Impact of Nutrition on Healthy Aging

Aging is a unidirectional physiological phenomenon, but one can retard its detrimental consequences by healthy nutrition. It is alarming that escalating global trends of diet-induced excess weight and obesity are leading to type 2 diabetic and cardiovascular complications and inflammatory diseases among adults and adolescents. Appropriate nutritional implements and active lifestyles are recommended to help safeguard healthy aging. While many functional food ingredients may have beneficial impacts on human health, the current chapter highlights the specific roles of dietary fiber, prebiotics, and probiotics in conjunction with commensal gastrointestinal and gut microbiota, and the subsequent microbial metabolites such as short-chain fatty acids and their receptors that play critical roles in controlling a variety of molecular events. Such events influence antitumorigenicity, energy metabolism, feeding behavior, T-cell differentiation, inflammation, and immune homeostasis in preventing individuals from becoming susceptible to a variety of diseases that often come with aging. The chapter reviews the recent literature and prospective lines of further research.