How To Eat Right For Your Age | Nutrition & Dieting articles | Well Being center

Feeling good and looking great are a lot easier in your 20's than in your 80's, but small changes in your diet can help you optimize your health throughout your life. This article will help you choose the foods that enable you to eat right for your age. However, some principles of nutrition apply to all adults. Let's start with some basics.

Everyone needs protein

Despite what the advocates of three-hour and four-hour diets tell us, everyone doesn't need protein at every meal. We don't even need protein foods every day, although about 48 hours is the longest anyone should go without eating protein. The average adult (women a little less, men a little more) needs 50 grams of protein a day. Those 50 grams of protein come from about 100 grams (about 3-1/2 ounces) of a high-protein food like fish or 150 grams (about 5 ounces) of a lower-protein food like beans or roast beef or cheese. Our bodies break down the proteins in food into amino acids, and then reassemble the amino acids to make proteins for us. The body's Buffering systems can only hold amino acids for about 48 hours. Excesses of a particular kind of amino acid are transformed into sugar (glucose) plus urea. They are flushed down the toilet.

Everyone needs carbohydrate

Carbs get a bad rap, because the body transforms most carbohydrates into sugar (again, glucose). However, glucose is the preferred fuel of most of the organs of the body, especially the brain. The brain needs about 40 grams (160 calories) of glucose derived from food every day for optimal function.

Zero-carbohydrate diets are never a good idea; even ketogenic diets should contain a small amount of carbohydrate.

The body also uses carbohydrates to make mucus and the synovial fluid that lubricates joints. Making these glycoproteins can take another 40 grams of carbohydrate a day. Where most people get into trouble is consuming too much carbohydrate. The liver simply cannot process more than about 300 grams (1200 calories) of carbohydrate a day, even if you aren't diabetic.

Everyone needs fat

There is a common misunderstanding about "essential" fatty acids. Certain fats the body in the production of hormones that regulate inflammation have to come from food. This makes them "essential." However, the fat that a fatty acid is essential does not mean we all need more, more, more.

As little as 10 grams of essential fatty acids a day is enough.

Additional non-essential fat simply gets burned as fuel (but only when sugar is not available, eating too much sugar keeps fat stored in fat cells) or stored for later use. The challenge of good diets is not to avoid eating fat altogether, but to avoid eating too much fat, and to avoid high blood sugar levels, which keep fat locked inside fat cells.

Protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the macronutrients. These are the nutrients we all need in large amounts. Vitamins, minerals, and plant chemicals are the micronutrients. They are the nutrients we need in small amounts.

We don't have to get every vitamin and every mineral every day. The body can store most of them. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies usually aren't related so much to diet as to problems with absorption. "More" is usually not the answer. When there is a vitamin or mineral deficiency, the problem usually is that the body isn't getting them in the form it can absorb and use.

READ Macronutrients: What Do You Need To Keep Your Body Healthy?

All through our lives we have to pay attention to getting enough of the macronutrients and all of the micronutrients. However, optimal food choices change as we grow older. The guiding principles of food choices change as we grow older.

Eating Right In Each Decade Of Adult Life

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.

READ Macro Counting Made Easy

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.

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