Kristen Hill

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My endocrinologist told me calcium and exercise were all I could do without the drugs. A bone specialist in Munich told her she was wrong. 6 months later my DEXA moved for the first time in 4 years, and nobody had ever put a Prolia needle in me. Here is how that happened. I am 63. I have never smoked. I have never weighed more than 128 pounds. I ran the front desk at our veterinary clinic for 16 years. First one in at 7, last one to lock up. My husband Paul says I am the only person he has ever met who reads the clinical studies on a supplement before she reads the price. He does not hand out compliments. That one was not really a compliment. My first DEXA scan came back when I was 58. Lumbar spine negative 2.2. Femoral neck negative 2.0. Osteopenia. My doctor said the usual things. Calcium. D3. Weight bearing exercise, which I had been doing 4 days a week for a decade. Then she said, "Come back in 2 years." I did every single thing she told me. Calcium citrate, 1,200 mg a day. D3 at 5,000 IU. K2 as MK-7 because I had read it was the form that mattered. Magnesium glycinate at night. Collagen peptides in my coffee. AlgaeCal on top of everything because 3 women in my yoga class swore by it. About 160 dollars a month. For 5 years. Close to $10,000. The big chalky one went down with my coffee. Every morning for 5 years. I walked 3 miles a day. Yoga twice a week. I bought a set of dumbbells and watched YouTube videos on how to lift with osteopenia. I even bought one of those vibration plates. Then I went back for the second DEXA scan. Lumbar spine negative 2.7. Femoral neck negative 2.5. Worse. I had fallen out of osteopenia and into full osteoporosis. I did not cry in the imaging center. I waited until I was in my car. I started going up my own stairs with my hand on the railing the whole way. I told Paul it was the carpet. That spring I stopped kneeling in the garden. I told Paul I had lost interest in it. I quit teaching the Sunday school class I had taught for 9 years and told them my schedule had gotten busy. That was not true. My sister Laura would ask if I wanted to walk the lake trail after dinner and I would say my back was bothering me. My back was fine. My grandson reached his arms up at Thanksgiving and I told him Nana's shoulders were sore. He believed me. He is 4. At 2 in the morning I would type reverse osteoporosis naturally into my phone and read until my eyes burned. My doctor sent me to an endocrinologist. 6 weeks for the appointment. A 45 minute drive each way. A 40 dollar copay. She had my DEXA scan up on her screen before I sat down. Prolia. I told her I had read about it. That once you start the injections you cannot really stop. I told her about the women who miss one shot by a couple of months and end up with 3 or 4 spine fractures in a row. From nothing. From reaching for something on a shelf. She did not look up from the screen. She said, "The risk of not treating is worse than the risk of treating. You need to start." That is the sentence I still hear. She meant it clinically. I understood that even sitting there. She was telling me the drug was safe as long as I stayed on it until I died. I sat in the parking garage for 20 minutes without starting the car. My mother took Fosamax. Every morning for 7 years. Her dentist warned her about her jaw, and her GP told her the risk was overstated. Year 5 a dull persistent ache settled into her jaw that never went away. Her dentist could not find the source. Her GP said probably unrelated. Year 7 they switched her to Prolia. She took 2 shots. Then her insurance lapsed during a coverage gap and she missed the third by 4 months. She broke 3 vertebrae in 6 weeks. Not one fall between them. One of them happened while she was lifting a bag of birdseed off the porch. She lost 2 inches that year. Her slacks dragged and she kept hemming them herself. The hip came at 71, stepping off the curb outside the pharmacy. 4 months of rehab. She never walked without a walker again. She died at 75. This was a woman who used to rearrange her own living room on a Saturday afternoon because she felt like it. I was 63. I had 12 years before I was her age. That is when my sister Laura mentioned Dr. Katharina Weiß. Laura's daughter, my niece Megan, had been living in Munich for 3 years. Her mother-in-law was being treated at a university bone metabolism clinic there, and the lead researcher was a woman named Dr. Weiß. Megan had gone with her to one of the appointments and called Laura afterward. She said this doctor explained bone loss differently than anything she had ever heard in the US. Laura had been holding onto this for weeks, waiting for the right time to bring it up. I asked if Dr. Weiß did remote consultations. Laura said Megan had already asked. She did. The appointment cost 200 euros. It was the best money I have ever spent. I told her everything. The Prolia. The rebound. What my endocrinologist said. What happened to my mother. Then I told her what I had been taking. The calcium citrate, the D3, the MK-7, the magnesium, the collagen, the AlgaeCal. The doses. The forms. 5 years without missing a morning. She listened without interrupting. Then she was quiet for so long I thought the video had frozen. Then she said, "Mrs. Harmon. Where do you think all that calcium ended up?" I did not have an answer. I had spent 5 years researching forms and doses and timing and I had never once asked where any of it went. She let me sit in it. Then she explained it the way you explain something you have said a thousand times but still care about getting right. Bone is not a dead frame that just wears down, she said. It is living tissue. Inside your bone marrow there are stem cells. And those stem cells have 2 jobs. They either become bone cells or fat cells. When you are young, they do both in perfect balance. Your bones are dense and strong. But after menopause, something shifts. The stem cells stop making bone cells. They only make fat cells. Bone density drops. And nobody tells you it is happening because you cannot feel it until something breaks. Here is the part that changed everything for me. She said there is a protein inside those stem cells called SIRT1. Think of it as a switch. When SIRT1 is active, the stem cells become bone builders. When SIRT1 goes quiet, the stem cells become fat cells. And SIRT1 runs on one fuel. A molecule called NMN. When you are young, your body makes plenty of NMN. The switch stays on. The stem cells keep building bone. But by 40, NMN production drops to roughly half of what it was at 20. By 50, even less. By 60, the switch is barely flickering. The stem cells are still there. They are still alive. But without fuel for SIRT1, they have stopped building bone and started making fat. That is why 5 years of calcium did nothing. Calcium is just building material. If the stem cells are not making bone cells, there is nobody there to use it. It is like delivering bricks to a construction site where the entire crew went home. And the drugs, she said, do not fix this either. Fosamax and Prolia freeze the breakdown. They hold the old bone in place. But they never turn the switch back on. Nobody is building anything new. The number stops dropping and the doctor calls it a win. But underneath, the old brittle bone just sits there getting more fragile every day. That is the rebound. That is what took my mother's spine. The moment the drug lets go, everything it was holding comes down at once. And the calcium I had been swallowing for 5 years without a working crew to place it, she said it does not just vanish. It deposits into the arteries, the kidneys, the soft tissue around the heart. I had been hardening the exact places you do not want hardened and starving the one place that needed it. Then she told me what she had been researching for the past 8 years. If the problem is that SIRT1 has no fuel, the answer is not more calcium. The answer is giving SIRT1 the fuel it needs to turn the switch back on. NMN is that fuel. NMN is the direct precursor your body uses to make NAD+. NAD+ is what SIRT1 runs on. But NAD+ molecules are too large for the body to absorb directly. Taking NAD+ straight is like trying to push a couch through a mail slot. It does not get in. NMN is smaller. Your body takes it in, converts it to NAD+, and delivers it directly to the stem cells where SIRT1 can use it. She said when SIRT1 comes back online, the stem cells start making bone cells again. And once the bone cells are working, all the calcium and minerals you have been taking finally have somewhere to go. She had published 2 papers on this herself. In a clinical study she referenced, postmenopausal women given NMN at 500 milligrams daily for 12 months showed a 12.4 percent increase in lumbar spine bone mineral density. The control group continued to decline. I asked her what she would recommend. She told me about a supplement called Rynse. She said most NMN products on the market are underdosed at 100 or 200 milligrams, which is not enough to reach the threshold used in the clinical research. Rynse has NMN at 500 milligrams. Full therapeutic dose. Full absorption. The actual amount used in the studies. But it does not stop at NMN. Trans-resveratrol at 100 milligrams activates SIRT1 directly, working alongside the NMN to make sure the switch stays on. It also increases bone mineral density and reduces bone loss on its own. Quercetin at 150 milligrams clears the inflammatory waste that accelerates bone loss and clogs the stem cells from doing their job. And TMG at 250 milligrams supports the methylation process that keeps the whole system running cleanly. 4 compounds. 4 jobs. All at full dose. She said if I found a supplement that had those 4 at those doses with third party testing, it was worth trying. If I could not find one with all 4, she said I should not bother. Rynse hit every point. Third party tested on every batch. Nothing in the capsule that does not belong there. Full dose on every compound. I told her about my mother. Estrogen positive breast cancer. I told her if any part of this touched estrogen, I could not take it. She said NMN does not work through estrogen at all. It does not add estrogen. It does not mimic it. It does not interact with it. It works through SIRT1, which is a completely different pathway. And the studies on resveratrol and quercetin both show anti-cancer activity, not pro-cancer. She said she would not have recommended it to me at all if she thought for one second it could cause what my mother went through. In every human study ever done on NMN at this dose, not one serious adverse event has been recorded. You cannot say that about Prolia. You cannot say it about Fosamax or Reclast either. The jaw one has a name. Osteonecrosis of the jaw. The bone dying while it is still in your face. The other one is the thigh bone snapping in half with no fall at all. Atypical femur fractures. Nobody ever handed me a paper on those. I found them myself at 2 in the morning, on my phone, in the dark. I ordered Rynse that night. 2 capsules with breakfast. Each one about the size of an Advil. Less than a dollar fifty a day, after 5 years of 160 dollars a month. It is a supplement and not a drug. There is nothing in it that conflicts with the medications you are already taking. I kept taking my calcium. I kept my D3. Those had never been the problem. They were the building material. Now something was finally telling my stem cells to use it. Week 1, nothing happened. I almost wanted to send it back. Dr. Weiß had told me to give it 4 to 6 weeks, that cellular changes do not announce themselves overnight. Week 2 I slept through the night. First time in months. I told myself it was a good week. Week 4 I was at the top of my stairs before I realized I had not touched the railing. I had been holding that railing for 2 years. Week 6 Laura asked if I wanted to walk the lake trail after dinner and I said yes before I thought about how far it was. I used to map it first. Where the benches were. Where I could stop. Month 3 I got down on the living room floor with my grandson and his trucks, and then I got back up without pushing off the coffee table. Laura was standing in the doorway. She did not say anything. She just looked at me. Month 5 I put in the whole garden. 4 hours on my knees, both beds, the way I used to do every spring. I was sore the next day. I did not care. I came inside and sat at the kitchen table and Paul asked me what was wrong. Nothing was wrong. Month 6 I drove back to the imaging center for the DEXA scan I had been dreading for 2 years. Lumbar spine negative 2.3. Up from negative 2.7. I read it 3 times in the parking lot before I let myself believe it. I booked the next one at 12 months. That one came back negative 1.8 lumbar spine. Negative 1.6 femoral neck. Out of osteoporosis. My doctor had the printout in her hand and she read it out loud twice, the second time slower. Then she looked up at me. She said you do not see numbers move like this without bone medication, and then she waited. I told her everything Dr. Weiß had told me. I showed her the studies. She read them in front of me. Then she said, "Whatever you are taking, keep taking it." I did not care about the number. I cared that for the first time in 3 years I went to bed without doing arithmetic about how much of me was left. I am back teaching Sunday school. 9:15 sharp, every week. Last month Laura asked if I wanted to hike the ridge trail at the state park we used to do when our kids were small. The one with the overlook. 2 years ago I would have said no and felt something in me close. I said yes. We did 3 miles. I took pictures at the top. I did not stop once. On the drive home she said, "I thought you were going to end up like Mom." I said, "Me too." But I am not. Because a doctor in Munich asked me one question that nobody with a prescription pad in this country ever did. Where is the calcium going. Your bones are not failing because you are not taking enough calcium. They are failing because without NMN, the switch that tells your stem cells to build bone has gone quiet, and everything you swallow has nowhere to go. The drugs do not fix that. They hold the breakdown still, and they only hold it while you keep paying. My mother found out what is waiting on the other side of that. There is a 90 day guarantee on it. Open it, use it, and if your next DEXA does not move in the right direction, send it back. Full refund. They already know you have wasted money on things that did nothing. Third party tested on every batch. Nothing in the capsule that does not belong there. I have one more DEXA scan before I reach the age my mother was when she broke her hip. She never had this option. I do. I will drop the link below.