Healthy bones denote a healthy body. It is your bones that make up most of your body’s frame and are responsible for all your physical actions. Ensuring sound bone health helps you control your mobility and perform all physical activities with ease.
Bone fractures distort this stability and lead to serious health complications. While it is common to accredit bone fractures with external factors such as accidents and falls, it is important to understand that weak bones increase the chances of getting your bones fractured. Healthy bones cannot be harmed easily, even if they encounter unfavorable external circumstances.
If you or your loved ones encounter bone fractures, it is always advisable to seek orthopedic help in your city. For instance, if you live in Gurgaon, make sure you visit the best orthopedic doctor in Gurgaon to diagnose and treat your bone fracture. Unnecessary delays can worsen the issue and delay the recovery time.
Before understanding how a healthy diet and exercise help you keep bone fractures at bay, let us briefly understand the issue.
What Is A Bone Fracture?
A bone fracture is a term used for a broken bone. In simple terms, it results due to situations that end up breaking your bones. The immediate causes of bone fractures are often traumas such as road traffic accidents (RTAs), sports injuries, falls, and more. However, certain specific medical conditions and repetitive physical actions may also increase the risk for bone fractures.
Bone fractures may require surgeries to restore normalcy. However, some patients can recover from the issue with a brace, cast, or splint used for healing the bones. The time taken for a bone fracture to recover depends on the bone that is broken, the fracture’s severity, and what caused the fracture.
What Are The Symptoms Of A Bone Fracture?
Here are a few common symptoms of a bone fracture:
- Prolonged and severe pain in the affected region
- Swelling in the affected region
- Bone tenderness
- Inability to move the affected region
- Discoloration or bruising
- An unusual deformity or bruise near the affected region
Even if you experience mild symptoms after meeting with an accident or a serious fall, make sure you visit the best orthopedic in Gurgaon to get the matter diagnosed.
Healthy Diet As A Defense Against Bone Fractures
A healthy diet is an important tool to improve your bone health. If you keep your bones stronger, they will not break easily under pressure. From a very young age of a child, building and maintaining healthy bones are important. Minerals keep getting incorporated within your body throughout your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. People usually achieve peak bone mass by the time they turn 30.
Eating a balanced and healthy diet helps you build this bone mass effectively and keeps your bones stronger. Calcium has the maximum contribution towards increasing your bone density and should always be included in your diet to ensure healthy bones. Low bone density leads to issues like osteoporosis (brittle bones) and osteopenia (low bone mass), increasing the chances of your bones getting fractured.
Here are a few important ways in which you can use a healthy diet as a strong defense against bone fractures:
Eat A Lot Of Vegetables
If you want to keep your bones dense and healthy, it is always important to eat a lot of vegetables regularly. Most vegetables are great sources of vitamin C – a vitamin that stimulates bone-forming cell formation. Moreover, the antioxidant effects of vitamin C protect your bones from getting damaged easily.
Adding vegetables to your diet also increases the mineral density in your bones, making them stronger. It is advisable to eat more green and yellow vegetables to increase bone mineralization in kids and maintain the same in adults.
Do Not Leave Out Protein
Along with vitamin C, it is equally important to add adequate protein to your daily diet. Around 50% of your bones are made of protein, and a high-protein diet helps you improve your bone health.
Low protein intake has been reported to reduce calcium absorption in the body, adversely affecting bone formation and increasing the chances of a breakdown. However, extremely high protein intake is also harmful to your body as it leaches calcium from your bones.
It is, therefore, important to maintain adequate levels of protein in your diet to ensure healthy bones and keep them from getting fractured. Generally, the safe limit of daily protein consumption is 100 grams. Make sure you pair your proteins with adequate plant-based foods and calcium to keep your bones healthy.
Consume Calcium-rich Foods Throughout The Day
Calcium is the bread and butter of bones. You cannot afford to avoid calcium if you want strong and healthy bones. Daily calcium intake is important because your body constantly breaks down old bone cells and builds new ones. Daily calcium intake helps you protect your bones’ structure and strength.
Generally, the recommended dietary intake (RDI) of calcium for adults is 1,000 mg per day. However, teenagers may require 1,300 mg, and older women may need up to 1,200 mg of calcium.
The amount of calcium your boy absorbs can vary throughout the day. If your meal contains over 500 mg of calcium, your body will consume a much lesser amount than if you consume more calcium. It is, therefore, important to spread your calcium intake throughout the day to maintain healthy calcium levels in your body. Moreover, it is advisable to obtain calcium naturally from foods instead of calcium supplements to keep your bones strong.
Have Enough Vitamin D An Vitamin K
Vitamins D and K are extremely important to keep your bones healthy and prone to easy breakage. Vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium and maintain healthy bone density. It also helps you maintain a blood level of 30ng/ml to protect your bones from complications like osteoporosis, osteopenia, and other bone-related issues.
You can have your daily dose of vitamin D from the liver, cheese, fatty fish, and sunlight exposure. Generally, people require up to 2,000 IU of vitamin D every day to keep their bones healthy and strong.
On the other hand, vitamin K2 modifies osteocalcin, an important protein for bone formation, to keep your bone healthy. It allows osteocalcin to bind the minerals in your bones to prevent the loss of calcium. MK-4 and MK-7 are the two most common forms of Vitamin K2. They exist in small amounts in foods like eggs, meat, and liver. You can also find MK-7 in foods like sauerkraut, cheese, and soybean.
Stay Away From Low-calorie Diet
Even if you want to lose weight, it is important to avoid consuming a low-calorie diet to keep your bones healthy. As consuming way too many calories is unhealthy, people automatically consider low-calorie diets healthy. However, that is certainly not the case if you want to maintain sound bone health.
A prolonged low-calorie diet slows down your metabolism, creates rebound hunger, and leads to muscle mass loss, all of which are harmful to your bone health. A daily diet of fewer than 1,000 calories can reduce the bone mass in people who weigh normally, are overweight, or are even obese.
To keep your bones healthy, it is important to have a diet that gives you at least 1,200 calories per day.
Regular Exercise As a Defense Against Bone Fractures
Along with following a healthy diet regime, regular exercising is equally important to stay away from bone fractures. To keep your bone strong and healthy, it is important to put them to work and build them effectively.
Regular physical activity stimulates bone cell formation and keeps your bones healthy. Lethargy and lack of regular exercise often cause loss of bone, making your bones weak and prone to fractures. If you have already consulted an orthopedic doctor in Gurgaon due to a health complication in the past, it is important to indulge in exercises that help you regain the lost bone mass and density.
Here are two of the most important exercises to keep your bones healthy:
Weight-bearing Exercises
As the name suggests, weight-bearing exercises are exercises that involve you working against your own weight. They involve working on your feet to put your bones and muscles to work against gravity. As your legs and feet carry your body weight, it puts pressure on your bones, making them work harder. This strengthens your bones and prevents them from breaking easily.
Strength-training Exercises
While weight-bearing exercises make you work against your body weight, strength-training exercises involve adding resistance to your movement to put additional pressure on your bones and muscles. While these exercises are commonly used to increase muscle mass, they also have an impact on your bone strength and density.
The Final Word
These were some of the most important ways in which you can use a healthy diet and regular exercise as a strong defense against bone fractures. Giving the necessary nutrients and minerals to your body and exerting adequate pressure on your bones helps you improve your bone health. Irrespective of your age, healthy bones do not break easily, keeping you safe from complications like fractures.
