Gabor Szendi:
Two sides of the 'osteoporosis coin'

The two faces of the osteoporosis issue mean that the disease indeed exists, but on the other hand is undoubtedly misdiagnosed and mistreated. How can this be interpreted for a successful outcome?

 

 

There are contradictory views over osteoporosis, just as with many other diseases of western civilization. There are sound arguments to support the idea that osteoporosis was invented by the pharmaceutical industry with the aim of dumping its expensive medications on increasingly broad masses of people, with fear-inspiring propaganda (Moynihan and Cassels, 2005), but there is also no question of the 30,000 spinal fractures and 14,000 hip fractures annually in Hungary alone, and that 20-30% of patients will die from the hip fractures within one year (Genti, 2007). The severity of the situation can be compared to cardiovascular or cancer mortality, and the three disease groups have in common that conventional medicine has absolutely no idea about the causes of these diseases and their effective treatment. The level of development of medicine is in glaring contradiction to its inertia. It is no wonder about the birth of conspiracy theories stating that the 'cataract blurring the eyesight' of Western medicine is the pharmaceutical industry. Unfortunately there is much truth in this since manipulated studies, exaggerated results, and information about side effects being held back are commonplace. Yet this does not explain everything. The key problem is the 'biological machine' model dominating medicine, set against the evolutionary perspective of humans.

Based on the mechanistic view of the human body, the osteoporosis epidemic suddenly appearing from nowhere is even now mainly considered merely as calcium deficiency. The sophistry is convincing: if weakening of bones is caused by decreasing calcium content, you must simply increase calcium intake.

Should we drink milk to have strong bones?

An obvious method to combat this is to increase the consumption of milk and dairy products. We should get used to the fact that public health advice has very little to do with scientific truth. Health advice has started to link the consumption of milk and dairy products with the notion of strong bones. According to official recommendations, if you want to have strong bones, you need to consume a lot of milk and dairy products, starting from childhood. It has become popular to indicate on the packaging of various dairy products what percentage of daily calcium demand is covered by their use. Moreover, millions of tons of different supplements and effervescent tablets for calcium replacement started to be sold. The dairy industry as well as calcium supplement manufacturers, while rubbing their hands at the prospect, were not at all confused by the fact that studies began to give warnings about the various dangers of calcium supplementation. Indeed, propaganda always builds on the notion of lying to people until they believe those lies.

In 1997 Diane Feskanich and her research group published results from a study with a 12-year follow-up of 77,761 female subjects. The results showed that subjects with the largest milk consumption were 75% as likely to suffer hip bone fracture as those not drinking any milk at all (Feskanich et al., 1997). Amy Joy Lanou et al., based on a pooled analysis from nearly 50 trials in 2005, concluded that there was nothing to support the recommendation to consume a lot of milk and dairy products during childhood and adolescence to help bone formation (Lanou et al., 2005). 2015 was the last time that a pooled analysis from 8 studies was published, which concluded from data of a total of 267,759 people followed for several years, that the risk of hip fracture was not affected by the level of calcium supplementation (Wang et al., 2005). In fact there was a twofold increase in the incidence of hip fractures in the subjects with a maximum daily calcium intake of 900 mg, compared to people with that of 450 mg (Feskanich et al., 1997).

Additional hazards of calcium supplementation

The official recommendations, being fundamentally flawed and in effect for several decades, slowly started to reap their 'benefits'. Mark Bolland and his group compared the effect of calcium supplementation to that of placebo tablets in healthy elderly women, and after just 5 years there was respectively more than a twofold increase and a 50% rise in the number of heart attacks and stroke risk in those with calcium supplementation (Bolland et al., 2008). In another 7-year study, the same research group found, as a result of calcium supplementation, an increase in the risk of heart attack and stroke of respectively 'only' 24% and 20% (Bolland et al., 2011). In a third clinical trial, the number of heart attacks increased by 26% (Pentti et al., 2009). Increased calcium intake also promotes kidney stone formation; in a 7-year study, a calcium intake of 500 mg daily increased the incidence of kidney stones by 17% (Wallace et al., 2011). That is to say, supplemented calcium is deposited in the soft tissues rather than the bones themselves.

Bisphosphonates: side effects instead of effects

Perceiving people as a biological machine led to the other naive idea of stopping osteoporosis. This states that if osteoporosis is caused by the predominance of bone degradation processes, these must merely be inhibited and the bone mass will therefore no longer decrease. The drug class of bisphosphonates, consisting of similar products from several large pharmaceutical companies, was developed for this purpose. The problem with this concept is that these drugs not only inhibit bone degradation, but also bone formation. Moreover, in the spirit of the idea that 'the more doctors are able to measure bone density, the more bisphosphonates they will prescribe', equipment to measure bone density were disseminated and the definition of osteoporosis was modified to the extent that the bone density of a 30-year-old athletic female became the standard (Moynihan and Cassels, 2005). Based on the largely exaggerative estimates of the future risk of bone fractures, these dangerous but actually inefficacious medications have been, and are, prescribed unnecessarily for many women (Järvinen et al., 2015b). Namely, the most common cause of bone fractures in the elderly is due to falls rather than osteoporosis (Järvinen et al., 2015a). Bone density measurement did not predict the occurrence of hip fracture in 50% of cases (Wainwright et al., 2005). The protective effect of bisphosphonates is largely overstated; they were estimated in a study to reduce the risk of hip fractures or the compression of more than two vertebrae by 21% and 60%, respectively (Cummings et al., 1998).

However emphasizing this relative risk reduction is misleading. If, for example, 2 out of 100 people have hip bone fractures in the group not taking any drugs vs. only 1 person in the drug treatment group, then there is a 50% relative risk reduction, but there have actually been only 1% less fractures. In the cited study, the actual decrease in the number of fractures was only 0.2% and 0.3%. The inefficacy of the drug is also well demonstrated by the fourfold difference in the prescription frequency of bisphosphonates across some regions in Canada, but with no difference in the rate of hip fractures (Crilly et al., 2014). As bisphosphonates stop the cycle of degradation and formation of bone cells, they also inhibit bone healing. Therefore, jaw bone necrosis (also known as osteonecrosis of the jaw or ONJ) is initiated in 0.1-0.2% of patients either spontaneously or after tooth extraction; the process can only be treated, but not stopped (Lo et al., 2010; Párkányi et al. 2011). In addition, spontaneous fractures, esophagus cancer, atrial arrhythmias, muscle pain, etc. might also occur during bisphosphonate use (Kennel and Drake, 2009).

Medicine, 'being stuck in the present', has created many ideas to provide an explanation for osteoporosis, e.g. consumption of too many or too few proteins, lack of estrogen, acidification, excessive salt intake, etc.; however, none of these are viable theories. To the disappointment of many people, vitamin D, which has only now become popular after some 100 years, is not the right answer to the problem either, although most physicians considering themselves as enlightened look at this substance as the solution. Essentially, taking far more vitamin D than the official recommendations slows down bone loss by enhancing active calcium uptake in the bowels, and thus the body maintains blood calcium levels with calcium obtained from a source other than the bones. But calcium will not build up into bones just because of this (Szendi, 2012).

The answer has always been right under our noses, and we only need to understand what archaeological bone findings and the strong bones of indigenous people now alive tell us. Doctors living among indigenous people have observed that osteoporosis is an unknown concept for them, and fractures occur only after extreme gross physical stress. In comparison their calcium consumption is 150-300 mg instead of the official recommendation of 1000-1500 mg (Lindeberg, 2010).

Osteoporosis is a lifestyle disease that can be understood only from the lifestyle of indigenous people which went astray in 20th century. Indigenous people have high vitamin D levels, while due to urbanization, the majority of westernized people suffer from severe vitamin D deficiency (Szendi, 2012). A second important factor was discovered by Weston Price, who in the early 20th century started to investigate the nutrition of indigenous people, in search of the cause of tooth decay. He discovered that a substance that he called Activator X is needed for appropriate bone growth. Now we know that this is actually vitamin K2, which slowly depleted from the diet of people living in the Western world. Another of Price's discoveries, that atherosclerosis is caused by vitamin K2 deficiency, was confirmed by science 60 years later (Szendi, 2013). The third factor is physical exercise. Studies have proven that bone mass grows proportionally with muscle mass (Anderson, 2000). The last time many people had strenuous exercise was in gym class at school.

A lifestyle disease should be healed with lifestyle changes. The prescription against osteoporosis is simple: a lot of vitamins D and K2, and a lot of physical exercise leading to muscle growth. It is never too late to start.

 

References

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