Hello and welcome to the nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host

Monica Reinagal and today we're going to look into the science on prunes or dried plums and whether or how they might be able to help you prevent osteoporosis or even reverse bone loss.

I've also got a few thoughts on the recent New York Times piece on

whether Americans are in danger of protein overload which several of you asked me to

comment on after it was published. Nutrition Diva listener Eleanor writes,

Can you comment on the benefits of prunes to stimulate bone growth?

There are a lot of websites that are promoting prunes as a

scientifically proven way to ward off osteoporosis. I'd love it if you would give these

claims a critical look. In fact there has been quite a bit of research done on dried

plums or prunes and their effects on bone health. Some of the results have been

very impressive. One study for example found that subjects who had already

experienced substantial bone loss were able to completely reverse these losses by eating prunes every

day and others showed that eating prunes can help prevent

that bone loss from occurring in the first place. The only problem is that these

studies were all done in mice and they involved eating prunes as 25% of the

entire diet and I'll just pause for a moment to let you contemplate the

potential impact of that.

So the real question is can prunes prevent bone loss in humans?

And there have also been a few trials involving real human beings.

One of them compared the effects of eating 100 grams of prunes or 75

grams of dried apples and how that affected bone mass in women who were past menopause.

The study went on for an entire year, but during

...