02/08/2026
Let’s talk Osteoporosis -
After age 50, approximately 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men will sustain an osteoporosis-related fracture in their remaining lifetime. Women will spend more time in a hospital for osteoporosis-related fractures than for breast cancer and heart disease combined. That statistic is worth reading twice. Breast cancer and heart disease are the two conditions that dominate the public conversation about women’s health, yet osteoporotic fractures generate more hospital days than both of them put together. A hip fracture in someone over 65 carries a one-year mortality rate of approximately 20 to 30 percent, and roughly half of those who survive are never functionally independent again. These are not rare outcomes. These are the real facts.
Men!! You are not exempt. Up to a third of men over 50 have either osteopenia or osteoporosis, and most of them have no idea because men are rarely screened and bone health is culturally framed as a women’s issue. It is not a woman’s issue; it is a human issue, and the fracture consequences in men are at least as severe.
Your skeleton is not the steel frame of a building. It is a living organ that is being dissolved and rebuilt continuously by specialized cells that never stop working. Right now, as you sit here reading this, osteoclasts are carving small trenches into your bone, dissolving the mineral matrix with acid and enzymes, and osteoblasts are following behind them, laying down fresh collagen and orchestrating its mineralization with calcium and phosphate crystals.
So if bone regenerates, then why do people get osteoporosis?
Because the loss of estrogen & progesterone shifts the breakdown/build balance, shifting it towards faster breakdown, unless you counteract this by starting to send a stronger rebuild "signal". That signal is muscle contractions (muscle is attached to bone, when it contracts it pulls on those bones). This is why progressive resistance training can reverse osteopenia & osteoporosis over time.
Food for thought………..
