You can’t see your bones age like you can your aging skin, but bones weaken and deteriorate over time just like your skin. This can lead to osteoporosis. The good news is that with proper nutrition and exercise, you can prevent it!

You can’t see your bones age like you can your aging skin, but bones weaken and deteriorate over time just like your skin. This can lead to osteoporosis. The good news is that with proper nutrition and exercise, you can prevent it!<1>

This article will help you “bone up” on what you need to do to protect and preserve your bones so you can be stronger and healthier every step of the way.

Algae Has Your Back (Plus Your Hips, Legs, and Arms!)

Did you know that an osteoporosis-related fracture occurs once every three seconds around the world?<2> Yikes. That hurts. When the body lacks bone-building cells called “osteoblasts” and has too many bone-weakening cells called “osteoclasts,” bones become porous and brittle.<3> Fractures from weak or porous bones are painful, slow to heal, and treatment options are few.

Good nutrition is the healthiest, most natural way to protect your bones both during your early years (when your body is focused on bone formation) and your later years (when you are losing more bone faster than you are building it). The easiest, simplest way to ensure healthy bones is with nutrient-dense whole foods like spirulina and chlorella tablets. Read on to find out why.

The easiest, simplest way to ensure healthy bones is with nutrient-dense whole foods like spirulina and chlorella tablets.

Getting the essential nutrients your bones need doesn’t have to be difficult! Algae such as spirulina and chlorella contain over forty vitamins and nutrients including the most important ones for healthy bones. Algae is rich in Vitamin K2, Vitamin B12, minerals like calcium and magnesium, and chlorophyll, all of which play important roles in bone formation, strength, and maintenance.

Your Bones Need More Than Just Calcium

Vitamin K2

We all know that calcium is an essential mineral for strong and healthy bones. That’s why we were told to drink our milk as kids! But recent scientific research has revealed the importance of Vitamin K2 (also known as menaquinones) to ensure that your bones absorb calcium.

Without Vitamin K2, calcium gets absorbed everywhere else except your bones. What? This discovery is relatively new (25 years) so it’s still relatively unknown, but it appears that Vitamin K2 is responsible for moving calcium into bones and teeth where it can be available for ensuring bone health.<4>

You form bone throughout your entire life, so adequate Vitamin K2 intake is super important. This powerful vitamin activates the calcium-binding actions of two important proteins in the body, matrix GLA protein and osteocalcin. These proteins help build and maintain bones.<5> In fact, increased levels of osteocalcin can prevent hip fractures.<6>

BONUS: want to improve that pearly-white smile? Well, osteocalcin also stimulates the growth of dentin, which makes your teeth stronger.<7>

How can you increase your osteocalcin levels? Vitamin K2 is probably one of the best ways to do this. Researchers linked deficiencies or low levels of Vitamin K to increased inflammation, fractures, bone pain, and in extreme cases, osteoporosis.<8> In a study conducted in Japan to study bone health in post-menopausal women, participants with a higher level of Vitamin K2 had significantly less bone loss over time.<9>

Vitamin B12

But wait, there’s more! Not only do you need Vitamin K2 for bone health, but Vitamin B12 is also known to be extremely important in bone health. A study evaluating the effect of B vitamin levels on bone health in the elderly associated Vitamin B12 deficiency with decreased bone density and an increased risk of fracture.<10>

Similarly, another study showed that low B12 levels led to issues with bone growth for children who are weaned from their mothers and decreased the number of osteoblasts (bone-building cells) in these children by two-thirds.<11>

Algae Contains High Levels of Vitamin K2 and Vitamin B12

So now that you know Vitamin K2 and Vitamin B12 are essential for bone health, where do you get these two critical nutrients? Sadly there are very few food sources that contain them, and there are none in the standard American diet, which is full of processed foods.

Granted if you are reading this, your diet is probably much better than most. Nonetheless, scientific research has shown that virtually 99% of us in the Western world are deficient in one or both of these vitamins. But before you panic, we have good news! Algae is loaded with both of them.

Spirulina is notable for its high concentration of Vitamin B12 and chlorella has a high concentration of Vitamin K2. Taking algae every day will help maintain your bone health, and since the tablets are super easy to travel with or take to the gym, you never need to miss a day.

And don’t forget algae tablets have bonus health and nutritional benefits thanks to the high protein and 40 other vitamins and nutrients in each serving! Goodbye multivitamins! Spirulina and chlorella both have high amounts of important vitamins as you can see from the table below:

Calcium, Magnesium, Copper, Zinc

The aging process can be pretty tough on our bones, which is why we all need adequate levels of minerals like zinc, calcium, and magnesium. Studies show that a shortage of these three minerals is directly related to the occurrence of osteoporosis. One such study evaluating the relationship between the intake of these minerals and the health of bones found that osteoporotic women had significantly low levels of these three minerals.<12>

Main takeaway: keep your mineral levels up, people.

The specific roles that these minerals play in bone health are varied. Magnesium plays a vital role in bone health as it converts Vitamin D into the active form of the vitamin that is responsible for calcium absorption.<13> In a study conducted with over 70,000 women, those who consumed 400mg of magnesium per day had 3% higher bone density than those who consumed less than half that amount.<14>

Zinc is essential for the function of several critical enzymes in osteoblasts which are necessary for collagen synthesis in the bone.<15> Although still widely unknown, copper plays a role in collagen and elastin linkage, which is important for bone cells. Finally, calcium is a well-known important mineral for bone health that builds and maintains strong, dense bones.<16>Clearly, these three minerals (and others!) have some pretty big roles!

But guess what: our bodies actually do not produce enough of these essential minerals, so we have to get them from external sources like our food. Low levels of any of these minerals can result in porous bones, fractures, breaks, not to mention other damaging health issues.

Algae to the Rescue!

Good news – algae is rich in all the minerals your body needs! Just one serving of spirulina has almost 30mg of magnesium, and one serving of chlorella has 23mg of magnesium. Spirulina and chlorella also contain calcium, copper, and zinc in small, yet important amounts.

Chlorophyll Can Help Too!

Chlorella algae is not just rich in chlorophyll. It has the highest concentration of chlorophyll in the world (25-times more than even liquid chlorophyll!). Chlorophyll is a phytonutrient that plays an essential role in your overall health including:

• reducing inflammation
• supporting the health of your cell walls (and mitochondria)
• speeding healing from injury or surgery
• improving hemoglobin formation and reducing their “stickiness’ to your blood flow improves.

All of the above and more are important for bone health. Inflammation harms your bones and has been shown to increase hip fracture risk by as much as 73%.<17> Keeping inflammation at low levels is just one important thing you can do to ensure optimum health of your bones, and consuming more chlorophyll is a great way to do that.

Chlorophyll also protects cells from oxidative damage by eliminating free radicals, which can be harmful to bone cells (and all cells). Free radicals can break apart osteoblasts and attack cells that are important in the process of bone creation.<18> By consuming more chlorophyll, you’ll protect bone-building cells by limiting free radicals within your system.

And if you have any doubt about the importance of chlorophyll to your overall health and longevity consider the fact that the chemical composition of chlorophyll is virtually identical to the chemical composition of hemoglobin (with the only difference being that chlorophyll has a magnesium atom in the center and hemoglobin has an iron atom in the center).

Other than this one atom, they are identical (as you can see from the illustration below). This may explain why the injured were given liquid chlorophyll during WWI when there was a shortage of blood for blood transfusions. They healed just as quickly as if they had been given a blood transfusion.

Chlorella Has More Chlorophyll than Greens

Adding greens to your diet will help increase your chlorophyll levels. Unfortunately, the reality is that even if you eat organic greens, there are so few minerals left in our soil that eating greens just isn’t good enough.

You would probably need to eat a room full of kale to get the amount of chlorophyll found in just one serving of our chlorella algae tablets and who wants to eat that much kale! One serving of chlorella tablets (7.5 grams) contains almost 160mg of chlorophyll, and the same amount of spinach (7.5 grams) contains only 0.75 mg of chlorophyll.

That’s quite a difference and is one of the reasons we refer to our algae tablets as “efficient nutrition!

Bonus Tip: Weight-Bearing Exercise Builds Bone Strength!

Engaging in strength training exercise is also a great way to build and maintain strong bones. Weight-bearing or high-impact exercises promote the formation of new bone. Studies show that this type of activity even increases the amount of bone created during peak formative and growth years for children.<19> <20>

In addition, strength training can be extremely beneficial for preventing bone loss in older adults. For examples, studies show that older men and women who performed weight-bearing exercises showed increases in bone mineral density, bone strength, and bone size.<21> <22> Doing weight-bearing and resistance exercises can help increase bone formation during growth as well as protect bone health in older adults.

Spirulina and Chlorella even Improve Your Workouts

Guess what?! Algae can help you get more out of your workout to help you build stronger bones. Spirulina is a great source of energy to help you get a quality workout and improve your focus and endurance.

On the other hand, chlorella will help your body recover and replenish important nutrients used during the workout, and since one of the toxins it removes is lactic acid, your muscles won’t be sore the next day, and your recovery will be faster.

That’s why algae not only provides your bones the nutrients they need to be healthy, it also improves your workouts and recovery. That’s what we call a win-win!

We hope you have enjoyed learning about the bone health benefits of algae! Our algae tablets may be tiny but they are mighty, and they can help you be mighty too!

*All tables are based on %DV for adults and children from the National Institute of Health (https://www.dsld.nlm.nih.gov/dsld/dailyvalue.jsp)

Sources

1. https://www.energybits.com/about-algae/nutritional-info.html
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16983459
3. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jhs/50/6/50_6_634/_article
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625766/
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22516726
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9062471/
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3530901
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24089220
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16614424
10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2435634/
11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071367/
12. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4469220/
13. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2787312
14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24500155
15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18813411
16. https://www.nof.org/patients/treatment/calciumvitamin-d/
17. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17419681
18. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22943759
19. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25198222
20. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22246217
21. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17140871
22. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17724395

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