Healthier, plant-rich diets slow the accumulation of chronic illnesses in older adults, with up to 5% fewer new diseases per year. Digest
What we eat may shape how we age as well as how many chronic illnesses we develop along the way. As the global population grows older, understanding how diet affects the risk of developing multiple long-term diseases is a pressing public health issue. A recent study found that older adults who followed healthy eating patterns were up to 5% less likely each year to accumulate additional chronic conditions than those with poorer diets.
Researchers monitored the health of more than 2,400 older adults in Sweden for about 15 years. They tracked the number and types of chronic diseases each person developed and assessed their diet quality using four distinct dietary patterns: the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, the Alternative Healthy Eating Index, the Alternative Mediterranean Diet, and the Empirical Dietary Inflammatory Index.
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They found that people who followed healthier diets—especially those rich in plant-based foods and low in inflammatory components—accumulated chronic diseases more slowly over time. Those with the highest diet quality developed about 5% fewer new diseases per year compared to others, while those with the most inflammatory diets saw a similar increase in disease accumulation. These patterns were particularly robust for heart and brain-related conditions but did not hold for musculoskeletal diseases.
These findings suggest that better diet quality may slow the rate at which older adults develop multiple chronic illnesses.