You may have started the year with a big, celebratory New Year’s Eve bash, with lots of treats, sweets, and alcohol. But now that we’re already partway through January, are you rethinking how you eat? As we’ve stated time and again, in so many ways you are what you eat: the healthier the food that goes in, the healthier your body will likely be. And while the Mediterranean diet continues to be lauded as one of the healthiest and most nutritious approaches to eating (with good reason), for some, committing to eating that way is a long-term project, not one easily accomplished in the coming weeks or even months. So are there smaller steps you can work on right now to get yourself on a path toward healthier eating? For a set of useful posts to get you started, rinse off that apple and read here.

Perhaps before a drastic purge of your fridge and reinvention of your shopping list, some general guidelines and encouragement would be helpful. For example, we have more evidence from recent research published in Nature Food that a shift toward a healthier diet could potentially increase life expectancy in adults by up to 10 years. It’s estimated that over 650,000 US adults will die each year just due to their unhealthy diets. Even as an older adult, movement away from ultra-processed food and the inclusion of more whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables can make a substantial and impactful difference in your health and even life expectancy. We know that older adults tend to have a higher quality diet than other demographic groups, though we also have data that over the last decade, the percentage of older adults with a poor quality diet has gone up. So we may be doing better than the average American in our eating habits, but it’s not necessarily a diet to be proud of if we want to promote healthy aging. What can many of us do to improve the odds that we live longer with fewer chronic conditions and a better quality of life?

Without a drastic change, some modest substitutions and alterations can make a big difference. One of the easiest? Try to eliminate the use of ultra-processed foods in your regular diet. Currently, for most, ultra-processed food is the majority of their diet and it’s not hard to understand why. The food is manufactured to be alluring, enticing, and addictive, causing you to crave it and even overeat. So eliminating these foods (the chips, cookies, deli meat, frozen meals, instant soup, etc) won’t necessarily be easy, but knowing what to be on the lookout for gets you started. This will require reading food labels, and other than making sure you have your reading glasses with you at the market, it shouldn’t be too hard! So, if there are more than 3 ingredients, or emulsifiers or stabilizers (making the food more appealing or last longer), or added or artificial sugars, or it’s an “instant” food- all of these should never make their way into your cart if at all possible. One more suggestion? These items tend to be in the middle of your supermarket- stick to the perimeters of the market instead. Beyond limiting or eliminating these processed foods, some other easy changes you can make include focusing on what your older body needs (protein and fiber) along with healthy carbs like fruits, veggies, whole grains, and beans. No one is saying you have to do this all at once or completely give up a sweet or occasional treat, but you do need to gradually shift your behavior and taste buds to accepting a more healthy and healthful way of eating.

You may also want to begin changing your approach to quantities and timing. Ending the day with a big dinner is just not a healthy way to feed your system. Humans were meant to eat their big meal of the day at breakfast, to energize them for a day of hunting and gathering. So you may want to rethink your own approach to daily meals, starting with a big healthy breakfast, and ending with a small dinner, which should be consumed, according to experts, at least 2 hours before bedtime, though ideally more like 4 hours prior to sleep. Experts report that “a meal consumed at 9 a.m. can have vastly different metabolic effects than the same meal consumed at 9 p.m.”  

While these suggestions will take time to incorporate into your life, your body, your gut, and your brain will thank you for this new approach to eating. For a few more tips for eating better and healthier this year, dish yourself some cottage cheese and click here.