Frailty has become a public health concern among older adults. Nutrition is closely associated with health. This study aimed to evaluate the relationships between nutrition literacy (NL) and dietary diversity and frailty. A cross-sectional analysis included 1,187 participants. NL was evaluated using the short-form nutrition literacy self-assessment questionnaire. Frailty was assessed via a modified Fried phenotype. Generalized estimating equations were used to examine the association between NL and frailty by considering odds ratios ( OR ) and 95% confidence intervals ( CI ); and generalized linear models were performed to calculate regression coefficients ( ꞵ ) and 95% CI for the association between NL and dietary diversity. The prevalence of frailty was approximately 13.7% in the study sample. Higher NL was associated with lower prevalence of frailty ( OR = 0.98, 95% CI : 0.96–0.99), and was correlated with higher dietary diversity ( ꞵ = 0.06, 95% CI : 0.05–0.07). Further exploratory statistical analysis indicated that the relationship between NL and frailty was related to dietary diversity, with an associative coefficient of − 0.0028 (95% CI : −0.0044 to − 0.0013) observed in the results. These findings showed that NL and dietary diversity were significantly associated with frailty in older adults, and dietary diversity may form an exploratory statistical association between NL with frailty. Our results underscore the potential value of strategies aimed at greater NL and dietary diversity for the management of frailty.
Xi et al. (Sat,) studied this question.