Fiona Phillips' husband recalls heartbreaking moment she didn't recognise their son amid Alzheimer's battle
The Kent-born journalist, 64, announced in 2023 that she had been diagnosed with early onset dementia, after initially thinking she was having menopause symptoms when she first started experiencing 'brain fog and anxiety'.
Alzheimer's is described as the most common cause of dementia, which is the name for a group of symptoms associated with an ongoing decline of brain function, according to the NHS website.
In her upcoming memoir Remember When: My Life With Alzheimer's, Frizell, 66, recalls the moment Phillips became 'terribly distressed' after not recognising Nathaniel, 26.
In an extract published in The Mirror, Frizell penned: 'One weekend, Nat was home from the Army and making tea in the kitchen while Fiona and I sat watching television.
'She became terribly distressed. 'Who's that man in the kitchen?' she asked me. 'That's Nat', I said gently. 'Our son. He's home for the weekend'.
'She was in such a state that she didn't even seem upset that she had asked the question.'
He wrote that while Nat would have been 'devastated' had he heard it, he thankfully wasn't present at the time.
The couple have previously spoken about their fear that the illness could be inherited by their kids; Nathaniel and Mackenzie, 23.
When the presenter was first diagnosed, both she and Frizell were deeply concerned that the disease might be genetic and could potentially affect their sons in the future.
However, after undergoing genetic testing, they were relived to learn they weren't in danger of inheriting the disease.
Recently, Frizell recalled how the former GMTV presenter thought he had kidnapped her because of 'delusions' brought on by Alzheimer's disease.
Speaking on ITV's This Morning, Frizell said: 'She'd love to be here, but she's got anxiety.
'She's got a kind of a secondary problem that causes her to be in pain, a lot, a lot of pain, which adds to the confusion. So it's difficult.
'In the book, there's a picture of her at the end of our road, picking the most recent picture I took, only a few weeks ago, and she's looking great, and she's kind of smiling, and she's got a coat on and what you don't know is, she thought I'd kidnapped her.'
He explained that the condition causes 'all sort of delusions', adding that Phillips would get 'kind of worked up'.
Frizell added: 'She does recognise me most of the times. Doesn't quite know that I'm her husband, but she knows who I am.
'On these occasions, and it's not frequent, but every now and then, she'll want to go home to her parents. I haven't got the heart to say they aren't here.
'What you do is, you say, 'Let's get our coats on, let's get our shoes on', we go up around the block a couple of times and come back in. And she says, 'Oh, I'm home now'.'
Frizell announced in November that he was stepping down as the editor of This Morning, after a decade in the post, saying he was expecting 'family priorities to change' and needed to free up time for them.
He oversaw the long-running morning show as it won numerous awards, including a Bafta and seven National Television Awards.
Phillips is best known for presenting GMTV from 1993 to 2008, before going on to head up a number of documentaries and episodes of Panorama.
She quit TV in 2018 after she started to suffer from anxiety and was also one of the Mirror's longest-serving columnists.
Phillips cared for her parents after both of them were also diagnosed with the condition and has made two documentaries about the disease, one in 2009 called Mum, Dad, Alzheimer's And Me, about her family's history of dementia, and My Family And Alzheimer's in 2010.
She has also served as an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
18 minutes ago
- CNN
Eating minimally processed meals doubles weight loss even when ultraprocessed foods are healthy, study finds
People in the United Kingdom lost twice as much weight eating meals typically made at home than they did when eating store-bought ultraprocessed food considered healthy, the latest research has found. 'This new study shows that even when an ultraprocessed diet meets nutritional guidelines, people will still lose more weight eating a minimally processed diet,' said coauthor Dr. Kevin Hall, a former senior investigator at the US National Institutes of Health who has conducted some of the world's only controlled clinical trials on ultraprocessed foods. 'This (study) is the largest and longest randomized controlled clinical trial of ultraprocessed foods to date,' Hall added. Hall's past research sequestered healthy volunteers inside a clinic for a month at a time, measuring the impact of ultraprocessed food on their weight, body fat and various biomarkers of health. In a 2019 study, he found people in the United States ate about 500 calories more each day and gained weight when on an ultraprocessed diet than when eating a minimally processed diet matched by calories and nutrients. The weight loss from minimally processed food in the new study was modest — only 2% of the person's baseline weight, said study first author Samuel Dicken, a research fellow at the department of behavioral science and health and the Centre for Obesity Research at University College London. 'Though a 2% reduction may not seem very big, that is only over eight weeks and without people trying to actively reduce their (food) intake,' Dicken said in a statement. 'If we scaled these results up over the course of a year, we'd expect to see a 13% weight reduction in men and a 9% reduction in women.' Men typically have more lean muscle mass than women, which along with testosterone often gives them a quicker boost over women when it comes to weight loss, experts say. The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, provided free ultraprocessed or minimally processed meals and snacks to 55 overweight people in the UK for a total of eight weeks. After a short break, the groups switched to the opposite diet for another eight weeks. Study participants were told to eat as much or as little of the 4,000 daily calories as they liked and record their consumption in a diary. By the end of the study, 50 people had spent eight weeks on both diets. While the number of participants may seem small at first glance, providing 16 weeks of food and implementing randomized controlled clinical trials can be costly. For the first eight weeks, 28 people received daily deliveries of minimally processed meals and snacks, such as overnight oats and homemade spaghetti Bolognese. Minimally processed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, meat, milk and eggs, are typically cooked from their natural state, according to NOVA, a recognized system of categorizing foods by their level of processing. Concurrently, another 27 people received a daily delivery of ultraprocessed foods — such as ready-to-eat breakfast bars or heat-and-eat lasagna — for eight weeks. Ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs, contain additives never or rarely used in kitchens and often undergo extensive industrial processing, according to the NOVA classification system. Because ultraprocessed foods are typically high in calories, added sugar, sodium, and saturated fat and low in fiber, they have been linked to weight gain and obesity and the development of chronic conditions including cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and depression. Such foods may even shorten life. Researchers in this study, however, did something unusual, said Christopher Gardner, Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in California who directs the Stanford Prevention Research Center's Nutrition Studies Research Group. 'They tried to make a healthy ultraprocessed diet by picking ultraprocessed foods with the recommended number of fruits, veggies and fiber and lower levels of salt, sugar and saturated fats,' said Gardner, who was not involved in the study. Both the ultraprocessed and the minimally processed meals had to meet the nutritional requirements of the Eatwell Guide, the UK's official government guidance on how to eat a healthy, balanced diet. The United States has similar dietary guidelines, which are used to set federal nutritional standards. 'This is a very solid study, matching dietary interventions for nutrients and food group distribution, while varying only the contribution of ultra-processed foods,' said Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine, in an email. Katz, who was not involved in the study, is the founder of the nonprofit True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to evidence-based lifestyle medicine. The study's goal was weight loss, which often comes with improved cardiovascular readings, such as lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels. That happened, but in rather odd and surprising ways, said Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who was asked to write an editorial to be published with the study. Instead of gaining weight, people on the ultraprocessed diet chose to eat 120 fewer calories a day, thus losing a small amount of weight. People on the minimally processed diet, however, ate 290 fewer calories a day, thus losing even more weight and some body fat as well. 'One possible explanation is that (people on the minimally processed diet) did not like the 'healthy' meals as much as their usual diets,' Nestle, who was not involved in the research, wrote in the editorial. 'They deemed the minimally processed diet less tasty,' Nestle said. 'That diet emphasized 'real' fresh foods, whereas the ultra-processed diet featured commercially packaged 'healthy' ultra-processed food products such as fruit, nut, and protein bars; sandwiches and meals; drinking yoghurts, and plant-based milks.' Less than 1% of people in the UK follow all of the government's nutritional recommendations, according to the study, often choosing ultraprocessed foods as the basis of their normal daily intake. In the US, nearly 60% of an adult's calorie consumption is from ultraprocessed foods. 'People in this study were overweight or obese and were already eating a diet high in all kinds of ultraprocessed foods,' Gardner said. 'So the ultraprocessed diet in the study was healthier than their typical normal diet. Isn't that an odd twist?' People on the minimally processed diet had lower levels of triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke, but other markers of heart health didn't vary much between the two diets, according to the study. There was one notable exception: low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, known as 'bad' cholesterol because it can build up in arteries and create blockages to the heart. 'Surprisingly, LDL cholesterol was reduced more on the ultra-processed diet,' said dietitian Dimitrios Koutoukidis, an associate professor of diet, obesity and behavioral sciences at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. 'This might imply that processing is not as important for heart health if the foods already meet the standard UK healthy eating guidance,' Koutoukidis said in a statement. 'Further research is needed to better understand this.' According to Hall, the results fit quite nicely with preliminary results from his current study that is still underway. In that research, Hall and his team measured the impact of four configurations of ultraprocessed foods on the health of 36 volunteers. Each lived for a month in the Metabolic Clinical Research Unit of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. 'When you modify an ultraprocessed diet to have lower energy (calorie) density and fewer highly palatable foods, you can offset some of the effects of ultraprocessed foods in causing excess calorie intake and weight gain,' Hall said. In other words, choose healthier foods regardless of the levels of processing. 'People don't eat the best ultraprocessed foods, they eat the worst ones, so the take home here is to follow the national guidelines for nutrient quality,' Gardner said. 'Read your nutrient label and choose foods that are low in salt, fat, sugar and calories and high in fiber, and avoid foods with too many additives with unpronounceable names. That's the key to a healthier diet.'
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Humans may have hibernation ‘superpowers' in untapped genes, scientists say
The 'superpowers' of hibernating animals are also present in human DNA, according to a pair of recent studies that provide clues to unlocking this potential and opening the door for new diabetes and Alzheimer's treatments. Hibernating animals such as squirrels and bears exhibit incredible resilience, going long periods without food and water and withstanding near-freezing temperatures by slowing down metabolism. They avoid muscle and nerve decay and stay healthy despite massive weight fluctuations. When these animals emerge from hibernation, they appear to recover from dangerous symptoms similar to those seen in people suffering from diabetes, Alzheimer's and stroke. 'If we could regulate our genes a bit more like hibernators, maybe we could overcome type 2 diabetes the same way a hibernator returns from hibernation back to a normal metabolic state,' Elliott Ferris, an author of one of the studies, says. The research focuses on a gene cluster called the 'fat mass and obesity locus', which plays an important role in hibernators. DNA regions near the FTO locus regulate the activities of neighbouring genes, tuning them up or down. They enable hibernators to put on weight before cosying up for winter and allow them to slowly use their fat reserves throughout hibernation, researchers say. 'What's striking about this region is that it is the strongest genetic risk factor for human obesity,' says Chris Gregg, a senior author of one of the studies from the University of Utah Health. When researchers mutated the hibernator-specific gene regions in mice, they noticed changes in their metabolism and weight. Some mutations sped up weight gain while others slowed it down under specific dietary conditions. The mutations also affected the ability of mice to recover body temperature after a hibernation-like state. 'When you knock out one of these elements – this one tiny, seemingly insignificant DNA region – the activity of hundreds of genes changes,' Susan Steinwand, another author of the studies, says. Previous studies show that hibernating animals can reverse neurodegeneration, avoid muscle decay, remain healthy despite massive weight fluctuations, and show improved ageing and longevity. The latest studies suggest we possess the necessary genetic code for hibernator-like superpowers, if we can bypass some of our metabolic switches. 'This work provides a genetic framework for harnessing hibernator adaptations to understand human metabolic control,' researchers say. 'Humans already have the genetic framework,' Dr Steinwand says. 'We just need to identify the control switches for these hibernator traits.' Further studies on these genes and their surrounding DNA regions can help confer similar resilience to humans, scientists say. 'There's potentially an opportunity – by understanding these hibernation-linked mechanisms in the genome – to find strategies to intervene and help with age-related diseases,' Dr Gregg says. 'If that's hidden in the genome that we've already got, we could learn from hibernators to improve our own health.'
Yahoo
33 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Want to lose weight? New study sheds light on how processed foods affect our health
People who cook minimally processed meals at home lose more weight than if they eat ready-made, ultra-processed meals – even if these foods are healthy, a new UK study has found. Food experts have long pointed to ultra-processed foods as a key driver of the obesity crisis, which affects about one in eight people worldwide. These foods are often high in saturated fats, sugar, and salt, for example crisps, frozen dinners, and processed meats. But they also include staples like wholemeal sliced bread and baked beans, meaning ultra-processed foods are not always unhealthy. That's prompted much debate over whether it's the ingredients or the processing itself that really matters when it comes to our health. The latest study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, indicates that minimally processed diets are better for weight loss – but that diets rich in ultra-processed foods can still be healthy as long as they meet nutritional guidelines. Related Butter linked to higher death risk while plant-based oils may boost health 'Completely cutting [ultra-processed foods] out of our diets isn't realistic for most of us,' Tracy Parker, nutrition lead at the British Heart Foundation, said in a statement. 'But including more minimally processed foods – like fresh or home cooked meals – alongside a balanced diet could offer added benefits too,' added Parker, who was not involved with the study. What the study found The findings are based on a small clinical trial involving 55 adults in England. Before the study, the participants tended to have poor nutrition diets made up largely of ultra-processed foods, and on average, they had a body mass index (BMI) of about 33, which is considered obese. The trial split adults into two groups. One group started on a diet of minimally processed foods like homemade spaghetti bolognese or overnight oats, while the other ate only ultra-processed foods like ready-made lasagnas or breakfast cereals. After a monthlong break, the two groups swapped, eating meals from the other diet for another eight weeks. Notably, both of these diets met the United Kingdom's guidelines for a healthy, balanced diet, which takes into account levels of saturated fat, protein, carbohydrates, salt, and fibre, as well as fruit and vegetable intake. The only difference was how processed these meals were. Related Diets rich in ultra-processed foods linked to higher risk of early death, new study warns By the end of the study, both groups lost weight – but adults lost twice as much weight when they were on the minimally-processed diets. They lost about 2 per cent of their weight on this diet, compared with about 1 per cent on the ultra-processed diet. 'Though a 2 per cent reduction may not seem very big, that is only over eight weeks and without people trying to actively reduce their intake,' said Samuel Dicken, a researcher who helped run the trial at University College London. 'Over time this would start to become a big difference,' he added. Over the course of a year, men on the minimally processed diet would be expected to lose 13 per cent of their weight, compared with 4 per cent on the ultra-processed diet, the researchers said. For women, the findings translate to a 9 per cent weight reduction on the minimally processed diet and a 4 per cent reduction on the ultra-processed diet. Dietary differences People tended to lose more weight on the minimally processed diet because of reductions in their fat mass and body water, which the researchers said suggested they had a healthier body composition overall. They also reported fewer food cravings on the minimally processed diet. There were no big differences between the two diets when it came to other health outcomes, such as blood pressure, heart rate, and blood markers that track liver function, blood sugar, cholesterol, and inflammation. The fact that people still lost weight while on ultra-processed diets indicates that these foods aren't all bad, independent experts said. 'The most interesting result of the study is that participants on both arms lost weight – which contradicts claims that ultra-processed foods result in weight gain,' Gunter Kuhnle, a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Reading, said in a statement. The findings 'suggest that a diet meeting current dietary recommendations is not detrimental to weight maintenance, whether it is ultra-processed or not,' added Kuhnle, who was not involved with the study. Related Ultra-processed foods account for nearly half of calories eaten by UK toddlers, study finds The study also has some limitations, namely the fact that it included only 55 people who tried both diets. Independent researchers warned that it takes time for the body to get used to new eating habits, so longer studies with more people would be needed to understand exactly how ultra-processed foods affect our health. Even so, researchers said the results are in line with other studies showing that access to nutritious food is critical to our health and wellbeing. Dr Chris van Tulleken, one of the study's authors and a researcher studying how corporations affect human health at University College London, pointed to the 'wide availability of cheap, unhealthy food' as a key driver of obesity and poor health worldwide. He called for policy action to make unhealthy options less appealing, for example through warning labels, marketing restrictions, and taxes. The study, he said, 'underlines the need to shift the policy focus away from individual responsibility and on to the environmental drivers of obesity'.
