Vilasavathi Venkatachalam
Vilasi & Company, India
Abstract Title:
Food and Dietary Patterns for Longevity: Translating Research into Practice
Biography:
Vilasavathi Venkatachalam, MSc, MS, RDN, CNSC, is a Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist credentialed by the Commission on Dietetic Registration and the recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Dietitian of the Year Award from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, USA.
She specializes in community and clinical nutrition, cardiovascular health, critical care, oncology, perioperative nutrition, and nutrition support. Her work focuses on translating nutrition science into practical, plant-centered, food-based strategies that improve patient outcomes and resilience. She serves as President of the International Affiliate of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (IAAND) and Editor-in-Chief of The Digest, the newsletter of the Research Dietetic Practice Group. Based in Vadodara, India, she consults, writes, and speaks internationally on evidence-based nutrition, dietary patterns, indigenous foodways, and nutrition across the continuum of care.
Research Interests:
Increasing life expectancy and a growing emphasis on quality of life have fueled interest in the role of diet in longevity. Research on dietary patterns, specific foods, and bioactive compounds that may influence metabolic health, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, cognitive function, and other determinants of longevity has expanded considerably. Yet nutrition recommendations are often communicated without the context needed to interpret the evidence, making it difficult to distinguish findings that are clinically meaningful from those that are preliminary, inconsistent, or overstated.
This keynote reviews the scientific evidence on diet, dietary patterns, and specific food-based interventions relevant to longevity science. The presentation is organized around three complementary layers: the evidence, the interventions that have been tested, and the practical translation of these findings into dietary recommendations and clinical practice.
Rather than asking whether a food "works," this keynote asks a more useful question: Under what conditions did it work? By examining dose, food form, duration, and the quality of the evidence, the presentation places research findings in the context needed to move from promising observations to evidence-based dietary recommendations and clinical practice.
