One in two women will experience an osteoporotic fracture in her lifetime. A hip fracture from a simple fall like tripping over a curb carries a 30% one-year mortality rate and a 50% chance of never regaining pre-fall function. Balance, foot speed, and strength training starting early can prevent these falls.
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So 1 in 2 women will have an osteoporotic fracture. So a fracture related to poor bone health. Wait, 1 in 2? Yeah. So statistically, Mel, it's either you or me. And when you say it like that, it becomes really real. If you fall and you break your hip, these are the statistics you're talking about. 70% of hip fractures are in women. Because of the complications, of being frail and being sedentary and having a big stress like a big fracture, 30% of the time you may die in the first year. If you survive, 50% of the time you will not return to pre-fall function, which means maybe you have to go live in a nursing home, which is nobody's destination of choice. Maybe you have to move in with your kids or you have to hire somebody full-time. So this becomes not only a personal burden. It becomes a family responsibility.
And the— that we will break a bone or fracture a bone not because of some catastrophic thing, but because our bone density's bad? Low-energy falls. So there's a difference.
A low-energy fall? What is that? Well, there's a difference. I'm making the distinction between being in a terrible car accident, wrapping your— that's another story. But all it takes is tripping over the curb. Or the little bitty dog that runs around the house, or the rug that wasn't latched down, and you land hard, and that frail bone, which had not previously broken, breaks.
Hmm.
And if it's your hip and you end up in the emergency room, it sets off a catastrophic series of events that can lead to death. So we wanna be as strong as possible, which is much lean muscle mass as possible. But what we really need to do is not fall. And so that's why in "Unbreakable," I don't leave it as we gotta do cardio, which I do say that, We have to lift weights, which I do say that, but we talk about rebuilding our balance and working on foot speed so that we don't have a fatal fall that ends you up in the emergency room dealing with that. Here's the deal. Falling and breaking a hip is not inevitable. Having poor bone health is not inevitable. Poor bone health manifests when we're older, but it begins when we're younger. And so we need to pivot from only arriving in midlife to say, what am I going to do here? To pivot and saying, oh my God, I've got to tell my kids this. I've got to talk to them about their bone health when they reach in their late 20s and their 30s. When you talk about bone and muscle, we reach those peaks around the age 30. What peak are we reaching? From then we're going to draw for the next 40, 50, 60 years, right? So this is a lifetime conversation, not just, oh, I've hit midlife and I'm getting older conversation.
