The BEST FRUIT for Osteoporosis! UPDATE!

are you looking for the best dietary tool to improve bone health about 10 months ago I published a video on a study that used prunes as an intervention for bone health and it's been viewed over 37,000 times we've received a bit of feedback that I would like to address I also want to update you on our position on prunes with our HSN members and our patients so if you are somebody who's been using prunes and you have a story about them leave us a comment on YouTube love to know your thoughts and your experience okay so before I get into kind of our updated recommendations here let me just review the study again you can watch the old video but let me just do it in short here so this study was looking at the impact of two different dosages of prunes on bone health in postmenopausal women over the period of 12 months so it was a really great study design because it was 12 months long randomized control trial the participants were postmenopausal women aged 55 to 75 and they had to have a bmd of up to or down tog -3 although they could have as low of bmd as zero so this isn't necessarily a postmenopausal osteop prodoct group although many of them were uh in the osteoporosis range they compared 50 g of prunes versus 100 grams of prunes versus a control group so again three groups the 50 g is around four to six prunes depending on the size and 100 G is 10 to 12 which is potentially arguably a lot of prunes that might be part of the issue that we're going to talk about here essentially they wanted to evaluate the impact of the prunes um and look at bone material density at various sites during the 12 months they also looked at body comp because they were getting aexa and they looked at igf-1 as a biomarker for being anabolic or catabolic Etc so from a bone mineral density perspective the 50 g per day prune dosage was effective at preventing loss of bmd now let me just clarify what I'm saying there it was effective at preventing loss not increasing bone burrow density so slowing down bone loss which is still a win but when people say my you know I'm using prunes and they reverse osteoporosis not exactly because that's not what the study shows in the 50 gr group there was high compliance meaning that over 90% of the people that were in that group continued to take 50 g or four to six prunes per day that was not true in the 100 G per day group so 10 to 12 prunes maybe too many to eat my guess is probably some gut dysfunction diarrhea Etc there a lot of fiber Al a lot of prunes what they noticed across the board from a biomarker perspective is that igf-1 went up and I think that's really important I'll explain why in a second additionally on dexa they were looking at bone mineral density but also they noticed that fat mass and body fat percentage over time went up so is that related to the prunes maybe we're going to talk talk about why that may or may not be an issue and then overall this was kind of a win for prunes right so if I was a a prune farmer then I would be excited but there's a there's always a clinical relevance to any intervention you know how how do we incorporate this in to our patients lives and then what is their experience and how does that work for them so I want to give you that side of this rather than just talk about the science at this point before I do that though let me just say that if you are still trying to put together your program and struggling with your results consider coming to our free Master Class free master class is where we go over how we are putting it together for our patients at this point in time and then there's a a Q&A session at the end 10 to 15 minutes to get questions answered that is really the pathway that if you are new to or struggling with osteoporosis can be such a Time collapsing event where you can learn about so many different Tools in one place so if you want to register for that just go to the description below on YouTube or go to Optimal human health.com and you can find a link on that website right there so let me fill you in on a bit of a secret my team at optimal human health for our bone health program is not just me I do see patients but the majority of our program is handled by our provider team of Pas and nurse practitioners as well as our dietician coaching team which currently we have about eight I believe seeing patients all day long every day so my team really hates it when I drop little truth nuggets like prunes are good for osteoporosis like this without consulting them first and so as I said that video that I posted 10 months ago has been viewed 37,000 times so there might be a lot of people eating prunes that didn't used to those are including our patients because our patients obviously are watching our videos so why is that a bad thing if it slows down bone loss well one of my dieticians brought this up to me and she brought it up a couple of times and finally I I paid attention and really looked into the details and so her concern is that 50 gr of prunes is pretty carb heavy now everybody has a different carbohydrate Toler but prunes in particular cuz they're fruit they have about 12 to 14 gam of sugar and 25 G of carbohydrate overall so it is a carbohydrate heavy snack or part of a meal depending on how you're doing it that's the equivalent of adding potentially up to two tablespoons of sugar per meal if you're adding these to a meal so my initial thought on this is that with the fiber and the whole food source of the sugar this is probably not a big deal and I still think for a lot of people that's true because if you look at the population of you know our patients the population of people in general that have osteoporosis many people in that group do struggle to maintain weight to put weight on so I'm not as concerned about weight gain in the population at large however not everybody tolerates that amount of carbohydrate particularly when you eat it and how you eat it so the perspective is this is that adding 50 grams of prunes could potentially increase your fasting blood sugar could potentially increase your A1C hemoglobin A1c is a measure of blood sugar over time it could potentially increase the biomarker of fasting insulin for some people it can cause diarrhea other kind of irregular stools going back and forth for some people it could potentially provoke weight gain changes in body composition and I mentioned in this study they actually did show that there was an increase in fat Mass on dexa another concern that my team has is that if you're adding in prunes especially that much fiber that you could get F pretty quickly and that could actually displace protein in the diet which you've I'm sure heard me talk about the importance of that so starting the day with a carbohydrate dominant meal if you're using prunes in the morning which many people do to to help with bowel movements you might notice that you're either hungrier sooner like within an hour um you might have more fatigue you might have then you know sugar Cravings carbohydrate Cravings some people complain of brain fog another concern that they brought up is that we all have a kind of a carbohydrate allowance for the day now some of us measure it some of us don't but we are all kind of a carbohydrate allowance and then if you're using that up particularly earlier then you're not going to be able to add other carbs in later that might have beneficial nutrients in it right so like the fruit and the the vegetables and starchy vegetables Etc also if you're getting all of your calories and sugar and carbohydrates from One Source then it's going to reduce variety which can have an impact on gut health which is going to impact on bone health and so really my team kind of looks at these things I like big fat supplements right they're just big supplements and I think that that's kind of true but I want to balance this out to say that carbohydrates themselves are not evil but we do have to understand our individual carbohydrate tolerance level some people have got Health limitations some people can tolerate more less Etc people that struggle with metabolic Health meaning that they have elevated glucose they might be pre-diabetic or diabetic people that have elevated fasting insulin levels or that aren't very active that entire population which is pretty big that entire population might not do well with adding prunes so I was curious how this would impact somebody who has a relatively healthy metabolism and so at our last team meeting I asked our dietitians if anyone was wearing a continuous glucose monitor and for those that are familiar with these things rather for those that aren't the glucose monitor or CGM is a way to measure glucose over time and you can do it accurately every you know I think 2 minutes or 3 minutes whatever the inter is but you can watch what happens to your blood glucose after a meal or eating anything and so one of our dietitians was wearing a continuous glucose monitor at the time and so the next day she added six prunes to her morning and she consumed them fasted so consumed them without anything else in her stomach at the most insulin sensitive time which is first thing in the morning and what we found is that her blood glucose did go up but not that much I was really surprised to see that it didn't go over 110 10 and then it came right back down so from a CGM perspective in this one individual it did not seem that significant but what we've heard from our patients is and what we've seen from our dietitians is that there are a fair number of people that don't tolerate eating prunes so what do we do in our practice well we discuss prunes but we don't push prunes again I there are so many tools that we have that you know having to add prunin to your diet is is something that not a lot of people want to do and that's okay because there are so many tools that we have at our disposal so it comes up people watch the videos it's in our bone foundations course so you know it comes up and we talk about it and some people do it I think that adding prunes to diet is totally reasonable and that's what I tell my patients but it has to be done in the context of metabolic health so understanding what someone's fasting insulin and glucose and A1C is is really important what is the gut health like what's their activity level if you are watching this video and you're not working with us as an HSN member or a patient remember to ask your own team before changing something as significant as this so this video was a review of prunes and if you like this content you might consider the video the best diet for osteoporosis that one is the 2024 update on the dietary recommendations we make in general for our patients and then as a in addition to that the video called the benefits of red meat and that talks about all the nutrients that are found in animal sources of protein that you can't find in plant sources of protein so that's it and remember please that osteoporosis isn't the end but deciding to reverse it is a beginning if you have already been to our master class and you want to learn more about how to manage bone health consider our bone foundations course totally free you can get into that of the ebook that osteoprosis breakthrough that I wrote and also give you a free month to our HSN where people get access to myself and my team to ask us questions about their own program and also gives access to a community so tremendous amount of support there so I hope you found that helpful I'll see you on the next video