Exercise and some nutritious eating habits for middle-aged and older people

Today, my talk is a little bit different than , but it still has to do with nutrition and exercise. And basically, it's going to focus on nutrition and exercise in the older adult, but some of the things I'll talk to you about will apply to everyone in this position. So with ageing and all of us are ageing, that's one thing we can't actually stop is there are things that are negative and positive that occur in our bodies. And both play both nutrition and exercise play a key role in preventing some of the things that ageing, you know, that occur with ageing. And one thing I'd like to make sure I say is that ageing is not a disease.

So so often people say, Well, I'm older now, and I can't do this or that. And I really like to say that, I think it's because maybe they got old too fast. So we shouldn't be stopping doing things just because we're getting older. And I'm still a competitive athlete in several sports, and I'm not up here to talk about that. But one of the newest sports I brought into my life was just four years ago, and that's playing ice hockey. So just so you know, it's it's okay to keep trying new things, because that that gets us cognitively, you know, challenging and also physically challenging. So, some of the things I'd first like to talk about are the changes that happened, both in fitness and the metabolic profile before I go on to just a couple of studies that we conducted in our lab, with individuals of an older age. And so with older, you know, individuals who exercise, the good news is, is that exercise can help stave off some of the negative impacts of ageing.

So unfortunately, at the age of 40, or so, that, you know, some of the things that happen is is called sarcopenia, where we start to lose some muscle mass. But we can prevent that if we continue to exercise both, both in in strength training as well as aerobic training. And some of the you know, if you continue to exercise as you get older, yes, you might lose about 10% of what's called your VO to max, or that's the measure of aerobic fitness, a maximal oxygen consumption. But you can decrease that if you continue to exercise. Some evidence also, maintaining habitual physical activity can decrease disease. And something else just add, I'm talking about exercise here and planned exercise, but activities of daily living also count. So taking the stairs instead of the elevators is really an important part of what we can do. As a matter of fact, a couple of studies show that if they asked people in their office building just to take the stairs and ask half of them just to continue using the elevator. That's the only thing they changed in their lives, that those who took the stairs improve their robic fitness significantly compared to those who did not. So even in my office building, when I go up 12 flights, people like you're not taking the elevator, I said, well, as long as my legs work, I will continue to use them. So some of the things that change too with with older exercisers, they typically have the same type of profile as people as younger counterparts as people in their 20s and 30s. And when I say older, that can be defined very differently, but but from about the age of 40 on.

And also blood sugar or blood glucose levels can be better maintained when people exercise and eat well, and things like your lipid profile, your total cholesterol in your blood, your good cholesterol in your blood. Those are better in folks who exercises versus those who don't.

So one of the studies we did in our lab was we recruited people who were overweight and obese, but they were older. And we implemented this diet and exercise programme with them. So first, let me tell you that the aim of the study was we wanted to see if they would lose weight based on our exercise slash diet programme. And so, and we measured a bunch of things, but I'm going to just talk about a couple of the things that we measured. But the design of the study was a pretty basic one. We recruited about 90 overweight and obese sedentary individuals. They were about 47 or so years of age and they had a body mass index of about 31.

So most of them were overweight, not so much obese. And what we did was we randomly assign them to either a diet group, an exercise group or a diet plus exercise group. And the diet group. We didn't put them on a special diet. We didn't give them special foods. I just taught them about heart healthy eating. And the exercise group. We they got these Nordic mitts track ski machines, which some of you are too young to know but they're these ski machines that use your upper and lower body and we supervise all of their exercise programmes. So they came to us for us.

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