[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. We are talking about what bone actually does. You know, you may think that bone is only structural. This is a femur, why wouldn't you think that? It looks like the I beam of a building. It feels hard, but the reality is that bone actually is the master communicator of your body. It does so many things. My goal for the end of this session today is that you are going to be so fascinated by all the jobs that bone does in your body, that you're gonna have a whole new perspective. We do think as bonus structural, and it is. What does it do? The thing you think about, think about Halloween. It's a series of very hard long structures or sometimes strangely shaped structures like your pelvis or your scapula that serve as the anchor for your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and they do do that. And thank goodness they do that, it gives us human form. It's allows us to locomote or move. Let's be honest, without bone, muscle that we're all in love with is just a heaping pile of steaming metabolic tissue. But when it partners with its cousin bone, it moves us, it helps us look human. But that is not the only thing bone does. It does provide structural integrity. And it does so because bone has many parts. You're most familiar with the hard part on the outside. It's called the cortex or cortical bone. It's very important for strength and load bearing, but inside the bone, if I were to cut this in half, bone is actually a mesh. The inside of bone I like to say looks like lace. The trabecular bone not only lightens the weight of bone, but it serves as a storehouse of many miraculous processes that we're gonna talk about. So our bone is structural, but did you know that bone is an incubator? Did you know that when we're making our entire immune system, our white cells, our red cells, that that happens in the long bones of our body and in our pelvis? So bone is not just structural, it is an incubator of our immune system. And it is critical in the production, especially in our pelvis of the memory cells of our immune system, our B cells, our T cells, are all made in the pelvis. So just to give you an idea of why that's so important, remember many years ago, we had a pandemic and many people chose or were made to get a vaccine. What that did was go and teach the immune system that was being developed in your bones to protect you. Isn't that fascinating? Bone is structural, and bone is an incubator. But we're not stopping there. Bone is the storehouse, the pantry, the lean-to where you put all your extra stuff of all the minerals that your body needs. So our body is a, is a chemical and an electrical system. And one of the main substances, molecules, elements that your body needs is calcium. Your bone is the storehouse of calcium. So when you need to fire your nerves, when you need to contract your muscles, when your heart needs to pump, that takes calcium. Well, you can't just have it running around and stored in random places, the bone stores calcium. It's also a big sink of protein in your body. Isn't that fascinating? I bet you've never thought of the fact that bone is a mineral reservoir. You know, you need calcium, but maybe you never knew why. So bone is structural, bone is an incubator, and bone is your mineral reservoir. But what else is it? Here's the big one, bone is the master communicator. Bone is a living endocrine organ. That means that is just not this hard structure holding you up. This organ produces hormones. It's unbelievable when you think about it. Bone is the master communicator, and why wouldn't it be? If I were designing a human being and I wanted a system that could coordinate communication from the top of my head to the bottom of my pinky toe. Why wouldn't I use a system that I already have to have to hold myself up and to allow locomotion? Why wouldn't I use bone to produce hormones that communicate all over the body? So how does that happen? Well, we could talk all day and in fact whole books and myriad data has come out of the literature about all the things that bone does to communicate. But I'm gonna talk to you about two. There's a hormone that the bone produces called osteocalcin. When your bone is stimulated by mechanical strain, like jumping up and down, it causes the transcription of osteocalcin. Osteocalcin travels to the brain and causes the brain to produce a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. That is a long way to say it makes your brain build better neurons. The bone does that. We are still discovering all the nuances of the bone-brain highway or access. One fascinating piece of information that augments how important bone is to the brain is the fact that people with osteoporosis have more dementia and Alzheimer's, and vice versa.
[6:16]People with Alzheimer's and dementia have higher rates of osteoporosis, and we are still working out the pathways, but it points to a clear communication pathway between your bone and your brain via osteocalcin. But what else does osteocalcin do? It works with your pancreas and your muscle to regulate your metabolism. It helps your pancreas with insulin production and resistance, it helps your muscle with glucose metabolism, and why wouldn't it? Because muscle is the storehouse of minerals and protein. And those are the organs that are really important in gathering the supplies. It makes total sense if they would talk to each other. So there's a bone-brain access, there is a bone-gut access. What else does osteocalcin do? Well, if you're a man, osteocalcin will travel to your testicles and help cells there called Leydig cells make testosterone. Bone is involved in so much communication, and the mere fact that we think bone is silent, points to the fact that we simply don't know how to listen, not that bone is silent. So those are only three of the fascinating things that a hormone that a bone produces called osteocalcin does. But let's talk about another one. Fascinating, it's called LCN2. Bone under stimulation by mechanical impact will produce a hormone called LCN2, which plays a huge role in satiety. In other words, it tells you when you're full, that you've had enough food or that you're hungry. Well, why would bone care about that? Well, don't forget, bone is the storehouse of your body. I hope already that you are growing a new appreciation for all the fascinating things that bones that you just saw we're holding you up do. Bones are critically controlled by how we use them. In fact, bone is one of the organs that you truly have a use it or lose it situation. That's why you hear me all the time encouraging you to impact your bones, unless our bones perceive that they are necessary in being used by impacting, by having the muscles pull against them, we lose them. How do we know that? Well, there are many examples, for instance, when somebody breaks their ankle and I put them in a cast, they will lose bone density in the bones that are immobile that are not perceiving any impact. We have an even better example when we think about our astronauts who live up on the space station for long periods of time. Astronauts because they do not have the impact and the gravity pulling against their bones, will lose one to 2% of their bone mass per month in microgravity. Bones are truly a use it or lose it situation. And that's what they're for. Bones are here, as I like to say, to be bashed. They are used to force generation, they are not used to comfort. They are not our comfort organs. They are here to support us and they don't do it alone. They do it in collaboration with their cousin's muscle, and believe it or not, by their cousin's fat, our body is talking to each other. Sometimes we don't hear it simply because we don't know how to listen. So I hope you remember by the end of this mini series that bone isn't just here to hold you up. It is a master communicator that helps coordinate all the systems from your head to your toes to keep you alive.
