How old age affects your appetite

We all need food every day, but our changing relationship with it through the years can have a big impact on our health.

The fourth decade, 30-40

Adult working life brings other challenges beyond a rumbling stomach, but also the effects of stress, which has been shown to prompt changes in appetite and eating habits in 80 per cent of the population, equally divided between those that gorge and those that lose their appetite.

These different coping strategies are intriguing: the phenomena of “food addiction” – an irresistible urge to consume specific, often high-calorie foods – is not well understood. Many researchers even question its existence.

Other personality traits, such as perfectionism and conscientiousness, may also play a role in mediating stress and eating behaviour.

Structuring the work environment to reduce problematic eating patterns such as snacking or vending machines is a challenge. Employers should strive to subsidise and promote healthier eating for a productive and healthy workforce, along with ways of managing stress and stressful situations.

The fifth decade, 40-50

The word diet comes from the Greek word diaita meaning “way of life, mode of living”, but we are creatures of habit, often unwilling to change our preferences even when we know it is good for us. We want to eat what we want without changing our lifestyle, and still have a healthy body and mind.

There is much evidence to show that diet is a major contributing factor to ill-health. The World Health Organisation highlights smoking, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and problem drinking as the main lifestyle impacts on health and mortality.

It is between the ages of 40-50 that adults should change their behaviour as their health dictates, but symptoms of illness are often invisible – for example high blood pressure or cholesterol – and so many fail to act.

The sixth decade, 50-60

After the age of 50, we begin to suffer a gradual loss of muscle mass, at between 0.5-1 per cent  per year. This is called sarcopenia, and lessened physical activity, consuming too little protein, and menopause in women will accelerate the decline in muscle mass.

A healthy, varied diet and physical activity are important to reduce the effects of ageing, and an ageing population’s need for palatable, cost-effective, higher-protein foods is not being met.

Protein?rich snack foods might represent an ideal opportunity to increase total protein intake in older adults, but there are currently few products designed to meet the requirements and preferences of older adults.

The seventh decade, 60-70, and beyond

A major challenge today in the face of increasing life expectancy is to maintain quality of life, or else we will become a society of very old and infirm or disabled people.

Adequate nutrition is important, as old age brings poor appetite and lack of hunger, which leads to unintentional weight loss and greater frailty. Reduced appetite can also result from illness, for example the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Food is a social experience, but the loss of a partner or family and eating alone affect the sense of pleasure taken from eating. Other affects of old age, such as swallowing problems, dental issues, reduced taste and smell also interfere with the desire to eat and our rewards from doing so.

We should remember that throughout life our food is not just fuel, but a social and cultural experience to be enjoyed. We are all experts in food – we eat it every day.

So we should strive to treat every opportunity to eat as an opportunity to enjoy our food and to enjoy the positive effects eating the right foods can have on our health.

--Adapted from BBC