The Bone Health Crisis No One Talks About with Sanjeev Javia | HFYH #137

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:00)
I am the bone doctor who puts metal in you when you fall. And I can't tell you how many women I have that have a growth mindset, have made their hormonal optimization decision, are lifting, are jumping, are working on their balance, are eating a high protein diet with enough fiber, and still their DEXA scan shows osteopenia, and they're almost deflated, like, oh my God, what else could I do? That's why we decided to make Unbreakable Bone. Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health, and culture, as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, welcome back to HOT For Your Health, where every week I talk to fascinating people, health innovators, and sometimes friends and collaborators. And this week, we're joined once again by Sanjeev Javia, who has been my friend for 15 or, I don't know, Jeevers, 20 years, co-collaborators on multiple things. But Jeevers, which is what his friends call him, you're a business genius, you have an MBA, you are a master formulator, formulating products for multiple companies. And I'm so lucky that you've now partnered with me once again to formulate for women's health. Because, you know, I go on and on and on, publicly, privately, about the problem of bone health in women. And I'm just going to tell people some statistics, which are frightening and which really motivate me. I mean, I stand on these soap boxes saying things like, I am still a practicing orthopedic surgeon, and every time I take call, I am met in the emergency room by women who are manifesting a disease of youth in their old age with a femur fracture. 70% of all people who have femur fractures are women. And do you know what happens? The minute Jeevers, they land on the ground, like that. The minute they do that, they have a 30% chance of dying. And if they survive the fall and the immediate aftermath, 50% of the time, they do not return to the home where they came from. And those are devastating statistics because we probably all have a woman in our life that we know that has gone through this. Now, this also happens for men. Honestly, 2 million men in this country have osteoporosis. But here's the thing about osteoporosis, which means holes in the bone. We can prevent it. We should have prevented it, except we never stepped in front of it early enough because we laid down peak bone density in our late 20s. And if we never laid down enough, then we hit perimenopause where our estrogen plummets, and we can lose another 15 to 20 percent of our bone density. So that we arrive in mid-age and beyond behind the eight ball. And you know what? We try our best. I try my best, but none of us are perfect. And so that's why you and I formulated Unbreakable Bone, so that we do every single thing possible to build better bone. And I have eight tools for building bone, and this is just one of them. So what got you interested, besides me harping at you, on building better bone from a formulation standpoint? Why is the story of being able to nutritionally augment the best we can with whole anti-inflammatory foods? What made that interesting to you?

**Sanjeev Javia** (4:08)
You know, I think what it was is what is the biggest reason why people are so interested now in bone, because of you is that I thought bone was mainly for structural purposes. It was to hold up our body. It was for our muscles to be attached.
I didn't look at muscles as an organ. I didn't understand all of the things that you were talking about, how muscle or sorry, how bone drives hormones and how bone drives neurological connection and how bone drives all of these different things and looking at it simply as really it's an organ. And if you lose this bone density, it's not just about losing the structural component that keeps you up and allows you to move, but it causes all of these other huge downstream effects from your brain all the way to your blood vessels.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (5:08)
So just in case anybody's wondering what the heck, absolutely, I think the most fascinating part of bone is not just that it's literally the backbone of our bodies, it is, but or the backbone of our mobility.
But to your point, I talk all the time about bone is the storehouse, it's the grocery store of our body, right? Everything, all the minerals we take into our guts stored in the bone. It's got to be stored somewhere until our body needs it for chemical processes. Storehouse. It is an incubator. All of our blood cells are made in our pelvis and our femur, our long bones. That's amazing, right? Bone is an endocrine organ. It's not just silent. Bone is the master communicator. It produces hormones like osteocalcin and LCN2, which are critical for things like satiety, i.e. are you hungry anymore? Bone does that. It's critical for glucose metabolism and insulin secretion. It has a direct relationship with our gut. So the nutrition we eat and as good as we try to be, the bone knows what the gut is absorbing because it has a direct relationship. Bone produces these hormones that go to our brain, Jeevers, and helps us build better brains. Bone is so fascinating, and I call it the master communicator because if I was designing a human that needed a communication system throughout the whole body, why wouldn't I use a structure that's in the whole body from the top of our heads to the bottom of our feet, bone? I mean, so we are magic, we are meticulously designed, and bone is central to communication. And yet, we ignore it, or we don't listen to it. Maybe because we don't know how to listen to it. It's not that it's not speaking to us, we just don't know how to listen.