I was shocked when I heard that 37 yr. old Gwyneth Paltrow was recently diagnosed with osteopenia, the pre-cursor of the crippling bone disease osteoporosis. This silent menace normally affects women over 50. But recently it's become more common in younger women because of many stupid lifestyle fads like low fat diets, juice cleanses, macrobiotic diets and vampire activities (staying out of the good ol’ sunshine).Paltrow revealed her condition on her blog http://goop.com where she talked about how she discovered she had osteopenia and what her East/West New York MD’s are doing to help improve her bone density.
For the most part I agree with her doc’s plan. He gave her prescription strength vitamin D and told her to spend a bit of time in the sun. Makes sense. But it seems like he just addressed her symptoms like most other MD's and didn't delve much into what caused the problem in the first place.
I'm sure her nutrition was a major contributor. Crazy "low fat" diets, macrobiotic diets and juice cleanses can rob the body of many key nutrients. When she fractured her tibia they discovered she had the lowest levels of Vitamin D they'd ever seen! Deficient vitamin D levels affect calcium absorption and if you can't absorb calcium it's only a matter of time before it affects your bones.
This catch 22 situation is very common these days and is usually caused by eating processed foods, pasteurized dairy, gluten sensitivity and excessive alcohol consumption.
Osteoporosis like so many other disturbing diseases is very preventable. You just need to do a little detective work and remove the root cause.
So if you want to help keep your bones strong. Add these three key ingredients to your lifestyle.
- Eat whole natural foods. Simply put, foods without a label and a laundry list of unpronounceable ingredients.
- Get some sensible sunshine so you can get your vitamin D from mother nature.
- Work out and be sure to include load bearing exercise like walking and resistance or weight training that will put healthy stress on your bones.
Do you include these three things to your daily life? If not, what’s stopping you?
It's so sad that some people get sick trying to get healthy. For me, it's always so much easier to change my diet than to do some exercises. And I think unfortunately many people falls into that category. However, the best "detox" diet can't do you any real good if the rest of your lifestyle is not healthy (like lacking exercise). And any diet, even when proved to be beneficial like vegetarian and vegan diets, have to be monitored at first to make sure that you get enough of all the required nutrients. I'm glad that you came up with this post. It's easy to think that celebrities are doing the right thing because we see them always so thin and glamorous. This shows clearly that we should be more careful!
That's so true Veronica re: what appears to be healthy on the outside may not be the case. I've also heard of quite a few cases of other former vegans who were also lacking vital nutrients which in turn caused some serious issues.