The study’s authors from the University of Navarra in Spain, whose research was published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, based their findings on 522 men and women. Participants were between the ages of 55 and 80 and didn’t have heart disease, but were still considered high risk because of type 2 diabetes or a combination of factors including blood pressure, cholesterol, obesity, family history and smoking.

The study’s participants, who were all taking part in a trial looking at how best to ward off heart disease, were randomly chosen to adhere to a Mediterranean diet with added olive oil or mixed nuts. A control group was asked to follow the low-fat diet typically recommended for preventing heart attack and stroke.

After an average of 6.5 years, they were all tested for signs of cognitive decline. The average scores on the cognitive tests were significantly higher for those following a Mediterranean diet compared with those on the low-fat option.

In the report, the authors admitted that their sample size was not particularly large and that the results may not apply to the general population because the group studied had a high vascular risk. But they say their findings support the growing body of evidence that certain dietary habits can protect cognitive functions in aging brains.

In addition to the above, the Mediterranean Diet also has been shown to have the following health benefits:

1. Protects against type 2 diabetes
A Mediterranean diet is rich in fiber, which slows down digestion and prevents huge swings in blood sugar.

2. Prevents heart disease and strokes
A Mediterranean diet discourages eating refined breads, red meat and processed foods, and encourages drinking red wine rather than hard liquor, which have all been linked to heart disease and stroke prevention.

3. Keeps you agile
A Mediterranean diet may reduce a senior’s risk of developing muscle weakness and other signs of frailty by about 70 percent.

Do you try to adhere to a Mediterranean-style diet? What do you think of it? Let us know in comments.

Conference founder, Zack Lynch, summarized neurogaming to those of us in attendance as the interface, “where the mind and body meet to play games.”

Driven by explosive growth in computer processing, affordable sensors, and new haptic sensation technology, neurogame designers have entirely new toolkits to craft an immersive experience  that simulates our waking life. Lucid journeys into the dreamscapes depicted in films like Inception may soon become possible.

Recently developed platforms like Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii don’t require the motor skill to use complex gamepads, so it’s common to see three year olds and even seventy-three year olds showing those teenagers a thing or two about Nintendo Wii tennis. The next step for game designers is to introduce psycho-emotional inputs measuring anything from heart rate, facial analysis, voice measurement, skin conductance, eye tracking, pupil dilation, brain activity, and your ever-changing emotional profile. These games will know the user at a subconscious level and deliver an experience that could forever blur the line between virtual and reality.

The future of neurogaming depends heavily on continued development of reliable augmented and virtual reality technologies. Chatter about Google Glass was everywhere, and I especially enjoyed sampling the Oculus Rift, a crowd favorite. I was stunned by the high degree of realism in navigating the game map inside one developer’s world where I experienced shooting a virtual basketball in an open court. Experiencing a game as a total first person observer is a somewhat psychedelic and mind-bending experience. Wearing an Oculus, that Wii tennis match may seem a bit more interesting when you’re competing at Wimbledon with a lifelike crowd on hand to cheer you on.

With the Oculus Rift, Stanford virtual reality expert Walter Greenleaf pointed out that, “Virtual Reality could finally be at a turning point. It’s available at an accessible price point, with unparalleled levels of connectivity, visual and auditory immersion, and the latency to enable more natural body movement.”

Neurogames also pull together technologies that deliver feedback to immerse players in ways never before possible. One such output technology included a recently developed device at the University of Utah, which uses sliding bars inside handle controllers to recreate the sensation of holding a real object.  Imagine a next generation Wii controller that simulates an actual tennis racket during that Wimbledon final.

Here’s a video of the tech in action:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Neurogames are sure to entertain, but they’re also amplifying gaming’s reach into other sectors as well.

Games are leaving those teenage living rooms behind, a point endorsed by the crowd demographics. Conference attendees ranged from healthcare providers, educators, defense experts, and sport scientists; all of whom are hoping to apply neurogaming to their industry. “Gaming could make us as humans, better in every way,” says game designer Noah Falstein.  Football players are using lifelike virtual reality to simulate real game scenarios complete with crowd noise, and football avatars going through actual plays. Two-a-days could now happen from the comfort of a computer lab, instead of the August sun.

Healthcare providers are increasingly working with game designers to create therapeutic neurogames to treat PTSD, ADHD, and other behavioral and emotional disorders. Already, brain-controlled interface companies like InterAxon offer meditation assistance apps. Many experts talked of a day when games are prescribed in place of today’s pharmaceuticals for disorders like depression and anxiety.

Lumos Labs was on hand to present Lumosity, an online brain fitness platform created by Stanford neuroscientists that battle memory loss, boost attention, and treat emotional disorders. With over 40 million users worldwide, Lumosity is an indication that brain fitness should be a growing industry segment.

The possibilities for these technologies to aid the defense community were showcased throughout the conference. Former DARPA program manager Dr. Amy Kuse says, “These tools are helping us augment human performance in incredible ways,” With aid from tools like EEG monitoring, tDCS (foc.us was on hand to show off their commercial product), and brain-controlled interfaces, DARPA was able to increase sniper marksmanship performance by a factor of 2. Enhanced training coupled with brain monitoring tools could give soldiers simulated combat experience while alerting superiors of PTSD symptoms in real time.

Recreational home use of these devices will see dramatic evolution. As neurogaming content development matures, casual gamers will see entirely new modalities of storytelling and immersion. Even the music and imagery will be driven by the users emotional state.

Imagine if gaming looked like this :

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The rise of neurogaming won’t occur without hiccups. Hardware designers must cope with “consumer vanity” issues that come with wearables like EEG, and other display headsets. Only time will tell if Google Glass users are welcomed as style innovators or shunned as wandering cyborgs.

Deeper questions surrounding the morality of neurogames will be sure to stir debate. As virtual reality technology inches closer to lifelike resolution, should gamers simulate themselves as characters engaged in acts of violence or criminal activity?

It’s unpredictable what these games could uncover about the user as neurogames gain insight into a users’ psyche and how they respond to stimuli at a subconscious level. For instance, a game could uncover how its user particularly enjoys shooting at civilians in gameplay. Games might even become expert at diagnosing psychiatric disorders.

As computers become exponentially more powerful, game resolution could fully mimic our ever-present reality. At that point, it may be quite impossible to distinguish real life from our virtual worlds. The days of artificial second life as real as our own isn’t quite here, but what energizes the prospects of neurogaming today, are that many of the underlying technologies that make it possible already exist. As these technologies begin to converge in the next few years, we will begin to understand the scope of how these technologies will be used.

The neurogames on hand now are just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible, but it’s clear that we are forever eliminating the barrier between our games and our brains.

Written By: Aaron Frank

• Open your mouth wide enough to hear a click in your ears and inhale deeply, followed by an audible exhale releasing the sound “AHHH!” Repeat until relaxed. Three times should do it. 

• Sing the song Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music. Each note corresponds with one of the seven chakras and calms the entire nervous system and lifts your mood.

• Breathe in deeply and slowly, and as you exhale, notice something you’ve not noticed before in your immediate environment and name it out loud. Such as “pattern in the rug.” Then breathe. “The scratch on the desk.” Breathe. “The different colors on the coffee cup.” Breathe. “The design on the base of the lamp.” Breathe. Keep noticing and saying out loud things in full view that you have never noticed before. Do this for at least 30 seconds to one minute. This stops your brain from racing forward and back in time and centers you in the present moment, thus relaxing you.

• Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth and right behind your front teeth. Next, purse your lips and exhale to the count of eight as though blowing out a birthday candle. Next, inhale to the count of seven, followed by holding your breath to the count of four. Then repeat. This easy breathing technique can calm your thoughts and refresh your body, inviting stress to flow out and relaxation to flow in.

• Anytime you feel overwhelmed by stress, bend your knees and wiggle them back and forth as fast as possible for 10 seconds, and then squeeze your buttocks cheeks together while letting out a very loud and resounding “AAAAHHHHHHH!” as though screaming all the stress right out of your body. Then relax. It not only relieves you of the stress consuming your every cell but also makes you and anyone around you laugh out loud.

• Start naming, out loud, one thing at a time, every single thing that you are or feel afraid of right now. Start by naming the thing you fear most in the moment, and then take in a deep breath. Next, name something you notice right in front of you. Then repeat. Again, name something you fear most right now. Breathe, and then again name something you see right in front of you. Do this until you can’t name any more fears.

• Do my favorite yoga pose. Pull the corners of your mouth to the ears, and hold it. Maintain this pose for at least 30 seconds. Then release.

• Thump your chest with your fist and let out the sound “HA! as loud as possible. Repeat. HA! HA! HA! Then laugh.

•  Sing your favorite Broadway show tune at the top of your lungs.

• Put your thumb and forefinger together and close your eyes. Breathe in, while saying the words “I am,” and then exhale saying, “calm.” Feel the calm flowing from your heart, through your body, and out of your fingertips. Do this as many times as needed.

These are all simple, easy, silly, effective, and fun. Try them all and see which one works best for you. Most of all, just remember: this too shall pass, and with breath it will pass faster and leave you less stressed along the way.

Yoga is not only safe for older practitioners, but also effective in keeping the mind and body in good health. If you’re thinking about starting a yoga practice, make sure to find a class and instructor who can meet your needs.

“People can either find an individual teacher to work with when they first start out, or find a studio that works with beginner classes, and see if they tailor to people over 50,” Eva Norlyk Smith, yoga teacher and Managing Editor at YogaUOnline, tells Huff/Post50.

Starting up a new practice may come easily to you if you’ve been fairly physically active through your life, but if you’re out of shape, don’t go straight for a walk-in class. Many studios offer beginner classes with props for modifications, and some even tailor to older adults. New practitioners should also remember that they can opt to sit in the resting child’s pose or take a seated meditation during more challenging postures.

“There’s a lot to learn, and most people over 50 run into issues like tight hamstrings, which affects alignment in so many different postures,” Norlyk Smith says. “If you go in and have a 20-year-old doing it perfectly next to you, you’re going to push yourself more than you should.”

If you’re considering starting a yoga routine post-50, scroll through the list below for five health benefits of the ancient stress-relieving practice for older adults.

1. You Get The Benefits Of Movement — Without The Strain.

Exercise is a crucial part of healthy aging, but high-intensity cardio or strength training can also put strain on the body. According to stress expert Dr. Kathleen Hall, regular exercise reduces the risk of death by a third and the cuts the risk of chronic disease by 40 percent. Yoga can be an excellent low-impact exercise options that’s easier on the body than activities like running or weight-lifting.

“Yoga helps people integrate an exercise program into their routine without some of the downfalls that you can easily come across in different training systems,” says Norlyk Smith. “Yoga does offer strength training because you use the weight of your own body in may of the postures. But unlike regular strength training, because you’re not adding any weight, you’re less likely to get injured.”

2. Increased Flexibility.

The gentle stretching of a yoga poses can go a long way in helping you develop greater flexibility, which can ensure that you maintain a good range of motion as you get older. A limited range of motion, which naturally declines as the body ages, makes older adults predisposed to falls and eventually get in the way of daily activities.

“Yoga exercises parts of the body that may not be exercised in any other programs,” Norlyk Smith says. “One is spinal flexibility… There’s a yogic saying that ‘the body is as young as the spine is flexible.’ I think that’s a reflection of the importance of keeping the spine pliable and keeping the circulation up in the spinal chord.”

3. Yoga Can Relieve Menopausal Discomfort.

Certain yoga postures can also help ease the hormonal fluctuations of menopause. Try poses like The Bridge, Seated Forward Bend and Plow to relieve uncomfortable symptoms of menopause, from hot flashes to anxiety to painful menstruation.

4. Promotes Good Bone Health.

A gentle yoga practice is not only safe for those with osteoporosis, but it can also be effective in preventing and slowing bone density loss, according to medical director of Manhattan Physical Medicine Dr. Loren Fishman. Whether you’re looking to prevent osteoporosis or to relieve pain from an existing bone condition or fracture, gentle twisting poses and stretches can be beneficial.

“I know [yoga] can help because I’ve done the studies,” Fishman, who has done extensive research on yoga and osteoporosis, told Huff/Post50 in a previous interview. Referring to a study involving adults with an average age of 68, he said, “We did a bone mineral density (DEXA) scan, then we taught half of them the yoga, waited two years, and did another scan. And not only did these people not lose bone, they gained bone. The ones who didn’t do the yoga lost a little bone, as you would expect.”

5. Yoga Keeps The Mind Sharp.

Taking quiet time out for yourself through a weekly or daily yoga practice can help relieve stress, and keep you centered and energized.

“When your body functions better, you’re going to feel better,” says Norlyk Smith. “You’ll have more energy, more vitality, and most yoga practitioners will say that regular yoga practice helps even out one’s moods.”

by Gabriel Cohen:  A growing body of research supports what spiritual contemplatives have known for Millennia—that the human capacity for imagination not only shapes our minds but also weaves the fabric of reality itself.

 

Do you have a lemon in your kitchen? Put this magazine down for a moment, go cut the fruit in half, and squeeze some juice into your mouth. Notice how you react.

Don’t have a lemon? Try this little thought experiment: Imagine that you have one. Picture yourself slicing through the bright yellow rind, exposing the translucent fruit inside. See yourself holding it up, squeezing it, and letting a stream of tart juice splash onto your tongue. Can you feel yourself puckering and salivating—not in your mind’s eye, but in “real life”?

Western thinkers have tended to draw a line between reality—that which we “actually” experience—and imagination, seen as a frivolous, dreamlike diversion. For millennia, though, spiritual contemplatives and artists have taken flights of fancy much more seriously and challenged the firmness of that line. And surprising recent advances in neuroscience, particularly in the field of brain scanning, have added support to their conviction that our imagination and sense of reality are closely intertwined.

In some ways this is obvious. Back in 1928, the sociologists W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas conceived of what became known as the Thomas theorem, which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” My college sociology professor put it this way: If we believe that little green goblins are hiding in the woods and we change our route to avoid them, then our fantasy has affected our experience.

That may seem like an extreme example, but imagination plays a very real role in our decision making. Just look at the last two US presidential elections, in which one big chunk of the electorate managed to view Barack Obama as a radical socialist, while another saw him as a moderate saint. Both views are heavily based on myth, but they had a real-life effect on how people voted.

Political races are hardly the only arena in which we project goblins into our daily lives. Too often humanity is ruled by superstitions, stereotypes, and tribal prejudices—resulting in all-too-real suffering, violence, and war. The folly of these antagonisms became especially clear when human beings made the first journey into space and saw that the supposedly entrenched divisions between countries were just imaginary lines on a map. As Frank Borman, commander of the Apollo 8 mission, put it, “When you’re finally up at the moon looking back on Earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world, and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people?”

YOUR BRAIN ON IMAGINATION
Our mind can run away with us, leading us to act through suspicion or fear, but we can also use our imagination as a tool to change our life—a process we’re beginning to understand through advances in neuroscience.

For centuries, we have envisioned two separate areas of the brain: one that processes the evidence gathered by our senses, and one that spins off into gauzy daydreams. Functional magnetic resonance imaging has helped us understand that these two functions are not as distinct as they seem.

Using fMRI scans, researchers like V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, have found that the same cells in the brain light up whether we perform an action ourselves or watch someone else do it—which might explain why some of us find action movies so exciting. But these “mirror neurons” aren’t activated just by the things we see. The effect also occurs when we simply imagine ourselves performing the action.

As a novelist and writing teacher, I have long told my students that vivid writing lights up the brain. Recently, I was excited to learn that this is not just a metaphor. In a New York Times article titled “Your Brain on Fiction,” the science writer Annie Murphy Paul surveyed fMRI studies that show that reading about sensory stimuli or physical actions activates the same brain areas that process real-life experiences.

When you read about that lemon at the beginning of this essay, you were activating the same region that would have been turned on if you had actually tasted the juice. There’s more. “There is evidence,” continues Paul, “that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.”

This has a profound import, not only for book lovers, but also for those who hope for a more peaceable planet. Paul cites studies by two Canadian psychologists that show that “individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them, and see the world from their perspective.”

That doesn’t mean fiction writers should make their work into a gooey project to present characters as positive role models. In fact, I’m often intrigued by authors who create characters who are ornery, difficult, or downright unlikable—a good writer can help us to understand and care about people who are radically different from ourselves and to delve beneath surface differences to the common feelings and thoughts that could bind us together.

It raises the question: if humanity’s embattled factions had to write stories based on each other’s experience, how would that affect humanity’s willingness to wage war?

MALLEABLE MINDS
Imagination can provide us with rich lifelike experiences and give us a powerful opportunity to develop empathy and compassion. But it can do even more: it can literally reshape and retrain our brains.
For ages, scientists have believed that our neural networks become rigidly set and defined in early childhood, but fMRI scanning now reveals plasticity: the adult brain is surprisingly malleable. If, for example, we go blind in midlife, some of our neurons for processing vision can shift to dealing with sound.

What’s particularly exciting is the discovery that focused mental exercise can alter the brain. For example, scans of some of Tibet’s most advanced lamas found that through years of meditation they had strengthened the centers in the brain that deal with such vital life skills as attention, emotional balance, and compassion.

A number of contemplative practices directly recruit the power of imagination to retrain the mind. For many people the Sanskrit word tantra may conjure images of wild sex, but a Tantric practitioner may be more concerned with visualizing a certain deity in order to strengthen her own ability to share in the divine being’s positive attributes, such as patience or kindness.

Of course, contemplation doesn’t have to focus on deities. My introduction to Buddhism started with a simple mental exercise.

Eight years ago when I was going through a painful divorce, I stumbled into a Buddhist lecture about dealing with anger. “Let’s say you’re sitting on a park bench,” said the teacher. “Now someone sits down next to you and they’re doing something you find annoying, like popping their gum or singing along with the music in their headphones.”

Our first reaction is usually to see the person as an external problem and to blame them for making us angry or depressed. Instead, the teacher asked us to change our thinking. “Imagine that you want to become more tolerant. Then you could say, This is great: Here’s somebody who has come along to help me work on that!”

As the Buddhist author Pema Chödrön argues in her book The Places That Scare Us, “Without the inconsiderate neighbor, where will we find the chance to practice patience? Without the office bully, how could we ever get the chance to know the energy of anger so intimately that it loses its destructive power?”

These teachers showed me that if I can use my imagination to help me perceive situations in a different light, I can turn all sorts of “problems” into constructive challenges—and radically alter my experience of life.

WHAT IS REAL?
The transformative power of focused imagination is central to Buddhist practice, but the Buddha himself was not content to rest there. Late in life, he confounded many of his followers with a stronger, stranger notion.

The teacher of my first Buddhist lecture introduced it simply. He held up a book and asked, “How many of you think that this exists independently of your mind?” Like the others, I raised my hand. “How do you know it exists?” he pressed. Answers bounced back. “I can see it”; “I can feel it”; “I can taste or hear it.”

After some discussion, we realized that the only way we knew the book was there was by interpreting what came in through our senses. The teacher pointed out that this is true of everything in our lives: objects, our friends and families, what we learned in school,everything. Ultimately, Buddhists argue, there is no such thing as objective reality out there.

The point is not a nihilistic one, that nothing exists, but rather that no thing has a detached, fixed identity. Phenomena “do not exist in their own right,” says the Dalai Lama, “but only have an existence dependent upon many factors, including a consciousness that conceptualizes them.” Where I see a “book,” a rain forest aborigine might see only “strange object made out of pressed-together leaves.”

Our whole experience of life is filtered through our minds, and we continually project our own sense of meaning onto people and things. As the Buddha put it, “With our thoughts we make the world.”

In short, our imagination is not an alternative to reality.

Our imagination is our reality.

Gabriel Cohen is the author of Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce and five novels. Find his work at gabrielcohenbooks.com.

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Change Your Reality

These meditation exercises tap your imagination for powerful results.

Meditation for Stress Relief
Sit with good posture, breathing slowly and deeply, and check every part of your body to make sure you’re not holding tension. Then as you breathe out, imagine that you’re releasing all of your pent-up worries as a column of black smoke floating into a clear blue sky. Picture this column of smoke dissipating in the breeze. After a couple of minutes of this, when you breathe in, imagine yourself inhaling a warm golden light that flows through your body and completely relaxes you.

Meditation for Conflict
Try this counterintuitive exercise to deal with those seemingly difficult people in your life. Buddhists call it tonglen, or taking and giving. Sit in a meditation posture and do the relaxation exercise above. Then think of someone with whom you’re having problems (a coworker, your ex, a relative, a former friend). This time, imagine that you’re breathing in their troubles and worries as dark smoke. Then imagine that you’re exhaling a warm golden light toward them.

“No way,” I sighed. “I could never give up cheese.”

For years, it seemed I had an itch that only cheese could scratch. More than a casual dalliance, cheese and I were carrying on a full-blown love affair. Not only did cheese bring me so much joy, it was rich in bone-building calcium. It was delicious—and good for me! How could I even think about giving it up?

But the more I learned about the dairy industry, the more I realized that cheese and I didn’t share the same values. For me, the hardship endured by dairy cows and their calves was just too much of a turnoff.

It was time for me to break up with the love of my culinary life.

The Bone of Contention

Still, I was worried. In my zeal to do no harm, would I end up harming my own health? For strong bones, the Institute of Medicine recommends adults consume between 1,000 and 1,200 milligrams of calcium daily, depending on age, and cheese and other dairy products are among the richest food sources of this mineral. As a result, many experts (including my own doctor) strongly recommend we consume three dairy servings daily. 

Was it even possible to give up dairy without weakening my bones?

For answers I scheduled an interview with Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health. He’s also been co- and principal investigator of a landmark study that has tracked the lifestyle habits and health outcomes of 238,000 nurses since 1976, with results that have shaped current health recommendations on heart disease, diabetes, and many
other conditions.

I was floored when one of the first sentences out of Willett’s mouth was this: “Dairy is not the most important food for bone health.” 

He says, “The highest fracture rates in the world are in countries that drink the most milk and consume the most calcium.” In many African countries, women consume only 300 milligrams of calcium daily (the amount in roughly one serving of dairy), yet their hip fracture rates are low. The same is true for Japan and Peru. Compare that to the United States, where we consume three times more calcium and dairy, and our hip fracture rates are the highest in the world. 

The Nurses’ Health Study found that postmenopausal women who had been consuming 2.5 or more servings of dairy a day had the same risk of bone fractures as women who consumed fewer servings. And when Australian researchers compared the bone densities of 105 vegan Buddhist nuns to 105 nonvegetarians, they found no difference between the two groups. The nuns had bones that were just as strong as the milk drinkers.

If calcium is so important for our bones, and milk is one of the richest sources, how is it possible that three glasses of milk a day doesn’t reduce fracture risk? In part, calcium may not be as important as we’ve been led to believe (see “Do We Really Need So Much Calcium?”). But milk might also come packaged with other nutrients that undo calcium’s benefits.

Bones aside, dairy might reduce risk for both diabetes and colon cancer. But Harvard’s Willett says we can get those benefits with just one serving daily. Drinking any more, he says, could harm health more than it helps.

High dairy consumption—three or more servings daily—has been linked with prostate cancer and decreased semen quality in men, and breast cancer in women. 

Heart disease is also a concern. “Dairy might be the number one source of calcium in the diet,” says Dr. Michael Greger, the founder of NutritionFacts.org. “But it’s also the number one source of saturated fat, and saturated fat raises risk for heart disease, the number one killer of men and women.” 

The Power of Plants

What should we consume in place of dairy?

Fish is one possibility. The Nurses’ Health Study has found the consumption of dark, calcium-rich fish—swordfish, salmon, bluefish, sardines—one or more times a week dropped bone fracture risk by 33 percent. 

But if you’ve gone meatless, like me, then veggies are your answer.  Many are surprisingly rich sources of calcium. 

“You can get plenty of calcium from plant foods,” says dietitian Virginia Messina, author ofVegan for Life as well as the upcoming Vegan for Her. “You don’t have to drink milk.” 

One cup of most calcium-fortified nondairy beverages offers 300 milligrams of calcium—the same amount of calcium in a glass of cow’s milk. Other heavy hitters include navy beans (123 milligrams per cup) and kale (100 milligrams per cup). Plus, a wide array of fruits, vegetables, and legumes offer smaller amounts, including oranges (60 milligrams) and broccoli (43 milligrams).

A good rule of thumb, Messina says, is to consume three servings daily of any calcium-fortified plant foods (such as soy milk, almond milk, orange juice, or breakfast cereal) along with at least eight servings of fruits and vegetables.

Fruits and vegetables also house an array of other important bone builders, including magnesium, potassium, vitamin C, vitamin K, B vitamins, and carotenoids. In particular, vitamin K—found abundantly in green veggies like broccoli, brussels sprouts, collards, and kale—may be just as important as calcium for overall bone health. Women who consumed 110 micrograms of K daily dropped their fracture risk by 30 percent.

To keep bones strong, this is what Messina recommends daily:

●    Two servings of dark leafy greens. Consume a variety. Collards and turnip greens are rich in calcium, but not as rich in the bone-building potassium. On the other hand, spinach and swiss chard contain a nutrient that prevents their calcium from being absorbed, but these greens are standout sources of potassium, she says. 

●    Three servings of fruit, including one citrus. Fruit is loaded in antioxidants and potassium, and many fruits are rich sources of bone-building vitamin C, especially citrus fruit.

●    Three servings of other vegetables. Nearly all types of produce help to keep the blood alkaline, which
prevents the body from robbing calcium from the bones, says Messina. 

You might also consider taking a few supplements, including vitamin D, which helps the body absorb calcium. It’s present in small amounts in fish, fortified foods, and certain types of mushrooms, and our skin also makes it when exposed to sunlight. Still, many people are deficient. Willett recommends people like me—who live in the dimly lit Northeast and who wear sunscreen religiously—take a supplement with 1,000 to 2,000 international units of D daily.

Another important supplement is B-12. Research has linked low levels of this vitamin with an increased prevalence of hip fractures. It’s mostly found in animal products, but is also present in various soy milks as well as some brands of nutritional yeast. For vegans, a 25 microgram supplement is the best insurance against low levels, says Messina.

And, of course, there’s exercise. “If you have ever had your arm in a cast, then you know that muscle wastes away when you don’t use it,” says Greger. “It’s the same with bone.” Regular exercise stimulates bone, causing it to retain more minerals. Greger recommends one hour of walking or another weight-bearing activity a day.

Since boning up on my knowledge, I’ve completely ditched cheese.  Surprisingly, the divorce was easier than expected. Nutritional yeast, it turns out, satisfies all my cheesy yearnings, and kale, collards, and other greens are now among my favorite dinner companions.

If only all other breakups could go so easily.  

Alisa Bowman wrote about the science and psychology of altruism in the Jan/Feb issue of Spirituality & Health.