Sport? I mean almost all the people I know had a broken bone or joint issue because of sport and then you have domestic accident.

For instance in Switzerland each year you have 550k non-professional accident (declared one to your employer) for 8.5M inhabitants. (Ref: SUVA annual report but only available in GE and FR)

Why is osteoporosis so prevalent in modern age? Diet?

Theory time - it could be due to reduced natural Vitamin D from lower sun exposure, a mostly sedentary life, combined with less life long physical labor (especially for women, who are severely under-represented in construction and heavy industry, which is about the only places you'd get that kind of exercise in modern society).

Lifting weight helps bones get stronger, and Vitamin D is an essential nutrient in proper bone building.

100 years ago even, most people lived and worked on farms in the US (and many other places), now it's single digit percentages - and many of them spend it driving vehicles and similar less physical labor.

> especially for women, who are severely under-represented in construction and heavy industry

Seems an odd thing to mention/focus on. Any specific reason for including this?

Because women have dramatically higher fracture rates due to osteoporosis (and lower bone mineral density in general) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11063899/], the only known way (outside of some, last I heard, unproven clinical vibration treatments) to get stronger bones is to lift heavy things while having proper nutrition, and about the only occupational exposure you're going to get to lifting heavy things on a regular basis is those industries?

At least as of 2007 those industries (and related industries) were 78% male [https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2007/06/art2full.pdf]

There is also a similar visible skew in the power lifting, olympic lifting, or weight lifting communities for those into it recreationally.

It used to be we all spent more time lifting heavy things. However, post WW2 that has rapidly declined.

So one way to reduce or reverse this is if we ALL lifted heavy things more often. From a risk reduction perspective, that seems to be especially valuable for women?

> So one way to reduce or reverse this is if we ALL lifted heavy things more often. From a risk reduction perspective, that seems to be especially valuable for women?

Depends; women might be much more prone to injury from lifting heavy things.

A lot of women I’ve lifted with were proportionately stronger than most men I’ve lifted with, injured less often, and more capable of lifting heavy things than I was. The person who taught me to deadlift was a ~140lb woman who could pull 330lb off the floor with her baby strapped to her. She was exceptional, but anecdotally I’d say women can lift whatever they want without any added risk of injury over male counterparts.

You're seeing the statistical problem of "restriction of range". Weightlifting women are one of the worst possible classes to try to generalize weightlifting ability from.

Why do you suggest that?

That, and like many cancers, just a larger number of people living long enough to fall victim to it. Women developing what are usually postmenopausal issues more or less requires living to and through menopause. (Yes, old people got to be nearly as old as they do now, but getting to be old was much less of a sure thing.)

Osteoporosis is (largely) an old person's disease, and people are now living long enough to get it.

You'd have to compare across a lot more fine-grained than medieval vs modern (which, in a historical sense, covers the Renaissance through to, well, now).

* It's only the last couple of hundred years that a significant body of people doing work that does not have a large physical component - bone density is heavily influenced by stressing the bones regularly through exercise.

* It's only the last hundred years that childbirth-related mortality for women has plummeted. A lot of women would die in childbirth. Early industrial revolution era saw some parts of Europe have 20-25% of women die of childbirth. Now it's an extraordinary event.

* Following from that, menopause dramatically reduces bone density for women; one reason HRT was such a popular thing in the med-to-late 20th century was that it was seen as a panacea for removing the worst effects of menopause. Unfortunately it creates a lot of issues, as well.

* Diets change dramatically. Medieval people ate (generally) much less meat and sugar, but a lot of fresh (when in season) vegetables, some fruit, and a lot of grains. Early industrial food quality plummets as people move to urban areas without the ability to grow their own food. Rickets are a huge, widespread plague on urban poor (places like Glascow had rickets endemic well into the mid 20th century) for most of the modern era.

That's just wopk and diet. Consider that the averge medieval person walked everywhere, early moderns likewise, and only from the 19th century onwards did rail, cars, and so on see people getting about without considerable exercise being involved.

People just live longer.