Keep fit and trim in midlife to age well – how diet that avoids weight gain pays dividends
Curbing or preventing middle-aged spread – the tendency to gain weight in midlife – could be key to avoiding serious medical problems in later life, doctors say.
Advertisement
The type and quality of carbohydrates a person consumes in their forties and fifties is likely to be a determining factor in how healthily they age, research shows.
“Sustained weight loss from overweight to healthy weight in midlife was associated with decreased risk of chronic diseases,” according to a team of doctors and scientists at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku in Finland, and University College London in the United Kingdom.
Achieving this weight loss without having surgery or taking drugs means “long-term health benefits beyond its associations with decreased diabetes risk”, said the researchers, whose study covering around 23,100 people was published by the American Medical Association (AMA).
The AMA also recently published a study of around 47,000 women carried out by a team from Tufts University and Harvard University, both in the US state of Massachusetts, in which the researchers say fibre and carbohydrates are “favourably linked to healthy ageing and other positive health outcomes in older women.”
Advertisement