Boost Your Bone Health

Maintaining internal scaffolding that's healthy, durable and ready for a long, strong future makes all the difference in determining what you'll be able to do as you age. Follow these steps to keep your skeleton in tip-top shape.

- By Meryl Davids Landau

Until we break one, most of us rarely give our bones a second thought. But it's helpful to think of building strong, dense bones as being similar to building a retirement account, says Michael Swartzon, M.D., a family and sports medicine physician at Baptist Health in Miami. Even if you have many years left in the workforce, you start making deposits now so it will grow and be robust later. "Your 30s and 40s are crucial decades for building bone. If you maximize that peak, you'll have more years later without problems," adds Jackie Thielen, M.D., a women's health specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL.

The "deposits" concept isn't merely a metaphor. We tend to think of bones as solid bricks that stop growing after childhood, but it turns out they're like living sponges with a hard lattice structure and hollow sections inside. Our bones are continually changing: Sometimes the bones are building up (known as formation), and at other times they're breaking down (resorption). As we age, and especially after menopause when we lose the bone-building powerhouse estrogen, formation slows down, making the hollow sections bigger. As with those retirement funds, if we haven't banked enough before then, we won't be in the strongest position.