What do your elderly family members eat?
This is not a small detail – in our industry, it's a huge and very important question. People answer it in all kinds of ways, and it has an immediate bearing on how we care for our residents.
By personalizing meal prep and helping families with groceries and more, we really bring efficient helping hands to the process of making sure a family member is cared for the right way.
Not Eating Much
A lot of people lose at least some of their appetite as they grow older. You may see this with your mother or father or aunts and uncles as they age. They'll simply stop eating those big three square meals a day.
They may skip breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.
It's natural to be freaked out by this if you're younger and still shoveling down the amount of calories that you need to get through the day. But your senior’s metabolism is different. It can be appropriate for them to substitute a small snack for a meal. The key is to look at it from a scientific nutritional viewpoint, to figure out if it's just a usual loss of appetite or something else.
Only Eating A Few Things
From a practical standpoint, it can be great if your senior family member only eats a few things. With that said, cheese sandwiches are not the “staff of life” or a good diet on their own.
The key is to strike a happy medium. Making sure seniors are getting key nutrition doesn't mean you have to force-feed them all kinds of vegetables and meats and other perishable foods. Supplements can help – with the right qualified medical input, of course. So can good centralized meal planning.
Vegetarianism, Veganism and Allergies
Different people have different needs. A surprising number of our seniors need a gluten-free diet because of gluten intolerance. Many of them are allergic to shellfish or peanuts or something else. Some are vegetarian, either for health reasons or others. Some are vegan.
Now, let's talk about what all three of these issues have in common. The commonality is that when you simply talk to a family and put together a concise, effective plan, you eliminate so much of that work where people go scurrying around to supermarkets and health food stores for groceries.
If you have a designated point person to get all of the necessary food items on site, or even better, a good purchasing program (some of these food stores will deliver), you don't have to have everybody's son or daughter or niece or nephew running around the neighborhood in their cars trying to get a package of mushrooms or meatless nuggets or noodles or something else to feed the elderly facility resident who is not able to drive because of their advanced age. All of this is about solving practical problems in a good logistical way, and when you do it the right way, everybody breathes an enormous collective sigh of relief!
