Table of Contents
Eating right means different things at different ages. Here is an overview of nutritional guidelines for every decade of adult life, from the twenties to the seventies and beyond.
As the movie character Ferris Bueller famously noted, "Life goes by pretty fast." Not many things stay the same throughout life. Aging even changes our food choices and our bodies need different kinds of food at different ages.
Optimal Food Choices in Our Twenties
By the time we reach our twenties, our bodies are fully formed but they are still maximally resilient. Missing workouts for a few weeks won't result in immediate muscle loss. We recover quickly from injuries and illnesses. Both men and women are at the peak of their adult hormone activity, and there are natural drives for sex, love, and exploration.
Healthy diets for twenty-somethings should emphasize balance. This isn't the time of life to make a habit of overeating. It's the time of life to establish the habits of eating healthy, balanced meals every day. A young adult body may not show the effects of junk food right away, but the twenties are the last chance for some of us to overcome the bad habits of our teenage and college years by making sure we get enough plant foods, some probiotic foods, and limited amounts of fat and sugar every day.
Optimal Food Choices for Our Thirties
For most of us, our thirties are the time when life begins to get "complicated." We become parents. We take on more job responsibilities. We are paying off debts and taking on new debts.
By this decade of life, we don't recover from illness or injury quite as fast as we used to. We don't have as much time for exercise. Our metabolisms begin to slow down.
In our thirties, most of us begin to need to eat less. The combination of less activity and slower metabolic rates lead to weight gain. It's much easier to win the battle of the bulge in your thirties, than to wait until your forties when metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, increased waist size, and prediabetes) often kicks in.
Optimal Food Choices for Our Forties
By the time you are 40, you have reached your fifth decade of life. For most people in their forties, time management becomes problematic. We have to say "no" to activities we once actively pursued. The pressures on "me time" and exercise time become more acute, as the metabolism slows down even more. Minor aches and pains become more persistent. Sex hormone and thyroid hormone levels begin to fall. It's harder to build muscle, and it's easier to gain weight.
Our forties are the time to build healthy eating habits around ritual. Find ways to make those increasingly rare family meals healthier.
It's also the time to be alert to emerging food sensitivities. It's not unusual for people to reach age 45 and discover that they are lactose intolerant or they don't feel well after they eat wheat or meat. Minor sensitivities tend to become major problems at this point in life.
The forties are also the idea time to get rid of bad eating habits for good. No more binge eating, no more binge drinking, no more junk food are musts. Managing your health for the rest of your life will be much easier if you.
Optimal Food Choices in Our Fifties
Our fifties are our best opportunity to build up strength for the rest of our lives. This is also the decade to get chronic problems into good control. It's imperative to prevent prediabetes from becoming type 2 diabetes. It's even more important to discipline eating to avoid gaining weight.
Men often find that their testosterone levels are falling by the time they reach their fifties. Men who gain large amounts of body fat will have even lower levels of the male sex hormone (because fat cells metabolize testosterone into estrogen).
Women go through menopause. They start needing to pay particular attention to vitamins D and K and magnesium as well as calcium for healthy bones. They also need to find sources of the anti-inflammatory essential fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) in their diets, typically from fish oil, since women's bodies cannot use essential fatty acids from seeds and plant oils without the help of estrogen.
Optimal Food Choices in Our Sixties
The sixties are the decade in which we see the results of our choices earlier in life. If you have partied hard all your life, by your sixties chances are you could enter a Keith Richards look alike contest and hope to win. Bad eating habits and questionable lifestyle choices have taken their toll.
That doesn't mean, however, it's too late to change. Some dietary fixes in our sixties are relatively simple. Most sixty-somethings produce less stomach acid than they used to, and have more trouble absorbing vitamin B12. Supplemental vitamin B12 can prevent a variety of health problems later.
About 20 percent of the population (more in Latin America and the Mediterranean countries) lacks an enzyme needed to use folic acid. Taking supplemental methylfolate and (if you live in North America, where folic acid is added to wheat flour) avoiding baked goods can reduce the risk of blood clots that can cause heart attacks and stroke as well as lower the risk of Alzheimer's.
Even though it is now very hard to lose weight and gain muscle, persistent efforts still bring lasting results. If you have never started exercise, now is the time to pursue a gentle fitness program. Resistance training, even small amounts of weight lifting, will help you maintain muscle mass and bone density. Low-impact aerobics (water exercise, cycling, ellipticals) will help preserve joints. This is also the decade in which you need to start taking supplemental vitamin D, especially if you are overweight.
Optimal Food Choices in Our Seventies and Beyond
With advances in modern medicine, if you have made it to the age of 70, chances are that you will make it to the age of 85 or even beyond. By the time you are 70, you may benefit from taking digestive enzymes to help your body handle protein meals. You may need to eat small meals to avoid overwhelming your digestive tract. Probiotics and fiber may be a must for avoiding constipation. The big challenge of our seventies and beyond is avoiding vicious cycles:
- If you are injured, you tend to stay inactive without focused effort.
- If you have dental problems, you tend to develop dietary problems.
- If you don't get hearing problems corrected, you tend to lose your mental sharpness (although I will admit that I personally have no intention of getting a hearing aid that allows me to hear the frequencies made by whiny teenagers, having had enough of that earlier in life).
- If you don't get vision problems corrected, you risk serious injury.
- If you don't "practice" the skills that enable you to stop a fall, get out of a chair, and pick yourself up off the floor, you may find yourself in a desperate situation.
The best antiaging program is in part about not letting problems snowball. It is also the time to leave our legacies. It's the last chance we have to get our acts together. Taking care of daily routine allows elders to pursue the important tasks of their lives with dignity to good result.
- Guyonnet S, Secher M, Vellas B. Nutrition, Frailty, Cognitive Frailty and Prevention of Disabilities with Aging. Nestle Nutr Inst Workshop Ser. 2015 Nov. 82:143-152. Epub 2015 Oct 20. PMID: 26545250.
- Wall BT, Gorissen SH, Pennings B, Koopman R, Groen BB, Verdijk LB, van Loon LJ. Aging Is Accompanied by a Blunted Muscle Protein Synthetic Response to Protein Ingestion. PLoS One. 2015 Nov 4
- 10(11):e0140903. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0140903. eCollection 2015. PMID: 26536130.
- Photo courtesy of superhua: www.flickr.com/photos/superhua/393544655/
- Photo courtesy of Marawder: www.flickr.com/photos/i_love_madonna/13224735435/
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