Today I learned I may have been eating things that are bad for bone healing

The general disappointment to see that my four-week X-ray wasn’t showing much progress got me on a googling spree today. I looked a little harder at what is good for bone healing and what is bad.

First, the things I already knew:

• NSAIDs, like ibuprofen, aspirin and naproxen inhibit the healing process because they block the production of prostaglandins, which apparently help bone growth. That was a bummer when I had a PMS migraine. I refused to take anything for it. The problem? Sometimes to sleep, I was taking Advil PM, which has ibuprofen in it, and I wasn’t thinking about it. Oops.
• Smoking delays bone healing. I’m not sure why exactly, but I would think maybe reduced oxygen and blood flow to the bone. (I googled it, and scientists aren’t sure why either.) Luckily, I don’t smoke.
• Alcohol also delays bone healing. I’m also not sure why, but maybe malabsorption of nutrients you need. (I googled it and it much more scientific than that, apparently.) I have resisted my urge to drink to pass the slow-moving time whilst unable to walk.
• A number of minerals are important, like silicon, boron and some others that I honestly didn’t know people ate or needed, but came up when googling. I take a lot of them in a multi-vitamin.

Now, things I didn’t know prevent your body from absorbing calcium:

• Caffeine. It inhibits your body’s ability to absorb calcium and there’s no ifs or maybes about it — scientists know that 6 milligrams of calcium is lost for every 100 milligrams of caffeine. Crap, how many milligrams of caffeine is in my morning coffee?! I thought I was doing good by putting milk in my coffee. Wrong!
• Some beans, including pinto. They have something called phytates, which bind to calcium so you can’t absorb it. Well, this is a problem since I eat beans every single day as a vegetarian.
• Salt. It causes calcium to be excreted through the kidneys. It also happens to make everything taste good, which means I’m screwed.
• Raw spinach. I was eating salads with raw spinach, red onion, avocado and lime juice because I thought they were super healthy for me. It turns out that spinach does itself contain a lot of calcium, but it contains oxalates, which can bind up the calcium. Lovely.

(edit: Apparently Vitamin D deficiency can prevent absorption of calcium too. Wish my doctor had mentioned that sooner.)

So what am I going to do about it? I can cut out coffee, but never eating beans, salt, or any foods that maybe unbeknownst to me bind to calcium isn’t really reasonable. I should just expect all the calcium I eat isn’t getting to my bones.

So here is my solution for now:

• Calcium supplements. I already take a Centrum multi-vitamin that includes things I know I need, like calcium, silicon, boron, vitamin D, etc. But it only contains 20% of your daily value of calcium, probably because people normally get the other 80% in a normal diet. With this broken bone, I’d rather get extra, even though from what I’ve read, science is a little mixed on how effective calcium supplements are at healing broken bones.
• L-Lysine. This apparently helps your body absorb calcium. I found at least one study that showed patients who took L-Lysine (along with some other supplement I googled that looked weird to me) sped up their bone healing by two weeks. I’m not equipped to judge whether the study was a good one, but apparently it’s a known fact that Lysine is used by the body to make collagen. This seems important because from what I’ve read, collagen forms a callus at the fracture site as part of the bone healing process. Better late than never, I suppose.
• Zzzquil. Now I can get to sleep without taking an NSAID along with it.

(edit: Also, Vitamin D supplements.)

I feel a bit like a dummy. I followed some of the research regarding bone healing well for a whole month, but other things I just ignored. I do hope “better late than never” applies here. My calcium supplements and L-Lysine will be delivered to my door within two days.