Proper Diet Helps Older Men Stay Healthy.

The ability to maintain independence and physically care for yourself is an essential part of healthy aging, but few studies have examined how diet may allow some aging people to maintain physical function--everyday tasks such as bathing, getting dressed, carrying groceries, or walking up a flight of stairs--while others' abilities diminish.

A study by investigators from Harvard University-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital examines the role of a healthy diet and finds that this highly modifiable factor can have a large influence on maintaining physical function, lowering the likelihood of developing physical impairment by approximately 25%. The team's findings are published in The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging.

"Diet can have specific effects on our health and can also affect our well-being and physical independence as we get older," says senior author Francine Grodstein of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham.

"What excites me about our findings is the notion that we have some influence over our physical independence as we get older. Even if people can't completely change their diet, there are some relatively simple changes people can make that may influence their ability to maintain physical function, such as eating more vegetables and nuts."

Grodstein and her colleague Kaitlin Hagan, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Brigham, examined data from a total of 12,658 men from the Health...