Professor Belinda Beck

Nobody thinks about their bones until they break something.

They're just there.

They're invisible and they do their stuff very quietly.

It's not all about just holding us up, you know, supporting us.

They help us move because the muscles need things to pull on.

So actually, they're really important for movement.

But also, they are this reservoir of

minerals and other substances that help our body function.

So they're the calcium bank.

We need calcium.

We go to the calcium bank and make withdrawals.

So it's a very metabolically active tissue, really important that we pay attention to it.

And as you say, we don't tend to until we are actually at a point where we're having fractures or we're at risk of fractures.

Yeah, well, it actually makes perfect sense when somebody tells you about it.

But it's still normally surprising when I say to people, we have all the bone we're ever going to have by the time we're about 20.

For men, it's a little longer than that.

But yeah, so...

And that's referred to as your peak bone mass, because if you kept growing more bone, we would all be enormous.

So we do, you know, when you stop growing after puberty, largely your bones, your growth plates fuse and you stop growing in length, but the bones sort of consolidate a little bit as you get slightly bigger, as you finish growing into maturity.

But that is the most bone you're ever going to have.