An Overview of Italy’s Demographic Change and the Strategic Role of Nutrition

The proportion and absolute number of older people in populations is increasing dramatically around the world.This demographic change has a large influence on society and has, in fact, been recognized as a key issue for social and health policy.Italy currently is in fifth place worldwide in terms of life expectancy and in fifth place worldwide for the highest average age of the general population.Italy is also currently in 197th place out of 210 countries in terms of total fertility rate. One of the characteristics of the older population is the greater prevalence of conditions of multiple chronic conditions (including diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases). The older population has also shown to be particularly exposed to malnutrition and to have a lower nutritional status compared to the rest of the population.Furthermore, in Italy 20.9% of children are overweight and 9,8% are obese. Severely obese children represent 2.2% of the paediatric population.In a population that is characterized by a low fertility rate and high life expectancy, health promotion and disease prevention should play a key role in the healthcare scenario.In conclusion, considering the data mentioned above it would be necessary to conduct disease prevention and health promotion campaigns that are focused on nutrition and that cover all the different age groups of the Italian population. The campaigns should be age and gender specific in order to address the nutritional characteristics and risks of each subgroup in the population.