Dietary needs of healthy & frail older people

Nutrition – including the individuals’ food habits and preferences – acts as a major determinant of long-term health consequences. Indeed, nutrition is one of the lifestyle factors contributing to both development and progression of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular and neurodegenerative pathologies, diabetes, and cancer.

These concepts acquire even greater relevance because aging per se drives changes in several physiological aspects linked to nutrition, and increases the susceptibility toward the above-mentioned chronic diseases.

For all these reasons, dietary interventions represent an underestimated opportunity to preserve health of the older population, and may help reducing the global burden of the care expenditures in this segment of the population. Thus, a major challenge for the field of nutrition in the coming decades will be the definition of appropriate nutritional needs for the older adults, in terms of both basal requirements and prevention/delay of chronic diseases linked to the dietary habits.

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