What Everyone Needs to Know to Reduce Risk of Hip Fracture, Cardiovascular Disease, and to Have Easier Visits with Your Dental Hygienist
Dental Calculus - the white material that tends to deposit the backs of your front teeth. When you go to the dental hygienist she usually spends a good deal of the appointment scraping off dental calculus. Dental calculus is made from calcium. It is dumped on your teeth when your body is lacking the proper molecular machinery to get it into your bones. Here is a study where the authors expected to show that poor dental hygiene was correlated with death from heart attack. Instead they found the only aspect of dental hygiene that that had a significant correlation – was - dental calculus. Gum inflammation made no difference. Why? Because the in addition to teeth, calcium also gets dumped in your arteries, obstructing them and causing coronary artery disease. Artery calcification is associated with poor bone density, vertebral fractures, and low levels of vitamin K. I wrote about how vitamin K is needed for calcium transport here.
Regarding hip fractures, a 50 % higher risk of hip fracture was observed in subjects with both low vitamin K1 and D compared with subjects with high vitamin K1 and D.
What you need to do to benefit from this knowledge? Take vitamins K and D. Vitamin K comes in two flavors, K1 and K2. K2 itself comes in two varieties. It is not clear whether some or all of these are necessary. Be that as it may, I take this vitamin K supplement which has it all.
In addition to building healthy bones and lowering hip fracture risk, vitamin D lowers risk of cancer and all cause mortality. I wrote about these properties of vitamin D here. I take 5000 units of vitamin D3 twice daily and my vitamin D level is in the middle of the desirable range. I also spend an hour and a half in the desert sun daily, albeit with sunscreen.
Finally you need a bit of boron and some silica. Boron is contained in many multivitamins, but if it is not in your multivitamin you can find it here. Silica is available from various herbal sources, for example, here and here. I wrote about boron and silicon towards the end of this piece on vitamin D. I take the vitamin K, boron, and silica supplements twice a day.
How about Fosamax and the other bisphosphonates? They are bad news - large epidemiological studies have shown that Fosamax increases certain types of hip fracture risks. [S]ubtrochanteric and diaphyseal fractures occurred at a rate of 13 per 10,000 patient-years in untreated women and 31 per 10,000 patient-years in women receiving alendronate [Fosamax]
The subtrochanteric is the top of the femur near where it enters the hip socket. If it breaks, this is a hip fracture. The diaphyseal is also the femur but lower down. So according to this study, Fosamax more than doubles these types of hip fracture risks. Sure it increases bone density, but density is not the same as strength. For more detail on this see my article When Good Doctors Prescribe Bad Medicine.
Some particulars about vitamin D testing courtesy of my co-administrator Besame:
My 23andme data showed I have the VDR bsm SNP [Single Nucleotide Polymorphism] that speeds up metabolism of storage D2 to active form D3. People who have VDR tag have the opposite issue (potentially) and they need higher D2 lab results because they are not as effective at metabolizing it to active form (what our cells take up). People with both those SNPs may balance out. But for me, before I knew this, I was taking 5,000 D3 twice a day but my labs kept reading low (and I was in the sun w/o sunblock). When I learned this and had the 25 (OH) D labs run, I had the wrong results, took too much D3 and was hypervitaminosis. This can be toxic and for D might lead to fragile bones and all the problems we are trying to prevent.
So, the regular blood lab test for D levels can be misleading and lead to toxic high levels or miss low levels. When the lab tests for the storage form of D 25 (OH) D in people with a certain genetic trait that makes them convert storage to active form more efficiently (VDR bsm — me) our 25 (OH) D levels will read low even when we have enough. So I need the 1,25 D lab test to get meaningful results.
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