Bone support is not merely for the elderly. In fact, if you want healthy joints and bones, then you need to start at a young age. To understand why you need to ensure healthy bone development from a young age, you need to understand how your body builds your bones.

The Bone Formation Process

As a child, your body uses a process of bone formation to produce more bone cells to ensure healthy skeletal growth. During this process, your body resorbs bone cells at the same time, and replaces them with new healthy bone cells. The process of resorption is vital for ensuring your bones are strong, healthy, and flexible. As you grow older, the bone formation process slows down and, by your early twenties, your body reaches equilibrium in terms of bone formation versus bone resorption. At this stage, your bones have reached their upper limit in terms of bone density. From this point onwards, bone formation and bone density decrease. The stronger your bones are at this point, therefore, determines how strong they are in later life. This is why supplementation for bone support is vital from a young age. The most important nutrients for promoting optimal bone density are:

• Calcium
• Magnesium
• Vitamin D
• Zinc
• Phosphorous

Calcium

Calcium is the foundation for bone health, and for health in general. You reach optimal bone density between the age of 25 and 35, and calcium is vital for ensuring you reach the highest bone density possible to ensure bone health and strength in later life. Calcium does not only strengthen the bones, but the bones act as a repository for calcium. Your body uses calcium to regulate the overall pH of the body, and you need abundant amounts of calcium to support nerve health and function. When your dietary levels of calcium are insufficient to support these functions, your body is designed to remove calcium from the bones to support these functions. This weakens the bone structure and increases your risks of developing conditions like osteoporosis. Calcium supplementation is not something that one can do once, and then forget about. You need to ensure your diet contains sufficient calcium every day. A good calcium supplement gives you the ability to ensure your calcium intake meets your body’s calcium requirements on a daily basis.

Magnesium

Magnesium is another foundational element for health. Like calcium, the body uses magnesium for various functions, including bone support, and it is vital to ensure your daily diet includes sufficient magnesium. Magnesium gives bones their strength and flexibility. Magnesium is vital for promoting the production of a hormone called calcitonin. Calcitonin facilitates the process of drawing calcium from the blood back into the bones to ensure optimal bone strength and density. This is partially the reason why you need to take both calcium and magnesium as a bone supplement, and why most top-quality bone supplements contain both calcium and magnesium. Since bone density and formation rely on both calcium and magnesium, and they rely on a particular ratio of calcium and magnesium, a good bone support supplement may be one of the most reliable ways to ensure you get sufficient magnesium.

Vitamin D

Calcium and magnesium without vitamin D borders on pointless. Vitamin D is the third nutrient in the triad of nutrients that are vital for optimal bone support. Vitamin D facilitates calcium absorption. Without sufficient vitamin D, your body will not absorb the calcium you ingest in the form of natural foods or even a supplement. This is why it is vital that the supplement you choose for bone support includes vitamin D. Magnesium is used as a co-factor in vitamin D metabolism. In other words, your body uses magnesium in the processes that require vitamin D. This essentially means that you need magnesium in order to use vitamin D, and that is why a good bone support formula has to contain calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D to support healthy bone formation and support. Calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D are codependent on one another. You could ensure you get sufficient calcium from the milk you drink, and you could regulate your magnesium intake in the food you eat, but trying to regulate your own levels of vitamin D on top of all that is virtually impossible. Your body produces vitamin D based on exposure to direct sunlight, and it is almost impossible to regulate your vitamin D levels by timing the periods you spend in the sun. A good bone support supplement offers you vitamin D, magnesium, and calcium in the correct proportion to help ensure you get the nutrients needed to build strong, healthy bones when you are younger, so that you receive the benefits of healthy bone structures later in life.

Don’t Leave Bone Support Too Late

Proper bone support begins at birth, or, at the very least, at childhood. Teach your children about the nutrients that are vital for supporting their healthy growth and development, and which are vital for providing the right platform for health later in life. Bone support is not only for the elderly.