Eating Well as You Get Older

How should you eat as you get older? Which foods are likely to keep you healthy and which ones should you avoid, or limit? Can you eat well and yet avoid becoming overweight? As you get older, your food choices can make an important difference to your health.

As you age, you are likely to face a changing in appetite, a slower metabolism, and, possibly, eating alone, and buying ready-to-eat meals. Living on a fixed income can affect the quality of your food choices, too.

Help is at hand – provided by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), both part of the US National Institutes of Health. A section called "Eating Well as You Get Older" is the latest topic to be added to NIHSeniorHealth, the website developed by the NIA.

The website gives plenty of practical information about food labels, food safety, meal planning, food shopping, and ways to enhance the enjoyment of eating. There are short, easy-to-read segments that can be accessed using a large-print type size, if you wish, or as an audio version. Even if you consider yourself well-informed about healthy eating as you get older, I recommend that you visit the site - it’s a valuable resource for many of us.