Best Fruit for Osteoporosis: Snack Your Way to Bone Health and Gut Health

Dr Doug Lucas here retired orthopedic surgeon now focusing my practice on bone health and health span if you've been diagnosed with osteoporosis or osteopenia and you're looking for those little things that can make a big difference in your daily plan around osteoporosis and bone health well stick around because there is one tiny little fruit that might just make a big difference stay tuned all right so did you know that prunes are considered a Powerhouse when it comes to fruit now I like fruit and I tell my patients to eat a fair amount of fruit depending on their carbohydrate tolerance but prunes in particular are known for their digestive benefits some people use them as an adjunct to weight loss some people love them for antioxidant properties cardiovascular health but what about bone health I got a question the other day about prunes for bone health and I looked up and found that there was actually a good study and so it got me thinking you know why would a prune be helpful for bone health other than potentially just for gut health Well turns out that gut health is certainly a part of it but also they are high in potassium which we know plays an impact on bone health they have vitamin K1 which has to be converted to K2 but still can be helpful for bone health the fiber could have an impact on your microbiome and it can have an impact on calcium absorption they're also high in polyphenols polyphenols are both antioxidants they're anti-inflammatory and we know inflammation plays a role in bone health as well and lastly they can't even contain phytoestrogens so kind of like soy where you're leaning on the estrogen receptors a little bit to potentially slow down osteoclast function and reduce bone loss so it's possible then that prunes which are dried plums of a specific variety can actually improve bone health but what does the literature show all right so what my research found is that there is actually a randomized controlled trial and the reason why this came up recently is because this was just published in 2022. so this is relatively new now this is just a single study but it was relatively well done so there were three groups there was a control group they got no prunes there was a group that got 50 grams of prunes and a group that got 100 grams of prunes now you might be wondering how many prunes that is well it depends on how big they are but it's about five to six prunes which I'm not a prune eater but my understanding is that's quite a bit of prune so I had a question with this of if it's the 100 gram group and you're talking 10 to 12 prunes how tolerable is that well it turns out the compliance meaning people sticking with this for the 12 months of the study was actually much lower in the 100 gram group so I think that that was probably too much for a fair number of people the actual dropout rate was 40 but otherwise it was about 90 in both the control group and a 50 gram prune group so it seemed to be relatively tolerable now they looked at bone mineral density at 12 months which you could argue it's not really going to change that much in 12 months for most people but in the control group it did go down by about 1.1 percent so that's what we expect to see is about 0.5 to 1 in most people year after year so it went down by 1.1 percent in the intervention group the 50 gram prune Group which is what these statistics came from it went down by 0.3 percent so it still went down marginally maybe not really within the margin of error but it still went down a little bit they measured fracks based off of all the other data that you can collect for frax and frax got worse in the control group and didn't get worse in the intervention group so really you could argue that prunes as the single intervention helped this one group from a losing bone over the course of these 12 months so what does that mean for bone health journey in my patients do we recommend prunes yeah I think that they can be reasonable I have some concerns about the carbohydrate content but they're so high in fiber that it really balances the sugar pretty well as long as you can tolerate that carbohydrates again about five to six prunes per day seems to be about The Sweet Spot to have an impact on the bone health and I really think that they can be an adjunct for osteoporosis for a comprehensive picture that includes a lot of things should it be your only thing probably not but again a good bone health approach is just layering when after wind after wind after wind you just stack all these things up and eventually you're going to have a comprehensive plan that works for you thanks for making it to the end of this prune video If you like this content please like subscribe and sign up for notifications so that we can send you a notification when new videos are released if you know anybody that would benefit please send this to them so that they can continue on their own bone health Journey if you want to learn how we manage bone health and some other tips and tricks you can do on your own look for the free Master Class Link in the description below and lastly I want to hear from you I love comments on YouTube we have such great back and forth that I would love for you to leave a comment tell me what you're thinking tell me what topics you want us to talk about we have a growing list of great topics on bone health and I'd love to hear what you want to hear thanks again for making it to the end of this video we'll see you next time