A unique nutritional guide and cookbook—with over 100 delicious recipes—that can help both women and men of any age maintain optimal bone density and prevent osteoporosis.

Can you have healthy bones while following a diet of more, mostly, or entirely plants? Is lower bone density an inescapable price even young people must pay for choosing plant foods?

Dr. Laura Kelly, a specialist in precision medicine for bone health, hears these questions from patients and colleagues who cite studies showing that as a group, vegetarians and vegans can have lower bone density than do people who eat animal food. In The Healthy Bones Plant-Based Nutrition Plan and Cookbook, Dr. Kelly puts these questions to rest, offering readers the same expert guidance she provides to her patients who are on a plant-forward or vegetarian diet, ensuring they have a plan to meet their nutritional needs for healthy bones or working toward reversal of bone loss. She explains why people on plant-forward, vegetarian, or vegan diets sometimes struggle with low bone density; identifies the environmental factors that can influence bone health; and explains how to minimize the risks while setting out the steps anyone can take to restore, improve, and maintain bone density.

As the authors of The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook, Laura and Helen Kelly specialize in explaining science to nonscientists, and this book is a must-have for anyone who is giving plant foods a bigger share—or a full share—of their daily diet. The authors guide readers to learn about the wide variety of plant foods and how to select, prepare, and cook with them, as well as best food combinations in order to achieve optimum bone health.

The Healthy Bones Plant-Based Nutrition Plan and Cookbook breaks new ground by including:

• Complete information on the abundant nutrition that plant foods offer and an explanation of how plant foods alone can help to strengthen the skeleton.
• An explanation of exciting research discoveries regarding gene expression and the use of genetic testing to help those struggling with bone loss. The new sciences of nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics allow practitioners to understand how a patient’s genetic profile contributes to bone density and how detailed nutrient and food prescriptions can either prevent or treat osteoporosis in an elegant and efficient way.
• The reasons why bone strength and density decline with age, and the type of nutrient interventions that can help restore turnover balance.
• How to meet and overcome the challenges to nutrient bioavailability posed by choosing a fully plant-based life.
• A discussion of the A to Z of bioavailability of nutrients most important for bone health, from calcium to Vitamin K2, and how to release the nutrients in plant foods from the antinutrients that can lock them in undigestible forms.
• Over 100 recipes created by gifted vegetarian chef Jummee Park that feature delicious and diverse combinations of vegetables, fruits, grains, mushrooms, nuts, beans, seeds, edible flowers, and spices.
• Tips on establishing a pantry and several example meal plans.
• How to use an online nutrition calculator to craft your own delicious plant combinations that supply needed amounts of complete protein, iron, and vitamins A and B12 for whole nutrition.

About The Author

Dr. Laura Kelly is a Traditional Chinese Medicine physician-scientist, CEO, activist educator, and the coauthor of The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook. She takes a hybrid approach to diagnosis, disease care, and wellness, drawing on principles and practices of precision medicine, integrative medicine, and Chinese medicine to investigate and treat malfunctioning mechanisms in the body. In her private practice, Dr. Kelly has worked with hundreds of people, from age 30 to 93, tailoring nutrition to prevent, mitigate, or reverse bone loss. She incorporates whole genome sequence genetics and individualized biomarkers to treat and prevent bone density decline and osteoporosis. This personalized precision approach has produced a range of bone density improvements of 12 to 18 percent among the patients she works with, with individual increases of up to 44 percent over two years.

To make her approach more widely available, in 2019 Dr. Kelly developed Opal, a protocol that offers the public access to testing and specifies treatment in the form of a personalized nutrition plan. In 2022, Laura founded O-Co, a company built to provide sexual wellness care for women, especially women 50+.

Helen Kelly is the coauthor of The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook. She writes about health, medicine, and management topics for a variety of publications. She has worked as international editor for The Working Manager, as an editor for McGraw Hill, and served as a writer for Yale University’s Medical School, Child Study Center, and Joint Program in Medicine and Public Health, which earned her a US Education Press Association Award for a series on children and television. Since the 2016 publication of The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook, Helen has taught bone health as an adult education instructor. Throughout her career Helen has been an active volunteer with inner city students and prison populations, helping people become fully engaged with ideas and education. In the 1990s Helen served as a policy advisor to the UK Education Minister. She is currently writing Early Years Learning in the Later Years, a book on the educational methods and materials she developed in the course of her work with disadvantaged populations.

Jummee Park, food shaman and wellness consultant, is the founder of Jummee’s Bliss Kitchen, where she has developed authentic Korean food remedies that cater to Western palates, including a line of kimchi. Jummee shares her insights as a speaker in cooking classes and lectures, emphasizing the benefits and significance of food as remedies, promoting longevity, health, and spiritual practices. She was born in the mountainous village of An Dong, South Korea, surrounded by the rich traditions of Korean food, but eventually departed Korea for the United States, where she became an executive at a Fortune 500 multimedia company. Later, listening to her inner calling, she left her corporate position to pursue culinary training, Eastern Medicine, and healing arts. After decades of studying Western and Eastern knowledge of longevity and health transformations, Jummee offers preventive medicine through food, integrated with her roots in Korea’s ancient food culture and philosophy, where she seamlessly transforms traditional recipes into easy, accessible, everyday, delicious and highly nutritious dishes.