Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel the nutrition diva here with your quick and dirty

tips for eating well and feeling fabulous today's quick and dirty nutrition tip is that eating your vegetables

may be at least as important for healthy bones as drinking your milk.

Marilyn wrote this week with a question about nutrition and bone health.

I'm 54 and I've done weight-bearing exercise and eaten a balanced healthy diet all my life, she writes.

But I recently got diagnosed with severe osteoporosis. My mother was crippled by osteoporosis.

What can I do nutritionally to help strengthen my bones? Well, Marilyn, it sounds like you have

been doing all the right things.

But in addition to diet and lifestyle, genetics can play a big role in whether or not you get osteoporosis.

The fact that your mom also had osteoporosis suggests that genetics may indeed have played a role in your case.

Your doctor may prescribe a medication to help with your own loss, but you're smart to be thinking

about what you can do nutritionally as well.

It's something we all need to think about whether we are young or old,

male or female, and whether we have osteoporosis in the family or not.

All of us will lose bone as we age, and if you don't start out with strong bones,

you can get into trouble pretty quickly.

It's never too late to start taking better care of your bones,

but it's best to start young.

So I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that a healthy

diet can do wonders to protect your bones. The bad news is that a lot of what you read about

nutrition and osteoporosis is out of date. For example, you'll still find a lot of articles claiming

that high protein diets cause bone loss.

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