Gratitude to my wife (and office manager) for sharing this interesting study, published in 2022, with me.
Researchers at Penn State University randomly assigned 235 post-menopausal women to either eat 50 grams of prunes (aka dried plums) or not every day for a year. For context, 50 grams of prunes is about six prunes per day. After a year, they found that the women eating the prunes had better bone mineral density, and an accordingly lower estimated risk for bone fractures, than the women who weren’t.
In other words, doing absolutely nothing other than adding six prunes per day to your diet might be a tool to keep your bones healthy, at least in post-menopausal women.
Please be aware that the office will be closed during the weeks of August 11th and August 18th for summer vacation. We will be re-opening on Monday August 25th.
If you are a current patient and have an urgent medical concern, please go to the nearest emergency room or urgent care center. You can reach out to me afterwards with a text message, voicemail, or email to update me on things so that I can follow up with you upon my return.
By contrast, if you are a current patient and need to reach me for a non-urgent issue such as getting a refill or discussing a minor medical problem, you can text or email me and I will get back to you, but there may be a delay of 24 hours or so as we will be traveling abroad.
Thank you for your understanding, and I hope you are having a nice summer.
In the study, the famed Dr. Dean Ornish (who is best known for a 1990 study that used a similar intervention to reduce heart attack risk) at the University of California San Francisco took patients with early-stage dementia and divided them into a control group (who didn’t do anything in particular) and a study group who received an intensive lifestyle intervention that consisted of:
A low-fat vegan diet
Regular meditation and yoga for stress reduction
Daily “cardio” type exercise
Prioritizing good quality sleep
The results after 40 weeks were that the people in the control group got worse (as expected), whereas in the people receiving the intervention, 46% improved and 37% stabilized on a series of cognitive tests. Put another way, 83% of people doing the lifestyle program did a lot better than the people not doing the lifestyle program.
