Speedy bone healing by Hannah Angus

I had a 5-month-old baby when my husband broke his arm. Suddenly he couldn’t pick up our son, rock him to sleep or even change a dirty nappy. Let’s say that I was pretty motivated to help him heal as fast as possible. I did quite a lot of searching and found an excellent article on how bones heal, and nutritional support for the different stages of bone healing. It was quite long and dense, so I decided to try and visualize it.

I researched (ok, googled) the foods highest in each of the vitamins and minerals that help support bone healing, and then mapped out which foods cover the most bases using an overlapping bubble/Venn diagram approach. There might be a few missing elements as I was largely sleep deprived during the development! We found the end product really helped us make better choices around what we were eating, as I hung a printed version of the graphic next to our kitchen fridge.

The results were surprising–although obviously anecdotal and influenced by multiple factors–my husband had his cast removed 2 weeks early, and was told he needed no further treatment! Since then, we’ve sent this infographic along to every friend with a broken bone.