"Almonds for Osteoporosis"
Currently, an estimated ten million Americans
suffer from osteoporosis,causing more than a million fractures,
including hundreds of thousands of hip fractures,
a common reason people end up in nursing homes.
Many older women say they’d rather be dead
than break their hip and end up in a home.
Bone is a dynamic, living organ
that is constantly renewed through a process of remodeling
and modeling involving bone breakdown by cells
that eat bone called osteoclasts
and bone formation by cells
that build bone called osteoblasts.
Osteoporosis is caused by an imbalance
between bone loss and bone gain,
most often related to hormonal changes
that occur during menopause.
Is there anything we can do to help
tip the balance back in bone’s favor?
There are a number of specific compounds
in plant foods that look promising,
but that’s based on in vitro studies
like this where they basically just drip some plant compound
on bone cells in a petri dish
and see a boost in bone builder cells,
or a drop in bone eater cells.
But no matter how much people like cranberry sauce,
they’re not injecting it into their veins.
For phytonutrients to reach the bone,
they first have to get absorbed
from the digestive tract into our bloodstream
and make it past the liver
before it can circulate to our skeleton.
So what would be nice is a so-called ex vivo study,
where you take people, feed them a food
—or not—and then draw their blood a few hours later
and then drip their blood onto bone cells
and see if there’s any difference.
But nothing like that had ever been attempted…
until this study.
Normally I’m not impressed with studies funded by marketing boards
who pay for studies like this, that found that eating almonds
improved cycling distance and athletic performance…
compared to cookies.
But this study was rather brilliant, not surprisingly,
given it was performed in the world-famous lab
of Dr. David Jenkins.
There was a population study that suggested that eating almonds
could protect against osteoporosis,
so what they could have just done
is drip some almond extract on bone cells,
but that’s not testing the whole food.
Instead you could treat bone cells with the blood
obtained from donors fed the whole food
to directly test the effects of these foods
at the cellular level.
So, they exposed human osteoclasts, the bone eaters,
to blood obtained before and four hours
after eating a handful of almonds.
But wait a second, before I get to the results,
if you ate a handful of almonds every day,
wouldn’t you gain weight?
that’s almost 200 calories!
Let’s find out.
If you add a handful or a handful and a half—
like 35 almonds as a snack
in addition to women’s regular diet as a mid-morning snack,
and told them to eat as much as you want
for lunch and supper that day,
people eat less;
in fact so much less, they cancel out the nut calories.
They all had the same breakfast,
then zero, 173 or 259 calories worth of almonds as a snack,
then ate as much lunch as they wanted,
but the nuts appeared to be so satiating
that they ate less for lunch or dinner
such that at the end of the day,
there was no significant difference in total caloric intake
between any of the three groups.
Part of the reason people don’t tend to gain weight
adding nuts to their diet may be because we end up
flushing nearly a third of the calories down the toilet
because we don’t chew well enough.
This is why we think there’s so much less fat
in our bloodstream after eating whole almonds
compared to the same amount of almond oil taken out of the nuts.
So anyway, they wanted to see if they could
suppress the activity of the cells that eat away our bones.
And they found that blood serum
obtained following the consumption of an almond meal
inhibits human osteoclast formation, and function, and gene expression,
providing direct evidence to support the association
between regular almond consumption
and a reduced risk of developing osteoporosis.
They also tried before and after eating other meals,
rice or potatoes, to make sure there wasn’t just some effect
of eating in general.
And no, the protective effect did appear specific to the almonds.