AMA #37: Bone health—everything you need to know

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything, or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything AMA episode 37 I'm once again joined by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we dive really deep into one subject, bone health.
This is a topic we get a lot of questions about, but we decided to save our AMA for a time when we had accumulated enough questions that we could cover this comprehensively, which as you've gathered by now is sort of how we like to do things because it allows us to go much deeper.
So in this AMA, we're going to cover the following. We look at why everyone should care about bone health. In other words, why is this such a priority, not just for yourselves, but also for your children? We break down what bone mineral density is, how it's measured, and how much variability exists between people, between sexes, and how it changes over the course of your life. We also talk about what influences it, both early in life and later in life. We look at differences between men and women when it comes to this health and why menopause has such a disproportionate effect on the bone mineral density of women. We then get into ways that you can improve bone health, from exercise to nutrition, supplements, and of course, drugs. We end the discussion around what happens when we're forced to be sedentary and how you can work to minimize the damage during these periods. As a reminder, if you are a subscriber and you wanna watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of this video on the YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 37

**Nick Stenson** (2:03)
All right, Peter, welcome to another AMA. How you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:13)
Doing well, man. The final seven episodes of Ozark dropped tonight. We're recording this April 29th. Interesting date for two reasons, by the way. The other thing that occurred to me this morning is that the days and dates in this year, 2022, were the same as they were in 1994 So, I was like, oh my God, today is Friday, April 29th, which is the same as it was in 94 So, on Friday, April 29th in 1994, was the practice day at Imola. And that's when Rubens Baricella had that horrible, horrible accident.
We can link to the accident where he basically hit the chicane and launched into a barrier and amazingly only escaped with a concussion and a broken nose.
The following day, which is the same day as tomorrow will be, which was Saturday, April 30th, was when Roland Ratzenberger was killed, which made it the first fatality in Formula One in 12 years. The last one being Gilles Villeneuve in 1982 And then of course, Sunday, May 1st, which will be the same this year, was when Senna died.

**Nick Stenson** (3:19)
All in 1994

**Peter Attia** (3:20)
Yeah, it was at the same race. You had these three horrible accidents resulting in two fatalities in one weekend.
But again, to think it's the exact same days this year as it was 28 years ago. I didn't notice that until today.

**Nick Stenson** (3:34)
This is really off topic, but do you still have the skill that you had back in the day where you can remember what day, like day of the week a date was?

**Peter Attia** (3:44)
Only if I can peg it to something, but not as profound as it used to be.

**Nick Stenson** (3:47)
I remember in meetings, we used to just throw out random dates and then we would fact check it. I feel like we wasted a lot of time doing that.

**Peter Attia** (3:54)
Someone would tell me their birthday and I would tell them what day of the week they were born on.

**Nick Stenson** (3:58)
On the complete opposite end of that, what we're gonna talk about today is the topic that we get asked about a lot. And we've gotten a lot of questions that have come in, but we've never really dove really deep into it, which is what we're gonna do today. And it's kind of all things, bone health, bone mineral density, osteopenia, osteoporosis, things of that nature. And I know this is something that you work a lot with in your patients, and I know it's something that's of really big interest for people. And so our hope is that we can go through this episode and focus on why is this important? So why should people care about this? People listening right now, there'll be a subsection of them that are gonna be super interested, and there'll be probably another subsection who are maybe younger, they've never really thought about their bone health, and they might not think it really applies to them. But our hope is in the beginning, at least, we'll walk through why they should care about this and why they should focus on it.