Older people’s nutritional attitudes and practices – A premise of age stratification?

Abstract

Often we are opposing older people to younger ones; we are talking about a generational gap, even a generational conflict. Age distinctions are constructed by different behaviour and attitudes. In the paper, nutritional habits (attitudes and practices) are regarded as one of potential means to categorize older generation. The paper has a dual goal: 1) to examine what are nutritional attitudes and practices of older people compared to younger ones; What (if) divides more younger and older generations – different nutritional attitudes or different practices? 2) to disclose whether the differences between older and younger people’s nutrition attitudes and practices make assumptions for their stratification by age? The research methods applied are the analysis of scholarly literature and of empirical data collected by the market research company TNS LT in a representative quantitative survey (N = 1,874, the age of respondents 15–74 years) carried out in 2012.
The analysis of the nutrition habits of Lithuanian population by age showed that one-third of the nutrition habits (6 out of 15 statements) unite older and younger people into one single group, since no statistically significant differences between these groups were found. The remaining two-thirds of the studied nutrition habits (9 out of 15 statements) showed statistically significant differences between younger and older population’s nutrition attitudes and practices.
After the comparison of the quantities of disclosed differences in the nutrition attitudes and practices among younger and older people, it could be stated that the younger and older generations differ more in their nutritional attitudes (6 out of 8 statements) than in their nutrition practices (3 out of 7 statements).
The analysis revealed that there are no bright age-based differences in the nutrition attitudes and practices. The results of the research showed a liquid combination of commonalities and diversities while examining the nutrition habits of older and younger people. It encourages to talk not about the clearly expressed age stratification and social exclusion of older generation through their nutrition habits but rather about a subtle, gradual stratification of consumer society by age (probably less expressive than the stratification based on social class (income) and gender).