Bone Healthy Foods

Hello, Lisa Broyles here with Way2Health MD and this is my third video in my series about the book Complete Bone and Joint Health Plan. Today we're talking about foods that fight inflammation, foods that help your bones and your joints. This is a bone healthy diet. So last video I talked about what not to eat. This video is about what to eat, okay? An anti-inflammatory diet is important for your bones, to help your bone mineral density, to help you not develop arthritis, to help your joints not be as painful with our bony erosions. So when you eat inflammatory foods, it causes these inflammatory cytokines, which actually break down the cartilage in our joints, cause narrowing of joint space and increase the development of arthritis. Yes, you're hearing me correctly that what you eat determines how much arthritis you're going to have in the future and the amount of pain you have from your arthritis right now. So foods that help fight inflammation are your colorful fruits and vegetables. The deeper the color of your food, the better. When you look at your plate, you should see a rainbow color of greens and blues and oranges and yellows, okay? When I went to the North Carolina Integrative Medical Society Conference last week in Charlotte, I had the pleasure of touring a North Carolina state initiative called FidoRx, where the state is actually evaluating how the quality of our food influences the amount of nutrition. So how it's sourced, how it's prepared, how it's stored. Does that change the vitamin levels in our food? It does. I got to stick my finger in something called a veggie meter and measure the amount of carotenoids in my blood, which is from orange and yellow vegetables. And I passed, although I have to confess that several people in my group had higher levels than me. So it's important to have these deeply colored fruits and vegetables. Other sources are whole grains. And by whole grain, it contains all three parts of the grain. This is the kernel, the germ, and the bran. So examples of whole grains are your deeply colored like brown rice, black rice, wild rice, quinoa, farro, amaranth. So whole grains. Also your eggs, fish, chicken, turkey, your low saturated fat meats. You can eat small amounts of meats that are high in saturated fats like red meat, but you should source them carefully. Free range as much as possible. We've discussed that in other videos. Herbs and spices. So turmeric, also cayenne. So did you know that cayenne pepper, so foods that are hot and spicy, actually decrease your sensation of pain through decreasing the substance P, which makes your brain sense pain less. So yes, you're hearing me correctly, that spicy food actually makes you feel pain less. All right. So other herbs that are important for fighting inflammation are ginger, your cooking herbs like rosemary, basil, turmeric, oregano, also omega-3s. So we've covered that in other videos. The largest source dietary of omega-3 is your fish, your white fish, your salmon, but also extra virgin olive oil is extremely important for calming inflammation. So you also want your alum group of foods, which is garlic and onions, shallots, chives. These are wonderful for fighting inflammation and they make your food taste better. We also want to look at foods that are rich in two primary nutrients, calcium and vitamin D. Now my next video, I'm going to take a deep dive into calcium and foods. The largest amount of calcium in a food group is dairy. Okay. Well, you can also get calcium from fortified non-dairy milks like soy, almond, coconut. When they're fortified with calcium, they have a comparable amount of calcium to about a glass of 2% milk. Other non-dairy sources of calcium include your bok choy, broccoli, kale, sardines with bones, basil seeds, and chia seeds. The other thing that I want to talk about is vitamin D. So you have to have enough vitamin D or you're not going to absorb your calcium no matter how much calcium-containing food you're eating. Vitamin D regulates how much calcium you absorb from your diet. What food is the highest in vitamin D? If you said mushrooms, you were correct. The cool thing, a little tip that this book talked to us about about vitamin D, is that if when those mushrooms are first picked, if they are dried in the sun, then they have substantially more vitamin D than if they weren't. So this study took three and a half ounces of shiitake mushrooms and put one group of them out in the sun for six hours. And would you know, the vitamin D content went from 100 international units not exposed to sunlight to 46,000 international units of vitamin D in that three and a half ounces of shiitake mushrooms because they dried in the sun. So again, food preparation matters and how much nutrients they have. Can't eat mushrooms, don't like mushrooms. You can also get some from fish and less from egg yolks. But mushrooms are definitely where the money's at when it comes to vitamin D in your foods.