The Best Supplements for Osteoporosis in 2024

welcome to the Dr Doug show your resource for bone health hormone optimization and Women's Health span through midlife and Beyond so this is going to be a fun conversation so this is my 2024 top three supplements for osteoporosis update so if you haven't already watched the uh video I did talking about my uh recent recommendations and how they changed on calcium I would pause this and go watch that one first it's a little long I know I'm sorry um but I'm going to talk about sort of the the then followup to that which is how we've changed our supplement stack for our osteoporosis patients based off of that uh deep research and the outcome as a result of that so I'm going to go through three products today I'm going to talk about what's in them why we like what's in them um and then we're going to talk about again as we did in that video um an exciting opportunity for listeners of this podcast and Watchers on this YouTube channel so stick around till the end all right so the first product I want to talk about is the outcome of that calcium video that I was just talking about so the calcium video was uh really going through how I went from U microcrystal and hydroxyapatite complex formulations of calcium and how I've changed my thought and my practice to start using algae uh based forms of calcium uh and I go through all of that in that video so I won't review that here but the product that I want to talk about is this algae cal alal plus again in that video we talked about why I think the calcium coming from a whole food source is the best I think those two sources Ground Up Bones or algae are going to be your two best sources of calcium better than calcium carbonate better than calcium citrate um but I'm leading down to the algae because of what's in the products and so the algae is going to be different from the grounded bones because the algae is going to have other micronutrients in it and what I'm finding is that people respond better to these natural accumulations of micronutrient trans now grounded Bones have some other interesting things in them but they have to be processed appropriately and I think a lot of times the mchd is just the calcium part of it which is still better than calcium carbonate um but having the other uh nutrients in it the other micronutrients like the algae does is going to reduce really capsule fatigue because if we're using the mchd products we start stacking more and more things what you're going to see is this combination of three supplements is going to help to put a lot of things in as few capsules as possible so the algae cal plus obviously the the first thing that's in it is the algae so the algae is going to have calcium as well as several micronutrients so I'm just going to go through that list with you here all right so I've got the list right here in front of me so I'm going to go through all the micronutrients that are in the algae in addition to the calcium so if you look at the the on their website this is all available but you have potassium copper and really these are these are trace minerals so these aren't big doses of any of these potassium copper manganese silicone nickel phosphorus selenium vadium and zinc and what I like about it in this form is that they are coming together as they do naturally and I think your body understands what to do with that better than it would if you were to try to like massive dose some of these things additionally as as I talked about in that calcium video alic Cal has gone through the extra step to do the stud to look and see what formulations of additional things might also benefit bone mineral density so in that video the the second publication I talk about has three different formulations of algae and so what they found is that if they added some more magnesium so there's additional magnesium added to this they also added more vitamin D so they had different levels of vitamin D and different uh plans in that study and this amount of vitamin D600 IU seem to be The Sweet Spot in those studies additionally they added more vitamin K so they have K2 as mk7 in a great form so they use this proprietary um vital mk7 which is a great product and added 100 micrograms of the mk7 to this product and then they added 3 milligrams of boron as Boron glycinate so it's a chelated form which is really well absorbed then there's just a little bit of vitamin C to go along with that and so this combination of stuff if you were to try to build that from um a bunch of different products you'd have a whole lot of capsules and so the algae cal plus is going to be two capsules twice a day if you're going to get a full dose of all of that and I think that is just so much easier to take from most most people uh that is stacking a whole bunch of different things people ask me often about the amount of calcium that's in it so I'll just address that here which is when you look on the website you can see that it says that there's 720 milligrams of calcium now in the past you probably heard me talk about you know trying to minimize the calcium based off of the research what I talked about in that other video is a really important Point here is that if you're getting calcium through whole food sources that risk seems to go away and so uh there was a big study that looked at the quintiles of calcium consumption and when people were getting it mostly through food the risk of heart disease actually went down so I think if we're getting it from food or from uh algae sources like this we probably don't need to be as concerned about that overall calcium number and remembering too that the upward limit of normal or upward limit of safety rather is 2400 milligrams so even if you're eating you know 1,200 milligrams of calcium through diet if you're adding 720 as um a plant product then you probably don't need to worry about you know where you're getting to with that calcium I think this amount of calcium is fine because your body again is going to know what to do with it because it's coming with vitamin D vitamin K and other micronutrients and I kind of came to this conclusion because when I have patients that love eating dairy for example especially if they're eating you know good Dairy raw dairy full fat and they say hey I'm consuming you know 1,500 milligrams of calcium through Dairy do I tell them to stop eating that much Dairy not usually not unless it's it's inflammatory to them where they're gaining a lot of weight um so I think that this should be in that same boat to say well if you're getting this much from calcium this is also how you're getting all of your other micronutrients um so I don't think that we need to worry about this much calcium as long as we're not eating you know 2,000 milligrams of calcium in diet which is really really hard to do so another point I want to make here uh talking about alal Plus versus other products is the amount of vitamin D that's in it so one of the things we found looking at um a whole lot of biomarkers in our patients is that when people are uh consuming big doses of vitamin D and I used to recommend this so this is definitely a pivot too but when people are on 5,000 IU 10,000 IU we see people taking really really big doses of vitamin D and it'll drive their blood levels north of 100 without a doubt we kind of have this feeling that you know more is better and you can't overdo Vitamin D and that you just you know don't worry about people that are saying it goes too high the truth is I'm not as worried about the you know the calcium disturbance and the um you know the potential k stones and high levels of calcium that you can potentially see in blood with high D that's not really my concern here although that's real additionally vitamin D as a supplement is coming in the form of kolic calciferol and we call it D3 but it's not really D3 and so it's different than if you were to make it naturally so we encourage people to make as much naturally as possible and to reduce the amount that they're actually supplementing I I don't think that you should come off of vitamin D necessarily because we do need D to to help to utilize the calcium appropriately and there's other benefits of not being vitamin D deficient but what's happening is we've gone from this vitamin D deficiency state of people with blood levels of 30 less than 20 to now people are driving it up to over a 100 and I think we've overshot that sweet spot so I like that this product only has 1600 IU of vitamin D and it doesn't have 5,000 like a lot of other products have K2 I mentioned earlier so K2 is mk7 is my preferred form of K2 we're going to talk about another product in a minute but K2 is mk7 is the form that is not K1 so it has no impact on blood clotting K2 does not have that impact at all and mk7 has a longer Half-Life so now you have a safe to take fat soluble vitam with a longer half life that you only have to dose twice a day which is what they do in this product um and then um will help to improve the way that vitamin D functions and the way that calcium is distributed so it has been shown to actually even reverse calcification although I think it's a little early to say that it can reverse heart disease but looks really promising that it can have a good impact for sure Boron is a really interesting mineral so Boron is added at the 3 milligram dose which I think is a great dose because Boron is going to have a direct impact on bone growth and we see a lot of people that did that get better with Boron as a standalone supplement and so adding it in with all these other micronutrients I think is a great idea vitamin C is good for uh collagen development it's good for bone growth it's good for immunity this is a pretty low dose but I don't like actually supplementing vitamin C that much because I think big doses are unnecessary because we can get vitamin C pretty easily through diet so those are all the things that they added to it and that's why I think that alal plus is now on our list of the top three if we were going to say hey I need to take three supplements that's it for osteoprosis what three would it be that's probably number one biggest bang for your buck all right so then number two is going to be also from alac Cal so this going be this alal D3 complete and so let me just address the question which is is this an alal sponsored video the answer is no they did not pay me to do this uh we do have a relationship with alac Cal and if you look in the description below you will see uh that we have a partnership you can get a 10% discount uh by using the code that's in the the video U description or if you are on um if you're listening to this in a podcast uh you should be able to find that on our website uh as well but that um that 10% discount is representative of our partnership they're not paying for this video but the reason why I'm partnering with them again is because we have I mean thousands and thousands of people that are looking for how to improve their bone health and they don't have a lot of resources and so they're trying to find the best bag for their buck and that's what I'm talking about here so then this next product this uh alal D3 complete so this is similar to a product I've talked about before and basically the D3 complete is going to be all of your fat soluble vitamins in one place so that's your D your a your e and your K so the amount of D that's in the D3 complete again is less than what you'll find in some other products there's a lot of products out there that'll have combination of definitely DNK there aren't that many that have d a e and K in good forms but there are a few um but if you look at those you'll find that the amount of D that's in them is actually pretty stinking high so again you start stacking too many D's you're just going to have too much vitamin D in your in your stack all right so how much D is in this well it's again it's D3 or kolic calciferol and it's another thousand IU so combine this with alal plus and you get 2600 so for somebody who has osteoporosis I'm going to kind of push as far north as I'm comfortable and that's about as far as I want to go with vitamin D supplementation there is a lot of variation from person to person so some people might need more but overall this is a really good starting point that I can feel good about even without testing for D because I don't think we're going to drive anybody too high with 2600 IU so I like that you can combine these two and you can get that much vitamin D I think that's pretty great the second part of this is the vitamin A so they have vitamin A at 550 micrograms and that's as retinal palmitate so I have a whole video on vitamin A I think it's something like this vitamin causes osteoporosis or something like that the controversy around vitamin A is that there is a U-shaped curve when it comes to risk of osteoporosis with vitamin A if you don't have enough increased risk if you have too much increased risk but what most people don't understand is that most people are deficient especially if you're not eating animal products to get adequate vitamin A you really need to eat not just just animal meat but you also need to eat animal organs and so there aren't a lot of people that are eating a lot of organ meat out there um if you're eating a lot of organs maybe you could get too much vitamin A but I still think it would be pretty hard to do um unless you're eating polar bear liver that's like the magic vitamin A machine uh but 550 micrograms of retinol palmitate is about 2third of your daily allotment of vitamin A as recommended the challenge with other forms of vitamin A particularly the beta keratin is that there is variable absorption in conversion from that that storage form or um you know pre-shaped form to the actual acto form in retinol and so um plant products have beta carotenes some people will say oh well I can get all the vitamin A from my my plants you know my carrots and my my yellow and and orange veggies but you would have to consume a whole lot of them and be able to absorb them well and be able to convert them well to actually get the amount of vitamin A that you need so I think that most people are vitamin A deficient that's why I like to add that to our supplement stacks and then there's the vitamin E now vitamin E is kind of a controversial topic um because if you look in the past there's some studies that would show that vitamin E has the potential to be um cargal but if you look at those studies and if you understand the genetics around vitamin E you know that in those studies they gave Alpha tofol alone Alpha tofol in large doses can be inflammatory for some people that have a specific genetic U uh variation and so what we find is that if you give big doses of that some people don't do well it's about half the population that's why those studies showed that some studies showed that there was increased risk some show that there was decreased risk it's because they were genetically different so the recommendation that I've had for a long time is that we need all of the subgroups of vitamin E we need there are four tphols and there are four toot trols we need all of the tphols we need all of the toot trols specifically there's been some research presented um um some very popular research around gamma to all so this product has d alpha tofol and a not too big dose it has gamma tofol and a 25 mgram dose and it has mixed toat trols and a 50 milligram dose that's a nice spread we're a little early in the research to know what the best spread is and it's probably different from person to person but you're getting all of the most important components there and then we get to vitamin K now I talked about alal plus having vitamin K2 as mk7 we have more K2 as mk7 here so another 50 micrograms here and and then you have 4,500 micrograms of K2 as MK4 now I mentioned this before that K2 as MK4 is shorter acting than mk7 in theory if it was your only vitamin K you'd have to dose it multiple times throughout the day now here we're only dosing it twice but it's a bigger amount and we know that vitamin K2 as MK4 is better at turning on uh bone building it's better than mk7 but it just doesn't do it for as long so that's why we recommend mk7 but you can certainly do both and that's what they've done here and then they also have just a little bit of K1 it's not a ton um just a th000 micrograms of K1 to go along to just fill out the compliment of vitamin K because it is relatively new as far as um a supplement so we're kind of hedging our bets here and giving you all of the different forms of vitamin K all right before I get to our third product that I want to talk about in this 2024 update let me just talk a little bit about our master classes we have two free master classes that there are descriptions for um uh or there links for rather in the description Below on YouTube and you can access these if you're on a podcast go to Dr douglas.com you can get there but one master class is all about bone health you get to see how we put together a bone health program that's custom how you could potentially do it yourself with an opportunity to ask questions and then we also have a hormone uh master class as well and we talk about sort of the ins and outs of hormones and answer questions related to hormone uh therapy both of these uh master classes are really popular so U grab a seat for this these master classes if you haven't been to one of those yet all right so the Third product I want to talk about is strontium now strontium is a controversial one and I'll tell you why it hits my list of the top three and the reason why is because I have a lot of people that come to me that are really really worried about their bill maneral density and I totally understand that because it is ultimately what defines osteoporosis right so um when it comes to the use of strontium I've kind of been hot and I've been cold and I have a whole video on strontium so I'm not going to dig into all the research here but the short of it is this which is there is some fear around Str because of the experience of strontium ranelate that was used as a pharmaceutical in Europe um kind of the last 20 years is it's not available anymore there was an increased risk of blood clot some weird syndrome called dress syndrome and some other things that went along with it um but understand that strontium or ranelate was the synthetic compound and the ranelate part was the synthetic part strontium is a totally natural Trace uh mineral and as a trace mineral it is already present in our bones it's present in our body it's present in our food supply we can eat strontium uh there just hard to get because there's not a lot of it um in our food supply and so you can take strontium as a supplement as strontium citrate that's how it's naturally found and so strontium citrate then can go into your bones and it will have an impact according to uh research studies on both osteoblast and osteoclast activity meaning that it will encourage Osteo blasts and it will discourage osteoclasts from doing their job so it should this to Bone metabolism we know from a couple of human studies but also specifically the alal studies that when you add strontium to alial plus then you will see Improvement of bone mineral density so we know that strontium will increase bone mineral density the challenge we have is that there has not been a long enough study done with strontium as a single intervention strontium citrate to know that it actually improves fracture risk does it actually increase bone quality or we just increase bone density so we don't really know the answer to that but again there are lots of people that are very very worried about their bone maneral density and would love to see an improvement in their bone mineral density um as quickly as they can and adding strine will help to do that some people will say well isn't it just falsely elevating my dexa and the answer is it is going to elevate your dexa it's not false it's real but strontium is a heavier from an atomic weight perspective than is calcium and it is utilized similarly in the body and so yes if you're substituting calcium for strontium yes your boneal density will go up is it synthetic I don't think it's necessarily synthetic I think we're just seeing what we should expect to see so I think that we should expect to see that there's going to be a further increase in Bow and R density with strontium than we would expect to see with calcium alone and that just makes sense so where do I use this in practice I use it in practice when people have significantly low bmd they don't want to use drugs or I don't think that drugs are a great fit or they're a good candidate for drugs drugs and we really want to see a more rapid Improvement in bone mineral density I would love to see a great study showing that we are improving bone strength but we're also doing a ton of other things at the same time that are going to improve their bone strength so if we want to throw the kitchen sink at it then I recommend all three of these things that we just talked about so again we're talking about the strontium component in addition to alac Cal Plus in addition to the D3 complete if you were to do all three of those things then I think you are creating creating a core nucleus of bone specific products that are going to significantly improve your bmd and do it really from the perspective of overall health span something I wanted to mention here too and the reason why I put them all in one video is that if you're looking for a money back guarantee on supplements which let's face it you don't see very often aacal does offer a money back guarantee it's not related to this one but if you were to put these two together they actually guarantee that you'll see an improvement in bone maneral density I'm pretty sure it's over 6 months even uh and if you don't they'll give you your money back now I've talked to the company about this and they do stand behind it and they say they tell me that they do not end up refunding very many people like single digits um and so I think it's really promising for most people to understand that these are probably the best products they're the best research products out there and if you stack this as your core component uh from a supplement perspective then you're in a really good starting point it helps to eliminate so much of the noise around supplements because there are hundreds of supplements you could potentially take right so these products have research behind them they are proven and they offer a money back guarantee so that's why I wanted to put them out here to say that if you were looking for three things this is a really really good starting point and again if you want a discount look in the description below but remember this that osteoporosis is not a supplement deficiency problem while getting the right supplements on board can certainly be helpful remember that lifestyle components are a huge component of this that's why we built what we built in optimal bone health so I think that these are a great starting point but remember that you have to do all the things if you watch our videos we talk about lifestyle we talk about sleep we talk about exercise and training and impact and nutrition and the right nutrition so all of those things matter that's why we have our optimal bone health program don't forget we also have our bone foundations course and if you haven't gone through that it is a free course that gives you access to our health span Nation uh which is a um uh a really cool weekly support group of people that are helping to elevate each other asking me questions through a live Zoom so you can learn about all of those things look for the description below for for all of those things and remember that you are actually created for greatness so seek optimal not average don't be afraid to be extraordinary because you are and that's what it takes I'll see you in the next video [Music] n [Music]