JUNE 3, 2009 — The London Daily Mail featured a story June 2 of how a woman’s sun avoiding ways led to early osteoporosis. London resident Georgia Coleridge, 43, wrote an article in the London Daily Mail detailing how surprised she was to find out she had osteoporosis, and how avoiding the sun was the cause.

“Osteoporosis affects around three million people in Britain; 50 per cent of us women will become old ladies with osteoporotic fractures, snapping wrists and hips like dry twigs if we fall, shrinking and curving over like crones in a fairy story as our vertebrae begin to crumble,” she wrote, surprised by a visit to a doctor. “I left the clinic with that nagging ‘what if ‘ feeling that wasn’t assuaged by a hospital leaflet about ‘bone density, sunshine and vitamin D’. Like many women, I’m susceptible to scare stories about sunlight and skin (that catalogue of beauty and health disasters, ranging wrinkles to cancer), and I’ve always worried about my husband, whose idea of a perfect holiday is to fly somewhere close to the Equator and soak up as much sunshine as he can.”

She continued, “I’m fair-skinned and freckly, and unless I cover up or ladle on sun cream, my skin can blister like bubble wrap. I’ve always felt more comfortable in the shade or even indoors. How ironic, then, to think that all my efforts to save my skin had provided a potential recipe for osteoporosis.”

When she had her vitamin D levels tested she discovered she was severely deficient.

To read all of Coleridge’s account in The Daily Mail’s click here.