ABSTRACT

The relationship of nutrition-related factors with well-being in people 80 and older has received little attention. Therefore, this chapter explores the relationships of depression and depressive symptoms, as a measure of well-being, with appetite, body weight changes, underweight, and obesity as measures of nutritional status. The sample is from the Georgia Centenarian Study (aged 80 to 89 and 98+ years, see Chapter 9). In bivariate analyses, centenarians with depression consistently had the highest prevalence of underweight when compared to centenarians without depression and all octogenarians (23% to 33% vs. 0% to 16%). When controlled for other demographic factors, clinically relevant depressive symptomatology was associated with appetite loss, while a current diagnosis of depression was associated with recent changes in body weight. However, taking antidepressant medications was not associated with any of the nutrition-related measures. Demographic factors emerged as important predictors of nutritional status. Living in a skilled nursing facility compared to living in the community was associated with a lower risk of appetite loss and higher risk of weight gain; being a centenarian or being female was associated with underweight; and being Black (vs. White) was associated with obesity. Thus, risk factors for poor nutritional status in the oldest may be related to depression as well as to specific demographic factors including age, gender, race, and residence in a skilled nursing facility.

Science fiction and the criticism of the genre have so far paid very little attention to the treatment of issues relating to race and ethnicity. The African-Caribbean writer Nalo Hopkinson says about her sf novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), 'I saw it as subverting the genre which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves.' Most English-language sf is written by whites. While some African-American writers produce work that has fantastic or magical elements, this work is not generally grouped with sf or fantasy; it is instead published as and treated by critics as African-American literature. The magical realist elements of Mexican, Native American or Indian subcontinent literatures are also not published or reviewed as speculative literature. Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1980), for example, explores Indian independence and the tensions between Moslems and Hindus through the eyes of a boy who is one of a group of children born with powers such as telepathy, but it is not generally considered science fiction. Samuel R. Delany and other black authors, including Charles Saunders and Walter Mosley, have written about the racial issues connected to the field, ranging from the initial cold-shoulder treatment of Delany by racist old-guard white writers to the lack of a substantial black audience for the genre, but neither sf about race nor criticism of it have achieved the same prominence that works about gender issues have.