ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the later years, when an individual is an adult and then enters into old age. It explores the specific food and nutrition elements that affect people as they get older. Successful ageing from a life-course perspective is not a static snapshot of function at a point in time. Rather, ageing is considered lifelong with late-life health outcomes meaning there are opportunities for growth and adaptation as well as intervention across the lifespan. Poor eating habits accumulated over the lifecourse can increase the risk of health conditions and disease. Food habits, however, are amenable to modification. Several of the health problems and bodily changes experienced by older adults, which previously have been attributed to the ‘normal ageing process’, are increasingly being recognised as being linked to personal behaviour or environmental factors. Bodily processes do age and there is recognition that there is progressive deterioration of cellular processes in all cells.
