Windrose Partners

At that time, the number of dietitians attending the expo and other industry-related conferences was nothing like it is today. When other PhD-RD colleagues from our company’s R&D department accompanied me, they often “tsked” with distaste when pursuing trade show booths exhibiting bold product claims that weren’t heavily supported with citations from the scientific literature.

Our first memory of the axiom “You are what you eat” arises from our college days in the early 1970s. The saying meant that people need to eat good food to be fit and healthy. When the term was used, we usually referred to macrobiotic, organic whole foods. We also recall that later the phrase was applied in sports nutrition and used to admonish bodybuilders and other athletes to eat the right combination and amounts of nutrients to build muscle and achieve training goals.

Aging is less about a number and more about the myriad of internal and environmental factors causing physical and anatomic changes that cause decline in function. Advances in science have identified some factors behind the aging process. These factors include exposure to cellular stress, chronic inflammation, dysregulation of lipid metabolism, and programmed cell death.