Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to you by nutritional weight and wellness.

To start today's discussion, let me ask you a question. When you think of people who should be concerned about their bones, does a certain

demographic come to mind? Or does your mind automatically go to women of a certain age at risk

for osteoporosis or thinning bones? Do you ever think about the importance of bone health in children

and adolescents? Maybe when you were growing up or when

you were raising children, yourself, there was the message to drink milk with each meal, to grow strong

bones. Well, today we'll be talking about all foods for healthy bones in adolescence.

Most teenagers maybe aren't thinking about their bone health.

I'm guessing they're not.

That's not their top priority, but something they might be concerned about

is preventing that sprain fracture or bone break while doing their sports

or their activities that they love.

Adolescence is a critical period for bone development,

and the choices we make in our youth can impact our skeletal health for the rest of our lives.

So many of the time a client will come to me with osteoporosis or osteopenia,

and we don't really see, she says, I've been active my whole

life. I don't really understand how we got here. But then we track back to their childhood.

Maybe she didn't eat that well. Maybe she had a problem with digestion. And I say, well,

you could have really lost bone or not developed good bone in your teens.

Yeah, because it started a lot earlier, right?

A lot earlier.

But we always think whenever you get a diagnosis that it happened right now.

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