Assessment of dietary intake in relation to longevity and healthy aging

Few Canadians experience healthy aging, living into old age in the absence of a major health condition such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, diabetes or Alzheimer’s. Diet may enhance the ability to resist disease and promote long healthy lives. We studied dietary patterns in 139 adults aged 85 and older from across British Columbia without a diagnosis of a major health condition using the same short diet questionnaire as the CLSA. We aim to compare the dietary patterns of these ‘super-seniors’ to those in the CLSA to determine if diet patterns are associated with healthy aging. We hope that these results may provide insight into dietary patterns associated with better health in older adults and information that will help tailor dietary recommendations.

Our study used CLSA data as a comparative cohort for a study of dietary intake in a group of ‘super seniors’ who lived into their 90s without developing a major chronic disease. The primary objective was to understand relationships between diet and healthy aging. We identified dietary patterns in the combined dataset. We found that both western dietary and healthy dietary patterns were associated with lower odds of being a super-senior versus a CLSA participant. The inverse association between the healthy dietary pattern and super-senior persisted with adjustment for covariates. This adds to the limited evidence on dietary intake in the healthiest oldest old.