Name: Podcast: Healthy Bones（Podcast: Healthy Bones）
Uploaded: 2023-03-12T05:27:11.000Z
Duration: 16 min 26 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

We have a lot of choices to make about our diet.

the protection of our organs and those things

without which we would quickly become a gelatinous mass

we look at how those eating plant-based diets

may be so slim, that they suffer from a loss of bone mass.

Osteoporosis is estimated to affect 200 million people worldwide.

Literally meaning "porous bone ," osteoporosis is a disease

characterized by reduced bone formation, excessive bone loss,

or a combination of both, leading to bone fragility

And bone mineral density is the most robust and consistent predictor

of osteoporotic fracture. What can we eat to boost our bone density?

Well, we know that increased consumption of plant foods

is associated with increased bone mineral density.

There's an extensive range of micronutrients and phytochemicals

packaged within plants that can be powerful promoters of bone health,

so healthcare professionals should be encouraged

to advise the increased consumption of plant-based foods,

irrespective of the clients underlying dietary pattern,

meaning no matter how much meat or junk they eat,

adding more healthy plant foods may help prevent

On the other hand, a more animal-source nutrient pattern

has been associated with a higher risk of fractures,

suggesting that a more animal-based diet is related to bone fragility.

So one would expect less osteoporosis in those eating plant-based diets,

but you don't know until you put it to the test.

"The Incidence of osteoporosis in vegetarians and omnivores ,"

the first study published nearly 50 years ago,

and the density of the bones that were measured was

significantly greater in the vegetarians than the omnivores.

In fact, the average bone densities of the vegetarians in their '70s

was greater than the densities of the meat eaters in their '50s.

Bottom line, these results suggest there's less likelihood of vegetarians

Turns out, though, that the researchers screwed up.

So the researchers were just using regular x-rays

and they confused the readings, such that darker bones on the x-ray

got a higher score, but that actually means less bone,

so their conclusion should have been the opposite

So vegetarians had worse bone mineral density.

Fast-forward about 40 years, by which time nine studies

had been done on thousands of individuals, and all in all,

the results suggest that vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets,

are associated with lower bone mineral density, but

the magnitude of the association is clinically insignificant, meaning

the difference was so small as to not really matter out in the real world,

reinforcing the fact that vegetarian diets

have no clinically detrimental effect on bone health.

And it is important to note that the findings of lower

bone mineral density didn't fully control for key confounding factors,

We know that people who are obese have stronger bones. Why?

Because they're weight lifting 50 pounds all day, every day, and maybe 100 pounds.

If you walked around with a 100-pound backpack every day,

That's how you build strong bones: weight-bearing exercise.

So people who weigh more have denser bones.

And vegetarians, and especially vegans, have such low rates of obesity

that no wonder, on average they would have lower bone density.

The researchers didn't take weight into account,

but if the difference they found isn't even clinically significant, who cares?

"Is vegetarianism a serious risk factor for osteoporotic fracture?"

the answer was no. Vegetarianism is not a serious risk factor.

By 2018, the latest meta-analysis on veganism, vegetarianism,

and bone mineral density, was up to 20 studies,

involving tens of thousands of participants, and, again,

lower bone mineral density was found in studies

of vegetarians and vegans compared to meat eaters.

The researchers conclude that vegetarian and vegan diets

need to be appropriately planned to preserve their bones.

But wait, did they account for the obesity thing?

They just used what are called crude risk ratios,

meaning no adjustments for confounding factors like weight,

so they didn't control for things like age, smoking, obesity,

exercise, and so their results are really uninterpretable.

But no one had gone through the trouble of going back through

all those studies and making the proper adjustments until now.

The title gives it away: "Differences in Bone Mineral Density between

Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians Become Marginal when

Accounting for Differences in Body Size Factors."