Advancing evidence-based nutrition science to improve healthspan through international collaboration, rigorous scholarship, and practical clinical guidance.
The HLMS Nutrition Working Group brings together international experts in nutrition, metabolism, aging, and lifestyle medicine to advance rigorous, clinically meaningful guidance on nutrition for healthy longevity.
Nutrition for Healthy Aging
Why the Working Group Exists
Nutrition is one of the most important—and increasingly confusing—areas in healthy aging. Scientific advances coexist with conflicting headlines, premature claims, diet tribalism and an expanding marketplace of products and opinions. The HLMS Nutrition Working Group brings together clinicians and scientists across nutrition, metabolism, aging and lifestyle medicine to evaluate the quality of the evidence, distinguish areas of consensus from uncertainty, and translate nutrition science into clear, practical guidance for healthy longevity.
Our Flagship Project
Nutrition for Healthy Aging: Principles, Personalization, and Practice develops a clinically usable framework for nutrition across the life course. Rather than promoting a single ‘best diet,’ it identifies transferable principles supported by the strongest available evidence and examines how they should be adapted to life stage, metabolic health, body composition, functional goals, clinical conditions, individual risk, culture and personal preferences.
Topics include dietary patterns, energy balance, food processing and calorie density, carbohydrate and fat quality, protein and skeletal muscle preservation, cardiometabolic risk, weight management, supplementation, biomarkers and practical clinical translation.
Topics include dietary patterns, energy balance, food processing and calorie density, carbohydrate and fat quality, protein and skeletal muscle preservation, cardiometabolic risk, weight management, supplementation, biomarkers and practical clinical translation.
Translates population-level evidence into clinically meaningful, individualized care
Consensus Reference for Healthy Aging Nutrition
How We Approach Nutrition
The Working Group’s approach begins with principles before prescriptions. Nutrition for healthy aging is neither a single named diet nor a rigid nutrient formula. It begins with well-supported fundamentals—nutritional adequacy, appropriate energy balance, predominantly minimally processed nutrient-rich foods, adequate protein and resistance-oriented activity to preserve skeletal muscle, favorable carbohydrate and fat quality, and attention to cardiovascular and metabolic risk.
Personalization comes next. Those principles must be adapted to the individual rather than turned into dietary dogma. Age, metabolic health, disease risk, body composition, physical function, culture, food preferences, accessibility and the ability to sustain a pattern over time all matter.
Practice is where the science ultimately has to work. The goal is not nutritional perfection, but an evidence-based approach that supports metabolic health, muscle and physical function, vascular and cognitive health, independence, quality of life and durable healthy behavior across the lifespan.
Personalization comes next. Those principles must be adapted to the individual rather than turned into dietary dogma. Age, metabolic health, disease risk, body composition, physical function, culture, food preferences, accessibility and the ability to sustain a pattern over time all matter.
Practice is where the science ultimately has to work. The goal is not nutritional perfection, but an evidence-based approach that supports metabolic health, muscle and physical function, vascular and cognitive health, independence, quality of life and durable healthy behavior across the lifespan.
Principles, Personalization, and Practice
Across its work, the Nutrition Working Group applies a principles-first, evidence-informed approach that distinguishes well-supported guidance from areas of uncertainty and translates population-level evidence into clinically meaningful, individualized care.
The goal is balanced, practical guidance that supports clinicians, researchers, policymakers and the public while bringing greater clarity to an increasingly complex and sometimes polarized nutrition landscape.
The goal is balanced, practical guidance that supports clinicians, researchers, policymakers and the public while bringing greater clarity to an increasingly complex and sometimes polarized nutrition landscape.
Working Group Members
MD, FACP, DipABLM, PNS — Chair
Internal and Lifestyle Medicine physician and past President of the US National Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists, specializing in metabolic nutrition and clinical translation.
Tom Rifai
PhD, FRSC
Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University and internationally recognized expert in skeletal-muscle protein metabolism, resistance exercise and healthy aging.
Stuart Phillips
MD, PhD, MBA
Longevity medicine physician with expertise in epidemiology, evidence synthesis, precision nutrition, biomarkers and evidence-based personalization.
David Barzilai
MD, PhD
Nephrologist and clinician-scientist specializing in chronic kidney disease, immunosenescence, culturally appropriate nutrition and healthy longevity.
Yen-Ling Angelo Chiu
MD
UK-trained General Practitioner and founder of the Medical Healthspan Alliance, focused on multidisciplinary longevity care and practical clinical implementation.
Rory Melville
MD
Adult and child psychiatrist integrating nutrition, mental health and longevity, with particular expertise across preconception, pregnancy and early-life development.
Sandra Cammarata
DO, DipABLM, FACLM
Internal and Lifestyle Medicine physician with expertise in healthy aging, clinical lifestyle medicine, patient coaching and nature-based health interventions.
Melissa Sundermann
MD, PhD, MPH, FEFIM
President, Healthy Longevity
Medicine Society
President, Healthy Longevity
Medicine Society
Evelyne Bischof
The Nutrition Working Group reflects HLMS’s commitment to scientific rigor, interdisciplinary collaboration and clinically meaningful translation. Our goal is to help bring greater clarity to nutrition for healthy aging while recognizing both the strength of established evidence and the areas where important questions remain.
Excellence, Leadership, Transparency, Inclusiveness
