much more beyond that. So once you dive into that a little
5:54
bit bone, is, it's a living tissue. Okay? That's obvious, but I think it's also easy for a person to forget that and think of bone as somewhat inert. But in fact bone is heavily vascularized bone. Is an organ that plays
6:09
a very important role in a lot of things. I'm actually not going to go super deep into the anatomy and physiology of Bones. I'll point out just a couple things, right? So first of all, think of a couple types of sections of bone. So we think about the cortical or compact bone and that's what forms, like the shaft in the exterior of long bones. If you think of your femur your humerus, things like that, they have the long shaft, and then the nubbins at the end. So the shaft of that is the cortical or compact bone. And then at the end, you have the trabecular bone sometimes called the
6:39
T-Bone, those are kind of at the end of the bone and there are some differences amongst those in terms of their vascularization and things like that. But again, I think for the purpose of this discussion whenever I talk about compact or cortical bone, I'm talking about the shaft. And whenever I speak about the spongy or trabecular part, I'm talking about the end. Again, I think marrow people probably intuitively understand that marrow is important, but again, it's very important. Right marrow is what's producing our white cells, and our red blood cells. So, in this era where we were thinking about,
7:09
Out, a post covid world. It's important to understand that the memory B cells and memory T cells that are going to provide lasting immunity against this virus and other viruses reside in the bone marrow, the whole purpose of being infected and then having a subsequent infection, that's less devastating purpose of being vaccinated for the same reason is to have memory B cells and T cells that are sitting there in the bone marrow that can respond immediately and quickly upon reintroduction of the same
7:38
antigen.
7:39
Mention now, been sick made me think about your banana nubbins and you recently posted on Twitter, you might be looking for a new profession. Do you want to let people know what your new interest is in the world of longevity? I've
7:52
been very interested in human longevity for, you know, a little over ten years and I'm sure I will remain. So but I've at least considered moving into banana longevity because I think the opportunity for impact is huge, it's one thing. If you can figure out how to take the average person from being a
8:09
80 to 90. That will have a huge impact on the world. But if you could take the average banana and go from like two days before it turns mushy and brown to 10 days, I think it's revolutionary. I just noticed I was on the usda's most wanted list because of how many bananas I waste. So I got to do something about this.
8:27
If you solve the banana crisis and you move to avocados, they'll probably give you a Nobel Peace Prize as well. The upside is very high in this new world avocados
8:36
last so much longer I could buy like
8:39
Avocados and eat them in a week. I can't buy seven, bananas and eat them in a week at one a day, it just doesn't work. I think that entire fruit space is just a racket. I think bananas are a pyramid scheme, the whole things just total scam.
8:53
Maybe one of our upcoming am as well. Just do a conspiracies with Peter attea and we'll just go into the world of bananas. So Peter you mentioned earlier go B cells and T cells. Can you walk people through what cells make bones? This
9:07
can be made as complicated or simple.
9:09
Well, as you want, just think about osteoblasts and osteoclasts and I kind of remember from Medical School the way I used to remember this. So osteoblasts be are responsible for building bone by producing collagen bone, matrix, and mineralizing. It osteoclasts remove bone by reabsorbing calcified bone, and the Matrix. So osteoblasts contribute to increasing bone mineral density osteoclasts the opposite.
9:39
It's also important.
9:39
To understand this exists
9:40
in an equilibrium. So we're constantly remodeling bone adding to and subtracting from this and basically turning over calcium. So bone is like 50 to 70 percent mineral and obviously, what's the predominant mineral? It's calcium will talk about that in a second. It's about 20 to 40 percent organic Matrix. So again, what does organic mean organic is carbon hydrogen oxygen? Sulfur sense, out of them and then the rest of it is a bit of
10:09
ER and lipid. And again you'll see that primarily in the marrow in an adult like the entire human skeletal system can be remodeled in a really long cycle might take 10 years to turn over all of the mineral and organic content within the bone over and over again. But at the micro level calcium balance is happening, quite frequently. I don't remember the exact number. I want to say, it's like 99% but virtually all of the body's calcium is contained within bone. And therefore,
10:39
Phone plays a very important role in calcium homeostasis. And if anybody's taking a physiology class, they probably remember how important calcium signaling is to everything within a cell. Again, we think of these bones is structural entities, which, of course, first and foremost they are. But remember, they're also a very important reservoir for calcium, which is another very important ion in the activity of every
11:04
cell you talked a lot about calcium. What about vitamin D? What role does?
11:09
Vitamin D play in the
11:10
bones, they're both very important. And again, there's two forms of vitamin D, vitamin D2 and D3. But really, when I talk about vitamin D, I'm going to mostly talk about D3, which is the active form. So what's the problem with being deficient in vitamin D will again? People might recall a disease called rickets, and you see this often in developing parts of the world where people are really malnourished and they have really, really soft. Sort of spongy bone. Actually, just yesterday, I had a friend.
11:39
Ver who does a bunch of mission work in Rwanda and she was showing me a child at their Camp. Whose legs the child was like probably five years old. He was sitting down and they were doing something with his legs. That you would think would be impossible to do with a human being basically. While he was sitting on the ground, they were able to move his foot back and forth, back and forth and he was in no pain, but it's because he didn't have bones that were anything other than basically rubber bands. So he couldn't stand.
12:09
And within I want to say six months of correcting his nutrition, totally normal amazing opportunity when you think about what happens in that part of the world and how you can fix that, but what is it about vitamin D? Will vitamin D, increases the guts absorption of calcium. So if you're woefully deficient in vitamin D, you're going to have trouble absorbing calcium through the gut and we're going to talk in this podcast later about the importance of dietary calcium and or supplementary calcium. And so you can see why that becomes part of the issue.
12:39
The other thing to kind of keep in mind here is the role of another hormone. And again I'm trying to only introduce Concepts now that are going to become relevant later either through treatments or nutrition or supplementation. So I'm being a little bit simplistic. But the other thing that you can't avoid here is understanding the role of calcium and parathyroid hormone. I think most people probably familiar with their thyroid gland sits here in the neck. It's kind of got this shape to it where it's got like two main lobes and then each lobe has two poles. Well,
13:09
Each of those polls is a little tiny gland called the parathyroid gland, so you have four of those. And the parathyroid gland is really the master gland for regulating calcium levels. So low levels of calcium in the blood stimulate parathyroid hormone secretion as parathyroid hormone level goes up. The stimulates the release of calcium from the bone into the blood. Now it also induces enzymes in the kidney which then convert vitamin D into its active form to then.
13:39
Aid and speed up in the process of reabsorbing more calcium from the diet. So all of this stuff parathyroid hormone calcium, vitamin D, very important to maintaining bone health. And anytime you have things that disrupt that system you're going to see disruptions potentially in the
13:56
bones. I think that was a good quick overview of what will be important for what we cover next and I think the natural follow-up to it is. What is the consequence of poor bone health? What is the consequence of lobe?
14:09
Bone density. Some people who will be listening, this will have already known issues of bone density and some people have never thought about this before in their life. What would you say to those people on why they should care about this and why they should think about it?
14:23
Thank you for listening to today's sneak peek AMA episode of the drive. If you're interested in hearing the complete version of this, am a you'll want to become a member. We created the membership program to bring you more in-depth, exclusive content without relying on paid ads.
14:39
Ship benefits are many and Beyond the complete episodes of the AMA. Each month, they include the following ridiculously comprehensive podcast show notes. That detail every topic paper person, and thing we discuss on each episode of the drive, access to our private podcast feed the qualities, which were a super short podcast. Typically less than five minutes released every Tuesday through Friday, which highlight the best questions topics and tactics discussed on previous episodes of the drive. This particularly important.
15:09
Isn't for those of you who haven't heard all of the back episodes, becomes a great way to go back and filter and decide
15:15
which ones you want to listen to in
15:16
detail really steep. Discount codes for products I use and believe in, but for which I don't get paid to endorse and benefits that we continue to add over time. If you want to learn more and access, these member only benefits head over to Peter, Atia, MD.com forward, slash subscribe. Lastly, if you're already a member but you're hearing this, it means you haven't downloaded our member-only.
15:39
God cast feed where you can get the full access to the AMA and you don't have to listen to this. You can download that at Peter, Atia M, d.com, /members. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook all with the ID Peter Atia, MD, you can also leave us a review on Apple podcast or whatever podcast player you listen on this podcast is for General informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine nursing or other professional Healthcare Services.
16:09
Including the giving of a medical advice. No, doctor-patient relationship is formed, the use of this information and the materials link to this podcast, is at the users own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining, medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their Health Care Professionals for any such conditions.
16:39
Finally, I take conflicts of interest, very seriously for all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or advise, please visit Peter. Atia MD.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of such
16:53
companies.
ms