Combined Nutrition and Exercise Interventions for Enhancing Functional Healthspan Across the Lifecourse

Life expectancy has recovered globally following pandemic-era declines, but a substantial gap remains between lifespan and healthspan: the years lived in good health, free from major chronic disease or physical and cognitive impairment. Many people now spend their final years or decades living with reduced physical function, chronic illness and declining independence. Functional healthspan captures this more precisely — the maintenance of the physical capability, metabolic resilience and cognitive function needed for independent living. It declines through interconnected processes including sarcopenia, impaired metabolic regulation, chronic low-grade inflammation and reduced cardiorespiratory fitness, shaped by modifiable factors such as inactivity, poor dietary quality and impaired recovery.Nutrition and exercise are each well studied as standalone interventions, but their combined and interactive effects on functional healthspan remain comparatively under-characterised, particularly outside older-adult populations. This Research Topic addresses that gap by bringing together studies that examine nutrition and exercise in combination, rather than in isolation, to clarify how dietary strategies modulate physiological responses to exercise and vice versa. While functional decline is often addressed only once it appears in older age, trajectories are shaped much earlier in life. We aim to identify combined intervention strategies, applied from early or mid-adulthood onward, capable of extending functional reserve and delaying age-related decline, and to consolidate current evidence on synergistic nutrition-exercise effects into actionable directions for future research and practice.This Research Topic welcomes studies examining nutrition and exercise interventions in combination and their interactive or synergistic effects on physical, metabolic, cognitive and quality-of-life outcomes relevant to functional healthspan. Themes of interest include: • Synergistic effects of combined interventions on strength, mobility and gait speed across age groups and sexes• Interactions between dietary nutrients (e.g. calorie-restriction mimetics, polyphenol metabolites) and structured exercise on mobility and cognitive outcomes• Combined strategies targeting metabolic flexibility and cardiometabolic health• Contemporary and innovative approaches to dietary and/or exercise interventions in minimising the risk of declining healthspan in various age groups and across different geographical locations• Mechanistic studies of how nutritional status modifies physiological adaptation to exercise. Special consideration will be given to studies involving younger and mid-life populations. We invite Original Research, Systematic Reviews and meta-analyses, Reviews and Mini Reviews, Clinical Trials, and Brief Research Reports; studies of nutrition or exercise in isolation, without a combined or interactive design, fall outside the scope. Prof. Justin Roberts currently receives funding pertinent to the area of healthspan particularly aligned with younger individuals perceptions.Prof. Fernando Naclerio recently received fundings from Crown Sport Nutrition to supervise a PhD and provide constancies Topic editors: Justin Roberts, Fernando Naclerio Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86062/combined-nutrition-and-exercise-interventions-for-enhancing-functional-healthspan-across-the-lifecourse