If you have received a diagnosis of osteopenia or osteoporosis, do you feel helpless as though you are a victim of a disease? I hope this article will help you see how you can reverse that diagnosis.

Osteoporosis is not a disease and it should never be treated like a disease. Medication to try to cover up symptoms without first addressing the cause is useless – even dangerous. That only leads to more serious consequences.

For many years, as a nurse, I had been brainwashed to think that nearly any physical concern could be solved with medication. However, I became very much interested in nutrition after that. So, when I was told that my broken hip was due to osteoporosis, I determined to learn what I could do to resolve it without drugs.

Following much independent nutritional research, I learned that most physical problems including osteoporosis are the result of lifestyle.

By lifestyle, I mean:

· The food I eat

· Vitamins & minerals to supplement my food

· My exercise or lack of it

· My rest and how I react to stress in my life

· My spiritual condition – or my trust in God

In a cartoon that I saw recently, a patient was asked by his doctor, “Do you watch what you eat?”

He answered, “Of course, I watch what I eat. Do you think I can put food into my mouth without seeing it? Obviously, he didn’t realize what the doctor was asking.

Thinking back, I realized that I contributed to my osteoporosis by the way I ate. The results of bad eating don’t ever show up right away. When I was a senior in high school, I worked half days in an office, and when it was time for our coffee break, a friend and I always headed for the candy machine because we didn’t like coffee and felt we needed some “refreshment.”

Little did I realize that a few years later, during my training to become a nurse, I would need to visit my dentist every week to get my many cavities in my teeth filled. Are you wondering what that has to do with
osteoporosis, remember that bones and teeth have similar composition. What affects the teeth affects the bones. Both depend upon calcium which cannot be digested well when a person eats a lot of sweets or
other simple carbohydrates, like white rice, white bread, or bagels.

So, you can see how I caused my osteoporosis. I hope you will be more careful to keep your body in a condition that resists such conditions.

Just ask yourself these simple questions:

Do I watch what I eat?”

Do I choose my food to make my body healthy?

Do I choose to eat whatever is convenient at the moment?

Do I choose my food based entirely upon my mood?

Could my food be just my emotional pacificier?

It is never too soon or too late to create a healthy body when we seriously want to.

By Muryal Braun