Staying socially connected can help maintain healthy eating with age, especially for older women

Healthy eating supports healthy aging: Canada’s Food Guide recommends daily intake of fruits and vegetables as a way to help prevent multiple chronic conditions that typically affect older adults.

We know that healthy eating is strongly influenced by our social connections and different settings. But aging often brings losses to different social connections that can put healthy eating at risk.

As researchers who study the interaction of nutrition, age and social issues, we were curious to know if adverse changes in an older person’s social connections matter for maintaining a good diet, and who is most affected?

Social isolation and social diversity change with age

There is broad health research focused on social isolation that measures this concept at one point in time using a combination of different types of social contexts such as living alone, infrequent social contact, no social participation and not married.

Social isolation, however, is not a static experience as aging adults frequently go through changes in different types of social relationships, often reducing their social contacts and activities over time.

Our recent research shows that the number of different social activities decreases over time for middle-age and older adults.

About one in five aging adults reduces the variety of their social engagement (for example, seeing friends and family, volunteering, sports, religious and educational activities, etc.), with greater declines seen among older women.

In addition, about 14 per cent of aging Canadians either became socially isolated or stayed socially isolated over time. Canadians in the oldest age group and in more socio-economically disadvantaged groups appear most vulnerable to staying or becoming either socially isolated or less socially diverse over time.

It is important, then, for research on nutrition and healthy aging to better capture distinct alterations in social engagement over time, not only in terms of a lack of regular social interaction but also in terms of a diversity of social interactions.

Dietary risks of changing social connections

Both the quantity and the quality of the foods we eat can be affected by our meal setting, and eating alone is correlated with poor diet quality.

Among older adults, being socially isolated is linked to inadequate intakes of fruits and vegetables — a marker of diet quality that is associated with chronic disease. More specifically, both older men and women with no or rare friend contact have poor diet quality compared to those with frequent friend contact.

It has been unclear whether staying or becoming socially isolated is a problem for maintaining healthy eating habits as people age. It is also unknown whether reducing the variety of social activities puts diet quality at risk of declining.

The handful of nutrition studies that do consider changes in social connections all focus on marital transitions, leaving a critical gap in knowledge for healthy aging policy and practice.

Our new study with collaborators is filling this knowledge gap by using multiple waves from a nationally representative cohort of middle-aged and older Canadians.

The first important finding is that older women who stayed socially isolated — meaning one or no monthly activity — reduced their diet quality over time compared to women who stayed engaged in two or more monthly social activities.

The second notable finding is the older women who reduced their diversity of social activities also had declines in diet quality over time. And finally, both older women and older men who had a small number of social activities that stayed the same over time were also at risk of declining diet quality.

These results were not explained by other social or behavioural factors that were included in the study’s analysis.

Social interventions to support healthy eating

Canada’s healthy aging strategy and Food Guide both emphasize the important role of social connections for maintaining health and healthy eating. There have long been programs, such as Meals on Wheels, that support health and well-being by providing hot, nutritious meals to individuals, especially older adults, who are home-bound.

Maintaining regular and diverse social activities is vital for promoting health and well-being as people transition from mid to later life. Everybody can benefit from not just being connected, but also from staying connected across a range of social settings.

We want to call attention to the significance of both persistent isolation and losses of social diversity for women’s nutrition and health in Canada. Different types of social connections may matter for women than for men, and their maintenance over time can show different effects on diet and health that need more research and policy action.

Understanding the social determinants of diet for women is key to addressing health inequities and to tailoring more effective social interventions for aging Canadians, such as social prescribing and other social relational models of care.