Prime Time Living 6.14.26 - Flipbook - Page 8
8
| Sunday, June 14, 2026
HEALTH
Our Changing
Nutritional Needs
as We Age
How you consume vital
nutrients is worth examining
By Margit B. Weisgal, Contributing Writer
F
our top researchers, contributors at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition
Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University, were brought together
by the Gerontological Society of America (GSA: geron.org) to discuss why we
need to pay attention to our nutritional needs, when we should start, and how it affects
other parts of our lives.
The HNRCA’s focus “is on Precision
Healthy Aging and is rooted in the understanding that nutrition is a cornerstone of
health and a preventive measure against
chronic diseases. We are building on that
with a geroscience-infused approach to
better understand how aging processes
contribute to diseases,” according to the
HNRCA.
Why should we pay attention? As the
HNRCA points out, “increased life expectancy is reshaping health care.” Chronic
health conditions and a shortage of health
care professionals say it’s incumbent
upon us to take on some responsibility for
our health. We do that by learning from
the experts. Here is some key information
shared by these researchers.
Dietary Interventions
As we age, there are challenges to
meeting the nutrient requirements causing nutritional inadequacies that go unaddressed. Think about them in three main
buckets.
• First are physical changes. You might
develop physical ailments such as
arthritis that affect eating habits.
Instead of cooking, you might have
to opt for a prepared or frozen meal,
or even a delivery service. And if
you are less active, your metabolism
slows down.
• The next bucket includes mental and
cognitive changes that might occur
with aging that can impact nutritional
deficiencies. For example, if you are
experiencing cognitive impairment,
you might actually forget to eat. This
bucket also includes concerns with
emotional well-being:
• If you have low emotional
well-being, you might be more
likely to reach for a candy bar
or some other food, not as
nutritionally dense, as a coping
mechanism. That way you won’t
get those important nutrients.
• On the other side, you might be
feeling apathetic and not want
to eat at all, so that can be a real
challenge to getting the food
you need.
• The last bucket is the physiological
changes that occur with aging. We
know that there are changes, hormonal cues our body uses to signal
it’s time for us to eat. Other cues
tell us to slow down or that we’re
full. Aging causes these hormones
to send mixed signals that result
in changes in our appetite – a real
challenge. As we deal with people
living much longer, to their 80s and
90s, this issue of appetite loss has
become more important.
Dietary Guidelines for Americans
Using the Healthy Eating Index, a
measure of diet quality used to assess
how well a set of foods aligns with key
recommendations and dietary patterns
published in the Dietary Guidelines for
Americans (Dietary Guidelines), a publication of the Food and Nutrition Service,
part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Americans are scored on how well they
eat compared to the dietary guidelines
from 2020. If you follow it exactly, what
we consider is a healthy diet of fruits,
vegetables, rich in whole grains, etc.,
you’d get 100. If you didn’t, you get zero.
Here’s the surprise. No one age group
scored above 62, a failing grade. Older
adults do not eat any better (or any
worse) than middle-aged adults. The age
group that eats the best are toddlers and
it goes down from there. So, despite
living in one of the greatest countries in
the world, adults don’t eat particularly
well here.
New dietary energy requirements were
recently released. It was updated as to
what we need to eat and the calories
Changing Nutritional Needs
Continued on page 21
