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Excerpt from Harvard Health Letter
Following health advice should help you reach a fine old age. But do the same rules apply once you get there?
We’re living in an age of health advice. Food isn’t simply food but a nutrition delivery system. No one needs to inform the laggards among us that we should be exercising. We know already! All the coaching we’re getting — and, more important, following — has had a remarkable effect. More Americans are living longer. Demographers say that one of the fastest growing age groups is the “old old” — people age 85 and over. Not only that, but more and more of those old-old years are relatively free of illness.
These trends have raised the question of whether the advice we’re getting — so much of which is based on long-term studies of middle-aged people — really applies to the later decades. Does a “healthy lifestyle” really matter once we are in our 70s, 80s, and 90s? And we’ve heard about the importance of getting treatment for certain conditions, like high blood pressure, even when they’re not producing symptoms. But do those treatments really help us when we’re “young old,” “old old,” or something in between?
Nutrition
Eating too much is the bane of most Americans’ nutritional existence. And in animal experiments, very-low-calorie diets have been the one sure way to increase biological lifespan. But in old age, eating too little becomes a threat to good health. Every geriatrics textbook has a chapter on loss of appetite (anorexia). The loss of taste, and especially smell, as you get older makes food less appetizing. With age, food tends to sit longer in the part of the stomach that makes you feel full before traveling to the small intestine, so you get a full feeling faster. Men may become less interested in eating because of the gradual decline in testosterone levels with age. Social circumstances can be a factor: Many older people live alone, so the appetite-enhancing element of sitting down for a meal with others slips away.
Also in this issue:
Supplement ineffective for arthritis of the knee
Squamous cell skin cancer
Homocysteine and heart disease
Ways to quit smoking
A doctor discusses: Sore hair; and psoriatic arthritis