Dietary Patterns, Skeletal Muscle Health, and Sarcopenia in Older Adults

Abstract

In recent decades, the significance of diet and dietary patterns (DPs) for skeletal muscle health has been gaining attention in ageing and nutritional research. Sarcopenia, a muscle disease characterised by low muscle strength, mass, and function is associated with an increased risk of functional decline, frailty, hospitalization, and death. The prevalence of sarcopenia increases with age and leads to high personal, social, and economic costs. Finding adequate nutritional measures to maintain muscle health, preserve function, and independence for the growing population of older adults would have important scientific and societal implications. Two main approaches have been employed to study the role of diet/DPs as a modifiable lifestyle factor in sarcopenia. An a priori or hypothesis-driven approach examines the adherence to pre-defined dietary indices such as the Mediterranean diet (MED) and Healthy Eating Index (HEI)—measures of diet quality—in relation to muscle health outcomes. A posteriori or data-driven approaches have used statistical tools—dimension reduction methods or clustering—to study DP-muscle health relationships. Both approaches recognise the importance of the whole diet and potential cumulative, synergistic, and antagonistic effects of foods and nutrients on ageing muscle. In this review, we have aimed to (i) summarise nutritional epidemiology evidence from four recent systematic reviews with updates from new primary studies about the role of DPs in muscle health, sarcopenia, and its components; (ii) hypothesise about the potential mechanisms of ‘myoprotective’ diets, with the MED as an example, and (iii) discuss the challenges facing nutritional epidemiology to produce the higher level evidence needed to understand the relationships between whole diets and healthy muscle ageing.

Crosstalk Between the Gut Microbiome and Bioactive Lipids: Therapeutic Targets in Cognitive Frailty

“…Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses showed that adherence to a Mediterranean diet is associated with reduced risk of frailty, incident frailty, cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, and progression from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease (131)(132)(133)(134)(135). A recent systematic review also showed that the Mediterranean diet is associated with myoprotective effects in several components of sarcopenia and declining physical function (136). Notably, sarcopenia is one of the main conditions involved in the onset of cognitive frailty.…”

Fruit and Vegetable Consumption and Sarcopenia among Older Adults in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

“…For example, between age 40 and 80 years, total skeletal muscle mass declines by 30%-50% [2]. Multifactorial environmental and genetic factors [3] (e.g., low grade chronic inflammation, hormonal changes, oxidative stress, inactivity, diet, age-related chronic diseases) are likely to be implicated in the pathogenesis of sarcopenia [4]. Sarcopenia is highly prevalent in the general population with its prevalence among people aged ≥60 years estimated to be around 10% [5].…”

The Mediterranean Diet Slows Down the Progression of Aging and Helps to Prevent the Onset of Frailty: A Narrative Review

“…In this regard, a review by Granic et al [142] reiterated the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet towards the reduction of strength and muscle mass and towards the reduction of walking speed. Nevertheless, the authors suggest the need to harmonize methods for defining dietary models (i.e., Mediterranean diet vs.…”