Wednesday, March 09, 2005

The Knee Bone's Connected to the Thigh Bone

Mary Kate Olsen is a lovely girl. Regardless of the circumstances that brought her to her current physique, though, there's no denying her bones are anything but lovely. Her bones are suffering. Since she has voluntarily placed herself in the public eye, I feel sanctioned to use her in my example.

There are a few terms any nutritionist has emblazoned on her neurons. One is the "citric acid cycle" (ugh!), another is "peak bone mass". Here I go, I'm sorry ... "Peak bone mass is the maximum amount of bone mass achieved by a skeleton in its lifetime, occurs from late adolescence to around 30 years of age." It's an extraordinarily important time in a skeleton's life, since it is all but impossible to regain bone lost during those years.

The thigh bone (femur, rhymes with "see more") - the largest bone in the body, the one that responds so well to activities such as walking, the part of this picture of MK that I couldn't help but gasp when I saw (MK, your thigh bone is crying out for a different kind of attention than those jeans are providing) - is one of the top three contenders for a fracture later in life. That 1 in 2 statistic from my previous post? I'm afraid that's going to be you, MK.

If I could place a bet on who is likely to avoid that statistic, just by a gander at her thighs, it would be another lovely girl, Jennifer Lopez.

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