• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Britt Ekland Has Been Dieting All Her Life ;Osteoporosis: What You Must Know ; GOOD HEALTH

Posted on: Tuesday, 11 January 2005, 18:00 CST

Britt Ekland has been dieting all her life.

Nowshe reveals that pursuit of a perfect figure has left her with a deadly disease. And she begs today's young women to be warned

BRITT EKLAND turned 62 last October but she looks as amazing as she ever did. Her face may carry a few lines but her skin is still fresh and full, her eyes sparkle and the remarkable bone structure that bewitched Rod Stewart and Peter Sellers is still intact.

Physically, too, Britt is in great shape, with stamina levels that would put women half her age to shame.

She has just finished a month-long pantomime run at Guildford that required her to be on stage twice a day, six and a half days a week. And while most of the much younger cast and crew were skittled down with various winter viruses, Britt says proudly that she is only just now starting with a little sniffle.

But external appearances can be deceptive. She may look and indeed act like the perfect physical specimen.

But, in fact, Britt, along with one in three women over the age of 50, is suffering from the crippling bone disease osteoporosis, and were it not for a prompt diagnosis by her doctor, she would almost certainly not be in any state to act her heart out every night.

'I spend part of my year in Los Angeles to be near my three children, Victoria (Sellers), 39, Nicholai Adler, 31, and TJ (McDonnell), 16 - and part of the LA lifestyle is that you have a comprehensive medical check-up every year,' she explains.

'Ten years ago, I went for my usual pap smear, to check for cervical cancer, blood tests and mammogram, for breast cancer, and my doctor offered me a bone scan.

'I was sure I would get the usual all-clear but instead my doctor called me back to tell me I had osteoporosis - the crumbling bone condition caused by the falloff in the hormone oestrogen that happens around the menopause.

'It was quite surreal to be told this. I was 52 and I felt great. I was in no pain and despite some horrendous falls while skiing, I had never broken a bone in my entire life. OK, I was over 50, but I had a six-year-old son and was as fit as I could be.

'Now I was being told that unless I took medication for the rest of my life I would, within a few years, be in danger of suffering from multiple bone fractures.

'If the illness were left untreated in the long term I also had a high risk of developing hump shoulders and in extreme circumstances having to resort to a walking stick or a wheelchair.' Britt's doctor explained that osteoporosis has been dubbed the 'silent disease' because often sufferers get no pain or symptoms until bones have degenerated to the point where it is too late to repair the damage.

SHE was lucky. She had been diagnosed early and there was medication to help. 'I was prescribed Actonel, a biphosphonate which helps to maintain the bone density, and I still take it once a week. I can't lie down after I have taken it because it can cause indigestion and nausea, but I have to say I have never suffered from any side-effects.

'I also take calcium and vitamin D, both of which help in the fight to keep my bones healthy and strong.

'I know they are the only things that stand between me and the disease, because last year I had a little petulant phase and decided I wasn't going to take any more drugs, and that my bones were just fine without them. Within a few weeks my nails started flaking and my next bone density reading came back showing 30 per cent down on the previous one.

I will never do that again.' All women suffer a fall in oestrogen levels during or after the menopause. But not all women get osteoporosis.

Whether or not they do is thought to be down to either genetic predisposition or to diet and lifestyle - and Britt is in no doubt which category she falls into.

NEITHER my mother nor any of my other female relatives have had the disease,' she says. 'So I have to conclude that the reason I have osteoporosis is down to the lifestyle I have led.

'I am an actor and staying slim is part of the job, so like most celebrities I have been on a diet for most of my adult life.

'I would crash diet for a job and then when that job was finished I would allow my weight to go back up again, and then a few months later I would be having to lose weight quickly - typical yo-yo dieting.

'In those days, if you wanted to lose weight you just ate as little as possible without any thought of what your body needed to function and stay healthy.

'As a result, my body has been deprived of essential vitamins and nutrients, which no doubt contributed to my osteoporosis.

'It hasn't helped that I have always hated milk and dairy products. I don't think I have ever drunk more than two glasses of milk my entire adult life.

'Of course, I could have taken calcium supplements but I just didn't know about them.

Smoking is also a factor but I stopped when I was in my late 20s, so I doubt that has had much to do with it.

'I do worry terribly about today's female celebrities, who are even thinner than our generation was. I have tiny bones, and am just 5ft 5in tall, so I feel and look right when I weigh around seven and a half to eight stone. But some of these girls are very tall and weigh the same as I do.

'Of course, you have to take a pride in your appearance and try to stay in shape, but the whole female body image seems to have become so distorted in the past few years.

'And the worst thing is that other women feel they have to copy the people they see looking so slim in magazines and in the films.

'But it is so obviously artificial, and when you see them in real life they are not at all attractive.

Yet they look good in photographs and that is what seems to count.

'But if they are keeping their weight artificially low by depriving their body of nutrients and vitamins, they will undoubtedly be damaging their health in the long term.' In 2001, while attending an awards ceremony in London, Britt slipped on some food and landed heavily.

She broke her right wrist and ankle and was in plaster for weeks.

She also had to use crutches while at home and on the rare occasions she went out she had to rely on friends to push her in a wheelchair.

'I am not sure if the fractures were down to the osteoporosis or not,' she says. 'Perhaps the bones would have broken anyway because it was a very nasty fall, but the end result was the same.

'For while I was very restricted. I was living in a flat in London and it was a real struggle to get around the place. I was very dependent on friends to come and help with very basic tasks.

'They were good, but for much of the time I was on my own and I became very depressed. I have always been an extremely independent and outdoor person - I love to power walk and ski, and to be so helpless and dependent on others was a huge emotional blow.

'I was prescribed antidepressants for a while but they didn't help, so in the end I stopped taking them and sorted myself out.

'But I will never forget how dreadful it is to be physically helpless and it was a nasty reminder of what might have been had my osteoporosis not been diagnosed at such an early stage.' As well as the osteoporosis, Britt has since her mid-50s been battling the Epstein Barr virus, the same ME-type illness that affected the EastEnders actress Barbara Windsor so badly that she had to withdraw from the show.

'I didn't know that I had the virus until recently,' explains Britt. 'But I do know when I started to become ill. It was shortly after my youngest son was born and I got a really nasty sore throat that took months to go away.

'Medicine didn't help and even after the sore throat finally went I still felt very low and tired.

Over the years it would come and go.

Mostly I would feel fine, my usual healthy self, and then wham, I would wake up one morning and feel so exhausted and weak that I would have to go to bed for weeks at a time.

'Somehow, I managed to carry on working through it all, although sometimes I felt like curling up into a ball.

'It wasn't until two years ago, when my doctor in Sweden was carrying out some routine blood tests, that the virus was discovered. At the same time my LA doctor had worked out what was wrong but they both told me that the only cure was rest.

'I couldn't do that - I have to work. So I took myself off to a homeopath who lives in LA, who said that my virus was related to excess Candida in my body and put me on a strict exclusion diet to cut out all yeast products.

Since then I have not had another attack and, touch wood, I have beaten it.'

Today, Britt splits her time between London, LA and Sweden but wherever she is she follows an extremely disciplined lifestyle.

She has long given up dairy, gluten and wheat, and lives mainly on vegetables and lean protein such as chicken and fish.

She power walks at least three times a week and is a fervent fan of Pilates, which she has practised since she was a young woman.

AS WELL as Actonel, she started using HRT cream in her late 50s, although she wishes that she had taken it earlier because it helps to protect against osteoporosis.

But overall, Britt knows she is extremely lucky. She could afford to pay for the diagnostic checks that have saved her from an old age fraught with pain and physical frailty, and she is at a loss as to why bone screening is not available for every woman over 50.

'When I was in pantomime in Guildford I went to the market every day to buy my fresh vegetables and every day I would see at least six old ladies bent over and having to use a stick to get around,' she says.

'Recently my friend's mother died after years of dreadful pain. She had osteoporosis and it made her life a misery.

'A bone scan is reasonably cheap. But if the state has to treat someone who has the full-blown disease, the cost becomes horrendous - not to mention the personal cost to the poor woman who has it.

'Women have to take responsibility for themselves, too. Just as you should have a smear and a mammogram, so you should try to get a bone density scan before you turn 50 to give your doctor a base line to work with. Then later scans will show whether or not your bone density is falling away.

'And you should take calcium - especially if you don't eat dairy products.

Two very simple things, and yet they could save you from so much misery.'

Osteoporosis: What you must know

OSTEOPOROSIS can often be diagnosed by your GP but is generally confirmed by a bone density scan. The patient lies on a bed while the arm of the scanner passes over their body, taking two- dimensional pictures. The scan will be particularly concentrated on the spine and hip bones - both good indicators of whether or not the bone density is decreasing.

The doctor reading the scan will look at the structures within the bone to determine how dense it is, and will compare that against a known scale of deterioration.

Once you have been diagnosed, there are several treatments available: Bisphosphonates are non-hormonal drugs which help maintain bone density and reduce fracture rates. These include Actonel, Fosamax and Didronel PMO.

Calcium and vitamin D supplements can be of benefit to older people to reduce the risk of hip fracture.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is oestrogen replacement for women at the menopause, which helps maintain bone strength. It is a personal choice whether or not a woman decides to use HRT as a prevention against osteoporosis and it is not used in conjunction with the bisphosphonates Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs) are drugs which mimic oestrogen, so helping to maintain bone density and reduce fracture rates.

A new generation of drugs includes Forsteo which has an anabolic or rebuilding action. It is currently prescribed only by specialists rather than your GP.

It is injected daily for 18 months and is very expensive.

Protelos has just been licensed in this country. It can be prescribed by your GP. It, too, has an anabolic as well as a preventive action.

Contact The National Osteoporosis Society on: 0845 4500 230 www.nos.org.uk

Source: Daily Mail; London (UK)

More News in this Category