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Nutrition

key points

  • The Australian Dietary Guidelines and the five food groups are still the baseline I point patients at.
  • A Mediterranean-style pattern is a well-evidenced, liveable way to actually eat that out day to day.
  • Most midlife and older adults need more protein than they think, not less, spread across meals.
  • Fibre from real food, and cutting back on processed food and sugary drinks, matters more than any single "superfood".

Patients ask me about nutrition more than almost anything else, usually hoping I will name one food to add or one to avoid. I never have a satisfying single answer, because the honest one is duller: the overall pattern of what you eat, most days, is what matters. Here is the short version.

What should I actually eat?

My starting point is always the Australian Dietary Guidelines, the "Eat For Health" five food groups: vegetables and legumes, fruit, grains (mostly wholegrain), lean meat and poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts and seeds, and dairy or alternatives. It is not exciting, but it is the framework built for an Australian population and it is where I still start every conversation.

Within that framework, a Mediterranean-style pattern, plenty of vegetables, legumes, wholegrains, olive oil, nuts and fish, with less red and processed meat, is one of the better-tested ways to actually live the guidelines out. The PREDIMED trial, a large Spanish study, found around 30 per cent fewer major cardiovascular events in people who ate this way compared with a low-fat control diet. It is a pattern, not a product, which is why it survives real life better than most diets do.

Protein needs go up, not down, with age

A lot of people assume protein matters less once you are past 50. The opposite is closer to true. To keep muscle as you get older, most active midlife and older adults do better aiming for roughly 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day, spread fairly evenly across meals rather than loaded into dinner. That is more than many people are eating, particularly if breakfast and lunch are protein-light.

Fibre, and cutting back rather than chasing a superfood

Aim for roughly 25 to 30 grams of fibre a day from real food: wholegrains, legumes and vegetables, not a powder. Alongside that, the bigger win for most people is subtraction rather than addition, cutting back on ultra-processed food and sugary drinks rather than adding one more "superfood". Higher intake of ultra-processed food has been linked to higher all-cause mortality, and sugary drinks to worse cardiometabolic health, more weight gain, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as intake rises. Two or more serves of fish a week is a simple, well-supported target worth keeping. None of this needs a supplement to work.

What about keto, detoxes and fasting?

Keto, carnivore and "detox" approaches are not proven to improve long-term health, and the evidence simply does not support them as a better way to eat over years rather than weeks. I would rather you spent that effort on the five food groups above.

try this week

Add one extra vegetable to dinner most nights. Swap one sugary drink a day for water or plain tea. Aim for fish twice this week. Put some protein, eggs, yoghurt, legumes, into breakfast or lunch instead of leaving it all for dinner.

One honest caveat before you go: the Australian Dietary Guidelines themselves date from 2013 and have not been formally updated since, so the framework is now over a decade old. I still use it as the baseline, because nothing has replaced it and the core five-food-group advice has not changed. A review has reportedly been underway, and I will update this page if and when a new edition lands.

Where this comes from

All free to read in full or read the abstract, accessed 27 August 2026.

Dr Ahmed Al-Obaidi

Dr Ahmed Al-Obaidi · FRACGP

General information only, not personal medical advice. Talk to your own GP about what suits you.

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