Longevity Is Built in Bone: The Design Problem Every Woman Over 50 Must Solve | Dr Vonda Wright

**Vonda Wright** (0:00)
Hi, and welcome to The Unbreakable Bone Mini Series. I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, your orthopedic sports surgeon and longevity and women's health expert. You know, over the course of these four previous episodes, we've talked about what bone is. What are some of the staggering statistics when bone is not healthy enough to hold us up? We've talked about the eight shields and a couple of bonuses on how to build better bone, and we've talked about the life cycle of bone and how osteoporosis, which affects one in two women, resulting in fracture, is not a disease of old people. It manifests when we're old, but it begins when we're young. So in this last episode, I just want to talk more about how I believe that longevity is built in bone. You know, when I think of longevity and all the time, we're talking in public society about what peptide, what vitamin, what kind of exercise we need, I think those are all important. But unless we realize that longevity is skeletal longevity, how our bones are working, our muscles, our tendons, our ligaments, we won't be able to do the lifestyle that we know that will sustain us. I believe that bone is the foundation of the longevity architecture. Skeletal longevity, let's just define it, is bone, muscle, tendon, ligament, and all the metabolism, and all the communication, and even endocrine function that these tissue do. Because remember, I've told you before, bone, muscle, tendon, ligament, cartilage, fat, muscle-derived stem cells are all derived from one stem cell called the mesenchymal stem cell, and they are cousins, and they talk all the time. So skeletal longevity is not just muscle, it's not just bone. It is the entire ecosystem that supports our soft organs in longevity. Bone is actually the keystone tissue that enables performance at every age. You know, I get a lot of comments and a lot of questions from people about, I know I'm supposed to exercise, but I have fractures or osteoporosis. I know I'm supposed to exercise, but I'm so weak or my knees are killing me.
So skeletal longevity, I contend to you, is the key to overall longevity. But here's the thing, skeletal longevity, and frankly, longevity in general, is not simply a timeline. It's not just about getting to 120 or 150 years. I contend to you that longevity, and especially skeletal longevity, is a design problem. And we should approach it as a design problem, meaning how are we going to preserve our skeletal longevity? Well, we are going to design an unbreakable future by the way we live our lives, by the 8, 9, 10, 11 shields for building better bone, by eating an anti-inflammatory diet, and all the things that we commonly talk about. When I say design, it's almost as if I'm asking you to make a strategic plan for your longevity and your bone health. Not just sprinkle in random interventions, gadgets, red lights, but to really design the way that you're going to fortify your body. And not just, my friends, react with medicine or pills. We can treat your osteoporosis once you have it. We have fascinating drugs and lots of them for treating osteoporosis. But I can tend to you that in a design model, designing longevity across the lifespan, across the skeletal longevity lifespan, that we design a program that starts in our youth through pregnancy and breastfeeding, through perimenopause, menopause, and afterwards. Because frankly, medicine reacts late, and bone demands a strategy across a lifespan. The truth is, fractures are predictable. I can predict to you, like I did in session number one, that one in two women with osteoporosis will have a fracture. We know that. The data are clear. I can predict that you're going to lose 20% of your bone density in perimenopause, more of it during pregnancy and breastfeeding. I can predict that if we cannot balance, and we do not have the muscle strength to support our bones, that we could fall and therefore fracture. When you fracture your hip, such as here, this is a hip bone, this is the femur, what we commonly say the hip bone, that if you fracture this bone, I will predict based on data that 30% of the time you will die and 50% of the time, you will not return to pre-fall function.
If we can predict these outcomes, I'm going to ask you, what is the mindset that is keeping you from building by design, a plan to build better bones, to build more muscle to protect yourself? Because the fact of the matter is that strong bones preserve your independence. They enable you to stay mobile across a lifespan. And because we've already discussed that there is a communication link between bones and your brain, that strong bones can give you cognitive resilience, GI resilience. So as we're closing in this really short segment of the Unbreakable Bone Mini Series, I want you to remember that aging, longevity, skeletal longevity is not just a timeline to coast through. It is a design problem. Aging with power begins by designing a lifestyle of skeletal integrity. Longevity isn't just about extending the length of your life. Longevity is built early and it's built in bone.