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The following are excerpts from the executive summary of ‘Nutritional Guidelines for Americans,’ issued by the United States Department of Agriculture Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion:

Eating and physical activity patterns that are focused on consuming fewer calories, making informed food choices, and being physically active can help people attain and maintain a healthy weight, reduce their risk of chronic disease, and promote overall health.

Poor diet and physical inactivity are the most important factors contributing to an epidemic of overweight and obesity affecting men, women, and children in all segments of our society. Even in the absence of overweight, poor diet and physical inactivity are associated with major causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States. Therefore, the
Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 is intended for Americans ages 2 years and older, including those at
increased risk of chronic disease.

These Dietary Guidelines recommendations encompass two overarching concepts:
• Maintain calorie balance over time to achieve and sustain a healthy weight. People who are most successful at achieving and maintaining a healthy weight do so through continued attention to consuming only enough calories from foods and beverages to meet their needs and by being physically active. To curb the obesity epidemic and improve their health, many Americans must decrease the calories they consume and increase the calories they expend through physical activity.

• focus on consuming nutrient-dense foods and beverages. Americans currently consume too much sodium and too many calories from solid fats, added sugars, and reined grains.These replace nutrient-dense foods and beverages and make
it dificult for people to achieve recommended nutrient intake while controlling calorie and sodium intake. A healthy eating pattern limits intake of sodium, solid fats, added sugars, and reined grains and emphasizes nutrient-dense foods and beverages—vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products, seafood, lean meats and poultry, eggs, beans and peas, and nuts and seeds.

We asked top experts for their strategies to help you ward off weight creep — and even shed pounds — at these tricky stages. Solutions ahead.

Watch portion sizes

Women tend to eat more when dining with their mate.As a general rule, have a serving each of carbs (fist-size), protein (palm-size), and healthy fat (around a tablespoon), and fill the rest of your plate with any non-starchy veggie, like broccoli, cauliflower, or green beans, says celebrity dietitian Ashley Koff, R.D., co-author of “Mom Energy.”

Don’t Save fatty leftovers

Indulging on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve won’t wreck your waistline, says Blatner. It’s all that grazing on leftovers for weeks that’ll do you in. Save treats for events: “Make it special and make it social,” she says.

Sculpt muscles.

Don’t want to eat less? Lift more. Since muscle mass diminishes with age, if you don’t do anything to replace it, your body will shift to more fat and less muscle — which slows down your metabolism even more, Northrup says.

Aim for two 40-minute sessions of weight training a week to keep muscle and bones at pre-meno level. Other days, try for 30 minutes of cardio, like dancing or the elliptical. That simple formula — strength plus cardio — really can keep mid-life gain away.

Alcohol abuse and the daily shift is one of casual society’s most intricate ways of convincing addicts that they’re not addicted. Any party or circle of friends can help someone make the deadly shift from casual drinker to a heavy addict. Though people don’t like to admit it, alcohol is a drug. Like any other drug, sustained use will nullify the effects any drug has on the mind. Any drug taken of a long period of time will eventually call for more and more of the drug to give you the feeling you want. The problem with alcohol is that it’s easy for people to make the shift from their priority being spending time with people and having alcohol as a perk, to focusing on alcohol with social interaction as the perk.

One of the funniest things in our society today is that almost all drugs of abuse, taken in very small moderation, are actually quite helpful to the body. The antioxidants and other chemical bonuses in a glass of wine once a night at dinner can be very healthy, but it never stops there. Human beings lack control. I think that the drugs are just a figurehead to the real problem. The real drug that humans are addicted to is recklessness. Anything that makes a human being feel like they’re stepping out of the regulated chalk-painted guidelines of modern society, however fleeting or stolen, is so exciting to someone that feels trapped by their own contributed prison.

A few people that I have talked to have said that they drink alcohol to forget about life for a while. Has anyone ever stopped to think that if all of humanity keeps sweeping their problems under the rug, eventually we’re going to be teetering on some figurative Persian mountain of insecurities gestating and festering within a lack of accountability and constantly shifting hands like a game of hot potato on a global scene? Eventually, we’re going to have to sit down and make ourselves look at why we do things, in stead of just casually pawn our problems off on party drugs that help us forget the fact that we slowly kill ourselves to escape.

New research is saying that seniors who suffer elder abuse are more likely to be women, to have a neurological or mental disorder and to abuse drugs or alcohol.

In the study, they compared 41 cases of elder abuse to a controlled group of patients over the age of 60, who were treated between ’99 and ’06. The results were 29 percent of abuse victims tested positive for alcohol compared to the 13 percent of the control group.

They also found that the abuse victims were more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, mental illness, alcohol abuse, and heart disease.

After treatment, about half of the victims returned to the place where the abuse took place. In most cases, the abuser had been arrested, but about 17 percents of the victims said they wanted to return to the person who abused them and not to press any charges. In 85 percent of elder abuse case, a family member or an intimate partner of the victim was the perpetrator.

A majority of the abuse cases weren’t identified until after the patient had been admitted or had spent a couple of days in the hospital. This shows that the failure of medical staff to recognize cases of abuses needs to be vastly improved.