Food and Our Bones: The Natural Way to Prevent Osteoporosis

Why take hormones and supplements to ward off osteoporosis--the bone-thinning disease that many postmenopausal women worry about--when you can get calcium and other nutrients needed for healthy bones from eating the right foods? That's the message from Annemarie Colbin, a food therapist who authored a previous book, Food and Healing. While she acknowledges some people would rather pop pills than go to the trouble of cooking healthy foods, she argues her philosophy persuasively.

First, Colbin describes foods that studies suggest may weaken the bones, such as caffeine and tomatoes. Then she presents evidence for bone-strengthening foods, going beyond the conventional wisdom that dairy products are the best way to get dietary calcium. In fact, she writes, the Chinese vegetable bok choy provides the most calcium per calorie of any food--more than double the amount per calorie in skim milk. The book includes more than 60 recipes to help put Colbin's philosophy into practice, although many of the recipes call for ingredients such as seaweed. Detailed nutritional analysis of the recipes takes up more than 60 pages, space that might have been better spent, perhaps on recipes using more easily available ingredients.

Even if you're not interested in following Colbin's philosophy exactly, her book provides insight into how what we eat affects our bones. "Eating well is the best prevention," Colbin writes. "I hope you will find some ideas here that apply to you, to help you remain strong until the day you decide to leave the earth. Once you know the facts, your own individual course of action will become clearer."