The Bones Research Hub

Bone is living tissue. Throughout your life it is continuously broken down by cells called osteoclasts and rebuilt by cells called osteoblasts, a process known as remodelling. For most of adulthood these two processes stay roughly in balance, and bone density holds steady.

Menopause disrupts that balance. Oestrogen restrains the activity of osteoclasts, so when oestrogen falls, bone breakdown accelerates while bone formation does not keep pace. The result is a period of rapid bone loss in the years surrounding menopause, followed by a slower but steady decline. This is why bone density in women over 55 requires deliberate attention rather than assumption.

The encouraging finding across the research is how much of this is modifiable. Bone responds to mechanical load, which means the right training can signal your skeleton to rebuild. It also depends on a specific set of nutrients working together rather than in isolation. Neither exercise nor nutrition alone is sufficient, and the strongest evidence supports doing both.

Why bone is a system, not a single nutrient

Bone is a mineralised protein scaffold. It requires the protein matrix that gives it flexibility, the minerals that harden it, and the cofactors that direct those minerals to the skeleton rather than to soft tissue.

This is why the most common assumption about bone health supplements, that calcium is the answer, describes only one part of a system with several. Calcium supplies the primary mineral. Vitamin D3 governs how much of that calcium is absorbed from the gut, so intake without adequate D3 status yields less benefit than the dose on the label implies. Vitamin K2 activates osteocalcin, the protein that binds calcium into the bone matrix, and it is the step most often missing from conventional formulations. Type I collagen forms the flexible scaffold onto which those minerals are deposited, contributing to bone's resistance to fracture rather than to density alone.

A nutrient that arrives without its cofactors does less than the research on that nutrient suggests. This is the central problem with judging a supplement by its ingredient list.

How Silvie evaluates the evidence

We select ingredients by form, not only by name. The form determines how much of a nutrient reaches the tissue that needs it, and two products naming the same mineral can differ substantially in what the body absorbs. Where a specific form has been used in the human trials, that is the form we use.

We dose to the levels tested in those published trials rather than to the smallest quantity that permits a claim on the label. A dose below the studied range is not a smaller version of the same effect. Often it is no effect at all.

We prioritise human studies. Mechanistic and animal research is useful for understanding why something might work, but it is not evidence that it does. Where the human evidence is mixed, preliminary or limited to a narrow population, we say so in the article rather than omitting it from the marketing.

We also try to be clear about what supplementation cannot do. Nutrition supplies the raw material for bone. Mechanical loading supplies the signal that tells the skeleton to use it. The research is consistent that the two work considerably better together than either does alone, and no formulation substitutes for the training.

You can read how we assess evidence, select ingredient forms and set doses in our approach to research.