A healthy balanced diet will help you build strong bones from an early age and maintain them throughout your life.
You need sufficient calcium to strengthen your bones and vitamin D to help your body absorb calcium.
Poor bone health can cause conditions such as rickets and osteoporosis and increase the risk of breaking a bone from a fall later in life.
You should be able to get all the nutrients you need for healthy bones by eating a healthy balanced diet.
A good diet is only one of the building blocks for healthy bones, which also includes physical activity and avoiding certain risk factors.
General population
Adults need 700mg of calcium a day. You should be able to get all the calcium you need by eating a varied and balanced diet.
Good sources of calcium include:
- milk, cheese and other dairy foods
- green leafy vegetables, such as broccoli, cabbage and okra, but not spinach
- soya beans
- tofu
- soya drinks with added calcium
- nuts
- bread and anything made with fortified flour
- fish where you eat the bones, such as sardines and pilchards
Although spinach might appear to contain a lot of calcium, it also contains oxalic acid, which reduces calcium absorption, and it is therefore not a good source of calcium.
It’s difficult to get all the vitamin D we need from our diet and we get most of our vitamin D from the action of the sun on our skin.