For other older people, both access to food and a decreasing appetite may become problems. As a result the amount of food they eat and the amount of exercise these older people can enjoy become less and less, and they become more frail. As you become frail, access to food becomes a problem at all levels, from obtaining the food, to preparing it, to eating it. As the frailty progresses, people lose their appetite. There is also evidence that this loss of appetite may be due to a loss in taste sensitivity that occurs with aging.
Frailty leads to decreased food intake which leads to increased frailty, and so on in a spiral.
Some other older people simply refuse to eat. Physicians are recognizing more and more that older people can become depressed, and loss of appetite can be associated with this depression, or with the desire to be with a dead loved one. One person we know stopped eating several years after the death of her husband. She had been very overweight when he died. Gradually as she got older, she began to think about meeting him in heaven.