In a new study from the University of Michigan, researchers found nutrition has a greater impact on bone strength than exercise.
They looked at mineral supplementation and exercise in mice, and found surprising results—nutrition has a greater impact on bone mass and strength than exercise.
Further, even after the exercise training stopped, the mice retained bone strength gains as long as they ate a mineral-supplemented diet.
The team says the longer-term mineral-supplemented diet leads to not only increases in bone mass and strength but the ability to maintain those increases even after detraining.
The second important finding is that the diet alone has beneficial effects on bone, even without exercising.
This surprised Kohn, who expected exercise with a normal diet to fuel greater gains in bone strength, but that wasn’t the case.
The study suggests the long-term consumption of the mineral-supplemented diet could be beneficial in preventing the loss of bone and strength with age, even if you don’t do exercise training.
Most other studies look at the effects of increasing dietary calcium. This study increased calcium and phosphorous, and found benefits to increasing both.
This isn’t to suggest that people run out and buy calcium and phosphorus supplements. The findings don’t translate directly from mice to humans, but they do give researchers a conceptual place to start.
The team says humans achieve peak bone mass in their early 20s, and after that it declines.
The question becomes how to maximize the amount of bone when young so that when declines do begin, people start from a better position.
If you care about diets, please read studies about this diet may help reduce erectile dysfunction and findings of this diet linked to blinding eye diseases in older people.
For more information about diets and your health, please see recent studies about this diet could improve health in people with diabetes and results showing alternating diets to boost weight loss.
The study is published in PLOS ONE. One author of the study is David Kohn.
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