The hips, they fracture. A lot of it has to do with the rigors of aging, but there are other factors. Back in 2013, scientists in Norway decided to take a look at the relationship between magnesium and calcium in drinking water and the prevalence of hip fractures in the population of people who drank that water. Turns out, the more magnesium in the drinking water, the fewer fractured hips.
Although this probably doesn’t appear in its pamphlets for tourists, there are a lot of hip fractures in Norway, 9,000 per year one of the highest rates anywhere. City-dwellers tend to break their perilous Norwegian hips more often than rural folk do, so scientists believed that this may have been due to the trace amounts of magnesium and calcium found in drinking water of rural areas. Turns out, they were wrong about almost everything. Their research could not explain why city folk fracture their hips more often than denizens of rural areas, and the amount of calcium didn’t seem affect anything hip-wise. (Some assume that because Norweigians eat a lot of dairy, they were already getting enough calcium). What they did discover was an inverse relation between hip fractures and the amount of magnesium in the water.
Researchers followed over 700,000 men and women for a period of seven years and recorded around 19,000 hip fractures. If the water was magnesium-rich in an area, the people drinking it were less to fracture their hips, regardless of where they lived. There isn’t a lot of magnesium in drinking water, but magnesium deficiency is quite widespread which may have also been a factor.
Here’s the data from the study abstract:
An inverse association was found between concentration of magnesium and risk of hip fracture in both genders (IRR men highest vs. lowest tertile = 0.80, 95% CI: 0.74, 0.87; IRR women highest vs. lowest tertile = 0.90, 95% CI: 0.85, 0.95), but no consistent association between calcium and hip fracture risk was observed. The highest tertile of urbanization degree (city), compared to the lowest (rural), was related to a 23 and 24% increase in hip fracture risk in men and women, respectively. The association between magnesium and hip fracture did not explain the variation in hip fracture risk between city and rural areas. Magnesium in drinking water may have a protective role against hip fractures; however this association should be further investigated.
Healthy hips need magnesium. The AIM Companies offers three types of topical magnesium (spray, lotion, bath crystals) through its essential Mag-nificence products. If you’re looking for a magnesium-rich drink with a pleasing taste, CalciAIM has 26% RDA of magnesium.