Does Your Diet Make A Difference When You’re A Certain Age?

They say youth is wasted on the young, but according to researchers at Penn State and Geisinger Healthcare System, dietary changes may be wasted on the old. If you’re over the age of 75, eating a high-sugar, high-fat diet may not affect your wellbeing, meaning that changing to a restrictive diet to lose weight or change other wellness problems may have little benefit in the end.

According to Gordon Jensen, head of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State, ‘Historically people thought of older persons as tiny and frail, but that paradigm has changed for many older persons. Currently, 30% or more may be overweight, and by 2030, almost 30% are projected to be obese, not just overweight. Recent reports even suggest that there may be survival benefits associated with overweight and mild obesity status among the elderly.’

Pao Ying Hsao, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State, added ‘We all know that adverse dietary patterns, such as a Western diet containing high amounts of fat or a diet containing high amounts of refined sugar, both of which may contribute to obesity, are associated with adverse medical conditions and health outcomes for many people, but until now, the health effects of these types of poor diets have not been characterized for people who live to 75 years of age and older’

Therefore the team followed 449 individuals, who were on average 76.5 years old at the beginning of the study, for a period of five years. Participants were called four or five times in a 10-month period and asked about their diets over the previous 24 hours. Their diets were then categorised as a ‘sweets and dairy’ pattern (consuming high amounts of baked goods, milk, sweetened coffee and tea and dairy-based desserts, and little poultry), a ‘health-conscious’ pattern (higher intakes of pasta, noodles, rice, whole fruit, poultry, nuts, fish and vegetables, and lower intakes of unhealthy foods), or a ‘Western’ (high in bread, eggs, fats, fried vegetables, alcohol and soft drinks, and less milk and whole fruit).

Though there was a link between the ‘sweets and dairy’ pattern and an increased risk of hypertension, the team found no relationship between dietary pattern and prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome or mortality in the participants. Jensen said ‘The results suggest that if you live to be this old, then there may be little to support the use of overly restrictive dietary prescriptions, especially where food intake may already be inadequate. However, people who live on prudent diets all their lives are likely to have better health outcomes.’