Nutritional Epidemiological Study on Diet Effective for Frailty Prevention

Summary : Prevention of frailty is an important issue in Japan. So far, there have been various reports on the factors that can reduce frailty, but only a few have focused on “ diet ” , and most are from Western countries where food culture and disease structure differ from those in Japan. The author conducted a nutritional epidemiological study to clarify diets that would be effective for preventing frailty. A prospective cohort study of com-munity-dwelling Japanese elderly revealed that a high intake of animal-derived protein was associated with maintenance of higher-level functional decline after seven years. We also focused on anemia, which is a risk fac-tor for frailty, and performed an analysis using data from National Health and Nutrition Surveys in Japan. It was clarified that diet patterns centered on animal products are associated with anemia risk reduction. Further-more, the author focused on Shiga Prefecture, where life expectancy has rapidly increased in recent years, and clarified that the mortality rate there is lower due to a combination of multiple lifestyle-related factors. Further-more, it was revealed that the greater the combination of these multiple lifestyle-related factors, there would be a greater number of people with a high subjective sense of health among the citizens of the prefecture. From the above results, the author has clarified that combination of an animal protein-centered diet with multiple lifestyle-related factors at an earlier stage might contribute to prevention of frailty.