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Shirin Hooshmand, Ph.D., R.D.
Speaker Recommends Prunes for Good Bone Health During National Nutrition Month
| Long recommended as an aid to digestion, prunes are a good source of different nutrients important for maintaining bone density in postmenopausal women and perhaps contributing to good bone health in all adults, according to Shirin Hooshmand, Ph.D., RD.
Hooshmand is a professor of nutrition at San Diego State University in the School of Exercise and Nutritional Services. Her primary research interests include investigating nutritional factors that impact the aging process and developing interventions to improve physiological changes associated with aging.
The presentation was part of the UAMS Department of Dietetics and Nutrition Seminar series, which presents the seminars online each month. Hooshmand was invited to speak for this month’s seminar, and March is National Nutrition Month.
Department of Dietetics and Nutrition seminar series started in 1999 and now is 25 years. All seminars are open to everyone at UAMS, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Veterans Administration healthcare system and other health care settings. These seminars will provide one Continuing Education credit hour to registered dietitians, registered nurses, medical doctors, physician assistants, pharmacists and athletic trainers.
The presentation was part of the UAMS Department of Dietetics and Nutrition Seminar series, which presents the seminars online each month. Hooshmand was invited to speak for this month’s seminar, and March is National Nutrition Month.
“Adding prunes to animal diets has been able to prevent bone loss in several animal models including those in which bone loss induced by glucocorticoids in animal studies,” she said. “But in human studies, we have seen similar bone protective effects in almost all ages of postmenopausal women — in women only 1 to 5 years after menopause — and in even older women about 65 years to 80.”
Several research studies she has led, and similar corroborative studies, have produced strong evidence that eating prunes is good for bone health.
In one study that Hooshmand conducted at San Diego State, she and her research team looked at postmenopausal women with osteopenia, a condition that involves bone loss less severe than osteoporosis.
The researchers randomized the participants into three groups: the control group, which just received calcium and vitamin D daily; the second – receiving calcium and vitamin D similar to the control group and 50 grams prunes, equivalent to eating four or five prunes daily; and the third – receiving calcium and vitamin D similar to control group and 100 grams prunes, equal to nine or 10 prunes daily.
Bone density was maintained and appeared to prevent further bone loss most effectively among the groups that ate prunes in addition to calcium and vitamin D supplement.
Another group of researchers from Penn State, used the same study design but repeated it with a larger group of women for a longer period. The findings there were very similar.
From that study, Hooshmand recounted the specific case of a 55-year-old, postmenopausal woman with osteopenia and asked to keep consuming prunes and continuing her measurements after the formal study closed. She was losing bone in almost every part of her body at the start of the study.
“She added four to five prunes per day, and she continued for another 16 months,” Hooshmand said. “You can see that as she started adding the prunes to her diet, for many of the sites in her body, her bone mineral density improved.”
Hooshmand added that prunes also have been shown to benefit men 50 to 79 years old by helping them maintain their bone density.
Milk is a well-known source of calcium. For those who are lactose intolerant, or for whom milk isn’t as readily available, Hooshmand said other sources of calcium are often recommended for their diets. However, a food source may be rich in calcium but not always an effective source of it in the body because of differing absorption rates.
One study showed a person would have to consume 16 servings of spinach to equal the amount of calcium they would absorb from one cup of milk.
“Don’t forget to have a healthy plate, and as I say, fruits and vegetables are an important part of that,” Hooshmand said. “Eighty percent of the US population are low in the servings of fruits we consume daily.”
During the question-and-answer segment of the seminar, Reza Hakkak, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Dietetics and Nutrition in the UAMS College of Health Professions, asked Hooshmand whether she saw any effect from prune consumption on glucose and A1C levels among study participants.
She said they didn’t measure A1C but that they didn’t see significant changes in fasting glucose among different groups in the study.
“One reason for that compared to other fruits is prunes are high in fiber. Also, one of the sugars in the prune is sorbitol and some of the sweetness comes from that,” Hooshmand said.